BY GAIL GERAGHTY | OTISFIELD It’s been almost two months since 17-year-old Asel Asleh, one of the original graduates of the Seeds of Peace camp, was killed in upper Galilee in a clash with Israeli soldiers.
A black banner is wrapped around the big boulder at the entrance to the camp, put there by maintenance supervisor Glen Pastore of Otisfield and his wife, Ann, head of housekeeping.
“When the snow starts flying, I’ll probably take it off, but I’ll want to (check with) other people first,” he said.
Pastore and his wife, who is also town clerk, said Tuesday that they wanted to do something to reach out to former campers to show them there are people in Maine who care.
“They say our alumni are hanging tough and keeping their noses clean,” Glen Pastore said, as the latest cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues and the death toll rises.
But the Pastores know it can’t be easy for the 1,200 Israeli and Arab graduates of the camp who are in the Middle East. The Web site of the Seeds of Peace organization indicates that questions remain about the circumstances surrounding the death of Asel, an Israeli-Arab, who was wearing his bright green Seeds of Peace T-shirt when an Israeli soldier shot him in the neck.
“I see kids all summer with those T-shirts. You get quite attached to them,” said Ann Pastore. When she found out Asel’s family buried him wearing one of the shirts, “that’s what really struck home with me.”
“It’s more than a job,” Ann Pastore said of she and her husband’s roles at the camp. “It’s a way of life for us.”
Camp Director Tim Wilson of Portland said it’s the “what ifs” about Asel’s death that hurt the most. A high school senior, Asel planned to attend the Technion in Haifa, Israel, to study computers and engineering.
“When any young person dies, it hurts. Who they are and who they’ll become you’ll never know,” Wilson said.
Wilson described Asel, who was among the 18 percent of Israeli citizens of Arabian descent, as “a very unique man. The kind of leader you’d hope for. He stretched across boundaries.”
And he had a great sense of humor, too. “My granddaughter, she’s just a little kid, but she remembered Asel,” he said. When she found out he was dead, she said, “‘Asel used to make me laugh.’”
“How do you explain to people who are younger than today’s campers why people are being so mean to each other?” he added.
A Seeds of Peace camper who has seen the current violence up close recently visited Wilson. “He said, ‘Tim, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s everything that we all fight against. People just don’t want to give up anything,’” Wilson recalled.
When the camp on Pleasant Lake opened in 1993, Wilson said, there was renewed promise of achieving peace in the Middle East. “Then, you had a different kind of kid coming with hope in their eyes.”
Now, as Israelis and Palestinians become even more polarized, he said, “You’re going to have kids coming who’ve been in the eye of the storm. The things that we bridged before, it’s going to be tougher. There’s more things to understand.”