OTISFIELD, MAINE | Yasmin Mousa was frightened on her first day of camp in the Maine woods this summer. Who could blame her, given the unfamiliar surroundings, the new faces and the clouds of mosquitoes?
But Mousa’s worries ran deeper than the typical new camper’s.
In all her life, the 15 year-old child of Palestinian refugees from Gaza had never socialized with Israelis. Even before her grandmother was killed by an Israeli soldier, her Palestinian family had regarded Israelis as mortal enemies.
But now, beside a sparking lake thousands of miles from home, Mousa was about to share a bunkhouse—not just for a night , but for three weeks—with people she feared.
“How can I sleep next to an Israeli girl?” she asked herself. “She is going to kill me.”
Such concerns are commonplace at Seeds of Peace in Otisfield, Maine, where every summer since 1993 hundreds of Middle East teenagers—Arabs and Jews—gather for an extended face-to-face encounter that would be unthinkable in their homelands.
Says camp founder John Wallach, a retired journalist for Hearst Newspapers whose experience reporting the Arab-Israeli conflict moved him to try to stop the carnage: “This is one place in the world where they can learn to make peace.”
But peace is not made overnight. At Seeds, Arab and Israeli youngsters selected by their governments for their leadership skills play side by side on baseball teams, observe one another’s religious ceremonies—and bond over typical American camp food. There are daily “coexistence” rap sessions—the “heart and should of the program,” says Wallach, 55, who cobbles together the annual $1.2 million budget from private donations—at which campers talk about the prejudices they have been taught and share their often harrowing personal experiences of war and terrorism.
Inevitably there are tears and hurt feelings; this year shouting broke out after Israelis displayed their nation’s flag during a cultural presentation (a breach of camp rules, which also include a no-romance clause), and a Palestinians retaliated by raising their own flag.
“They’re light years apart,” says Barbara Gottschalk, “but here you have two people who ordinarily would hate each other, cleaning the bathroom together and holding the dustpan while the other one sweeps. You don’t do that with the enemy.”
The camp organizers hope that as adults this year’s 300 alums will help bring peace to their region.
Noa Epstein, 15, attended Seeds of Peace last year and subsequently invited Palestinians to visit her school in Jerusalem.
“This place changed my point of view,” she says, back in Maine this summer. Now when she listens to the radio news, “if they say three Palestinians were shot in the city of Hebron, it could be one of my friends.”
A young woman, perhaps like Basma Alghalayini, also 15, who admits that the hopeful lessons of camp will be a hard sell among Palestinians back in Gaza City.
“I’ll tell people to look at the Israelis more as humans. They’ve suffered like we have,” she says.
And will her peers listen? A smile flashes across Bashma’s sun-kissed face.
“I have my ways,” she says.
Read Patrick Rogers & Mark Dagostino’s article in People Magazine »