Peace Market is an event unlike any other in New York City, drawing over 1,200 influential young professionals, an impressive line-up of celebrities, notable dignitaries, and a significant media presence.
ADDRESS: 125 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011
DATE: March 13, 2013
TIME: 6:30 p.m. – VIP Reception | 7:30 p.m. – Doors Open
LOCATION: Metropolitan Pavilion
CONTACT: Jenn Lishansky | jennifer@seedsofpeace.org
BY LORETTA WALDMAN | A group of Arab and Israeli boys got a taste of peace here yesterday—at a pizza party thrown in their honor.
While ancient tensions simmered and planes strafed their homelands, the delegation of teen-age ambassadors drank sodas, got acquainted and clowned for the camera at the kick-off event for “Seeds of Peace”.
The privately funded program was dreamed up by author-journalist John Wallach to promote understanding and peace in the Middle East.
“The idea is to get the next generation to make friendships that will endure, that will make a difference,” Wallach said as he hustled the rowdy 11- to 14-year-old boys into the Dolce Restaurant on East 49th Street. “It’s the only way to stop the terrorism and the hate.”
The 46 kids, who arrived on different days, met each other for the first time at the party. Events planned in the next month include a welcome today at Gracie Mansion from Mayor Dinkins.
In New York they will attend a Giants game, two plays, the United Nations and Planet Hollywood.
Their stay will include two weeks at a Maine summer camp, baseball in Baltimore and a visit with President Clinton in Washington.
Never in his wildest dreams did JOHN WALLACH imagine that the program he organized this summer—to bring together Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptians boys at a camp in Maine—would end the way it did: front and center at the historic ceremony for the signing of the peace pact on the White House lawn on Monday.
In T-shirts with the logotype “Seeds of Peace,” 46 boys from the program, ranging in age from 11 to 14, were acknowledged by President Clinton when he said in his speech, “In this entire assembly, no one is more important than the group of Israeli and Arab children who are seated here with us today.”
The boys, who arrived in the United States on Aug. 17, spent three and a half weeks at camp, where they learned not just to play standard camp sports but also to overcome hostility and suspicions and be friends.
They also toured New York and Washington, attending a professional football game, visiting Planet Hollywood and meeting Mayor David N. Dinkins, Terry Anderson, several senators and Vice President Al Gore.
While they were touring the White House on Friday, Hillary Rodham Clinton suddenly appeared and spent 45 minutes with them. As they left, she said, “I’ll see you at the ceremony Monday,” recalled Mr. Wallach, an author who is foreign editor for the Hearst newspapers and founding editor of WE, a joint Russian and American newspaper.
“That was the first hint we had that we might be invited,” he said. “Then someone from the White House called and said that Seeds of Peace would be featured in the President’s speech and officially invited us.”
“We really had to scramble to change airline reservations,” he added, saying that the boys had been scheduled to leave on Saturday.
“I think they deserved more than anyone to be there,” he continued. “They had overcome such psychological and emotional hurdles to bond. For example, there was an Israeli boy whose father had been killed by Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian boy whose uncle was killed by Israeli soldiers and a Palestinian boy who had spent six months in jail for throwing rocks.
“An agreement is only words on paper. These boys made peace where it counts—with each other—and had tears in their eyes when they said goodbye.”
As for the timing of events, Mr. Wallach was still marveling yesterday as he accompanied the boys to National Airport to return to their countries. “It was divine providence,” he said.
The boys from Egypt arrived in New York City on Tuesday, the ones from Jordan on Wednesday and the Palestinians and Israelis on Thursday. There are 50 boys in all, and they will spend more than two weeks in the United States getting to know each other. They will return to their countries on Sept. 8, perhaps with a stronger belief that Arabs and Jews can live together in peace.
Their trip is being organized by JOHN WALLACH, a journalist and an author who founded a nonprofit organization called Seeds of Peace. Donations are covering all expenses.
The boys, who are 11 to 14 years old, were introduced to pizza last night, and today they are to join Terry Anderson, the former hostage, at Gracie Mansion, where Mayor David N. Dinkins is to receive the first Seeds of Peace Award.
On Sunday, the boys will begin a two-week stay at a camp in Maine. Then it’s off to visit the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court.
“I want these young men to have the best time they can possibly have,” Mr. Wallach said. “Bringing the next generation together before they have been poisoned by the hostility of their own region is the only hope for the future.”
Mr. Wallach said that PRESIDENT CLINTON sent a message of support, calling the Seeds of Peace program a “promising beginning.”
WASHINGTON | White House aides today disowned comments by Hillary Rodham Clinton about the need for a Palestinian state and insisted that she was speaking only for herself.
Mrs. Clinton’s remark came when she told a group of Arab and Israeli teen-agers that creating a state of Palestine was “very important for the broader goal of peace in the Middle East.”
With that statement, which was made in answer to a question, Mrs. Clinton stepped into a foreign policy minefield that American policymakers have always shied away from. The United States has never endorsed creating a Palestinian state, although President Carter set off a controversy in 1977 by calling for a Palestinian “homeland.”
White House officials today restated the Administration’s position, which is to say nothing that would appear to prejudge the outcome of the so-called final-status talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. “That view expressed personally by the First Lady is not the view of the President,” said Michael D. McCurry, the White House press secretary.
Peppered with questions about Mrs. Clinton’s comments and her role in foreign policy, Mr. McCurry said later, “I expect that she will always continue to express her views, but I doubt that she will venturing into the Middle East peace process anytime soon.” Mr. Clinton, in hastily prepared remarks about the Middle East, did not refer to Mrs. Clinton’s statements, but he emphasized that the United States was not trying to dictate how the negotiations would be resolved.
American Jewish groups reacted with alarm to Mrs. Clinton’s remarks.
“The timing couldn’t have been worse,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “If Israelis conclude that Hillary Clinton is a stalking horse for the Administration, in sort of testing the waters on this issue, then it’s going to undermine their confidence in the American role.” Despite the White House disavowals, some leading Jews wondered whether Mrs. Clinton was voicing the private beliefs of her husband.
Among Arab-Americans, the comments also caused a stir, although of a different nature. Hala Maksoud, the president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said: “We have been waiting for such a signal from any American Administration for a very long time. It’s a recognition of the fact that the Palestinian people should be treated like any other people in the world, and that they should not be denied a basic human right.”
She called the Administration’s disavowals “understandable under the present political situation,” but added, “It’s still very heartening that she should have said so in the first place.”
The reaction in Israel was muted today. Mrs. Clinton’s comments were reported in newscasts, but did not receive prominent play.
It is not clear that Mrs. Clinton knew that she was breaking with official policy. Soon after she made her comments, her office issued a statement in response to reporters’ inquiries that said: “These remarks are her own personal view. The Administration’s position on this matter has not changed.”
Mrs. Clinton was speaking via satellite with Arab and Israeli teen-agers holding a meeting in Villars, Switzerland, as part of a program called Seeds for Peace that is intended to teach peaceful coexistence. She first mentioned a Palestinian state in passing, in responding to the kind of question she loves, about whether Palestinian women should take part in political leadership.
“I would hope that women in the Palestine state, just as throughout the Middle East, would be given the opportunity to demonstrate their talents and make their contributions,” Mrs. Clinton said in part.
One of the students, alert to the explosive areas of the Middle East peace negotiations, later asked Mrs. Clinton what consequences there might be “for your declaration a few minutes ago of Palestine” given that “right now this country does not exist.”
Mrs. Clinton replied: “Well, I think that it will be in the long-term interests of the Middle East for Palestine to be a state and for it to be a state that is responsible for its citizens’ well-being, a state that has responsibility for providing education and health care and economic opportunity to its citizens, a state that has to accept the responsibility of governing.”
Mrs. Clinton said such a state was important not only for the Palestinians, but also for peace in the Middle East.
She then added that the territory the Palestinians “currently inhabit” along with whatever land they gain through peace negotiations, should “evolve into a functioning modern state that is responsible for the well-being of its people and is seen on the same footing as any other state in terms of dealing responsibly with all of the issues that state governments must deal with.”
WHEN two groups are in conflict, how can you improve relations between them?
One strategy is to encourage positive personal contact among individuals from each group. If a Catholic and a Protestant in Northern Ireland would only sit down together to talk—learning about one another’s families, hearing about one another’s fears—the encounter, according to this approach, would foster understanding, humanize the enemy and lessen bigotry. The scholarly version of this idea is known as interpersonal contact theory.
It’s an intriguing hypothesis, but does it work in reality? For four years, we studied Seeds of Peace, a program that every year brings together several hundred teenagers from conflict regions such as Israel and the Palestinian territories for a three-week summer camp in Maine. The teenagers sleep, eat and play games together, and engage in daily sessions to talk about the conflict between their groups and their own experiences with it.
We measured how the intervention affected Israelis’ and Palestinians’ relationships with, and attitudes toward, one another. Our results, which will be published in the September issue of the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, offer a glimpse of the power of forming a relationship with even just one person from the other side of a conflict.
Hundreds of tests of intergroup contact theory have been conducted in the past and have generally supported it. But most of them have lacked two elements that are critical for assessing it fully.
First, most prior studies involved asking individuals at only one point in time how often they had come in contact with individuals from another group and how they felt about that group. But this approach makes it hard to know whether contact causes positive attitudes or whether people with positive attitudes are simply the ones most likely to engage in contact in the first place.
Second, few prior studies involved groups engaged in active conflict. Personal contact may be effective in making people feel more positive about groups with which they have had little or no experience — say, rural white teenagers encountering their urban black peers — but that does not mean it will be effective for groups facing pervasive violence.
In contrast, our study was longitudinal and conducted with antagonistic groups. The teenagers who attend Seeds of Peace are selected by their government or nominated by teachers and community leaders based solely on their leadership potential and ability to speak English. Despite living so close to one another, before attending camp a majority of the teenagers in our studies had experienced only negative contact with members of the other group.
At the beginning and end of camp, the campers reported their feelings toward the other group, as well as some of their political attitudes and attitudes toward the peace process, rating their opinions on a scale of one to seven.
From pre-camp to post-camp, we found that Israeli and Palestinian teenagers alike reported feeling more positive toward, close with, similar to and trusting of the other side. On average, for all of these questions, the teenagers moved up almost a full point on the scale from where they started, a statistically significant change. They also reported feeling more optimistic about the likelihood of peace and more committed to working for peace, and they expressed a greater intention to participate in other peace intervention programs. Four different sets of campers have consistently shown the same pattern of outcomes.
Critics of such programs suggest that there is a “re-entry problem”: that any positive effect of the encounter will vanish when participants return to normal life. We therefore sent campers a follow-up survey one year after they returned home, asking them again about their attitudes.
We found the participants’ attitudes did regress over time, but not enough to eliminate a positive effect. Even a year after the camp had ended, the Israelis and Palestinians who were surveyed still felt more positive about the other group than they did before the camp.
Perhaps our most striking finding was that regardless of their initial attitudes, the campers who were able to form just one close relationship with someone from the other group were the ones who developed the most positive attitudes toward the other group. Indeed, forming one friendship was as good or better a predictor of future attitudes toward the other group than the total number of friendships that a person formed.
For most contentious and violent conflicts, whether between Israelis and Palestinians or between other groups, the path to peace is likely to be long and hard. But programs like Seeds of Peace can help pave the way. Conflict may seem more surmountable when you know someone on the other side.
Juliana Schroeder is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and business, and Jane L. Risen is an associate professor of behavioral science, both at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.
Read Juliana Schroeder and Jane L. Risen’s op-ed in The New York Times ››
By Kamal Almashharawi
Mr. Almashharawi is a lawyer working with SunBox, a solar power company based in Gaza.
And yet I know the world can be better. I’ve seen how people in other conflicts have worked toward coexistence, and I know that one day I will work to better Gaza, to rebuild our community and to move forward. But this week I took the only opportunity that secured my immediate future: to flee.
I’m a Palestinian raised in the Gaza Strip, so I have long known conflict. My family are refugees from 1948; my grandmother used to tell me really great stories about our village, Al Muharraqa. It was on the eastern border of Gaza, about nine miles from Gaza City.
Still, every other time there has been a war in Gaza, it hasn’t really come to this level of intensity. This is the first time in my life I really didn’t know where to go or if I would survive at all. But because I have seen a different version of this world, I still held out hope.
Seven years after those first soldiers invaded my home, I met Israelis on my own terms. I was 15; my brother encouraged me to apply to attend Seeds of Peace, a summer camp in the United States that promotes coexistence and looks for future community leaders. Seeds gave me a full scholarship. It was 2015; one year after another war with Israel and seven years into the blockade that made travel into and out of Gaza nearly impossible. Attending camp was my first chance to leave the strip. The opportunity changed my life.
Gazans don’t really get to meet people outside the region. We don’t really get to travel and explore the world. With Seeds, I not only got to see beyond Gaza; I also learned how to describe my story in a way that touched others, connecting my life to the lives of others. I took the chance because I wanted Israelis and others to see how a Gazan has lived and survived. I wanted them to learn that we deserve to live. And I wanted to educate them about the culture here in Gaza in a way that could push them to take serious actions back in their communities.
After Seeds, I continued to take courses in political science and peace building. I attended law school at Al-Azhar University in Gaza and focused on conflict resolution. Two years ago, I attended a program based in Jerusalem — remotely — that also helped me build the skills I need to work toward peace building in and outside the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. I traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland, and met with people who had been involved in reaching the Good Friday Agreement. I now have friends from conflict zones around the world. And, this summer, Seeds of Peace asked me to help plan and set up its community action program, trying to teach the kids how to take serious action in their communities.
Meanwhile, I went to work as a legal officer at a solar energy company, SunBox, trying to bring electricity to Gazans who, even before this conflict, would often go many hours without power. I had relocated to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for my work. I returned to Gaza for my sister’s wedding party and to visit my company’s solar projects in Gaza just before Oct. 7.
The past seven weeks were horrendous. When the war began, I was with 85 members of my family. We didn’t stay in one place for long. Instead, we moved across the strip from Gaza City to Khan Younis, Khan Younis to Rafah, Rafah to Khan Younis and then back to Gaza City, to my parents’ home, forever in search of safety.
For weeks, our daily routine consisted of finding clean water to drink and charging our phones. Even that could take hours and hours. Each morning, some people would go to get bread, some people to get other food and some people to get water. The luckiest were those who came back with something. But then as the fighting got closer, we had to hide in our basement, and we couldn’t go out at all.
We returned to Khan Younis earlier this month, traveling for hours by foot and donkey cart. All around us were shots and explosions. The roads were full of sand and sewage and bodies. It was very dangerous, but we couldn’t stay in Gaza City — all the kids in my family were starting to get sick. We simply had nothing to give them. I myself had gone days without food. Nothing felt certain.
Then, on Thursday, I had the enormous good fortune to cross into Egypt with part of my family, including my parents. To depart Gaza is excruciating. We leave behind friends and family to face the continued horrific reality of life lived amid the rubble of their houses. I am so grateful my family has survived but saddened the people of Gaza are not surviving.
After all this, I still know two things for sure: Civilians should not be in the middle of this, and coexistence remains the only solution to this conflict.
I think there are two main steps toward making this happen. The first is on the personal and community level: People need to believe that there’s a chance for both peoples to exist at the same time and live peacefully. This could happen through schools, starting from raising awareness and promoting coexistence activities. That was a major part of what happened in Northern Ireland.
But there then must be another step at the government and international level. Countries and governments around the world have to promote the idea of coexistence and acceptance that both peoples deserve to live on the same land, peacefully, without the need to be biased toward one people over another.
I believe in coexistence as a solution because I’m fed up. And the more than two million people living in Gaza are fed up with conflicts. We need to live peacefully, as the people live on the other side of the fence. I think it’s possible; there just needs to be more effort invested in making it happen.
It’s going to take so much time to rebuild everything. But the devastation I see is not just about reconstructing those pieces of concrete. It’s about the stories behind those walls and houses. We need to restore those lives, those stories, too. And for that we need people to care about those stories — the very sort of connections I’ve made in my experiences with conflict resolution.
I think we can rebuild, even if it takes 50 or 60 years. We can find global interest in reinvesting in projects affected or damaged by the war. We need peace. Whatever the war does to this beautiful place, we will fix it. When I return, I will work to fix it.
Kamal Almashharawi is a lawyer working as a business and legal officer for SunBox, a solar power company based in Gaza.
Finding a pattern of government ”prejudice and neglect” toward Israel’s Arab minority, a landmark Israeli commission of inquiry today accused the police of using excessive force three years ago to combat riots that it said had resulted from simmering, overlooked anger.
The commission said insensitivity by the Israeli ”establishment” permitted widespread discrimination against Israeli Arabs and the buildup of a ”combustible atmosphere,” as, it said, a politicized Islam began to radicalize the population.
The three-member commission was charged with investigating the deaths of 13 people from police fire in October 2000, when thousands of Israeli Arabs choked streets and threw stones in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who just had just begun their uprising against Israel. A Jewish motorist was also killed, by a stone-thrower.
Criticizing police tactics that included the use of sniper fire to disperse crowds, the report concluded that Israel ”must educate its police that the Arab public is not the enemy, and should not be treated as such.” More than a million of Israel’s 6.6 million citizens are Arabs.
Israel identifies itself as a Jewish state, and since its founding in 1948 its Arab minority has held a vexed position in society. While many Israeli Arabs say they enjoy political freedoms and economic opportunities they might not find in Arab countries, they generally also say they feel like second-class citizens. For their part, Israel’s Jews increasingly regard Arab compatriots as a potential fifth column, after the convictions of a small number for aiding Palestinian terrorism.
The report, which recommended that at least one police commander be dismissed but did not call for severe sanctions against top political officials, seemed unlikely in itself to bridge the deepening divisions between Israel’s Arabs and Jews. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would convene his cabinet to consider the findings.
Relatives of those who were killed gathered here today to criticize the commission as not going far enough.
”It didn’t identify or make any attempt to identify the killers,” said Jamila Asleh, whose son, Asel, age 17, was killed during one stone-throwing protest.
Asel Asleh, who had many Jewish friends, was a leading member of Seeds of Peace, an American-based group that promotes conflict resolution between Israelis and Arabs. Mrs. Asleh, who wore a picture of her son pinned to her lapel, said the report ”shows that the future won’t be so good between Arabs and Jews.”
Walid Ghanaym, 37, whose brother Emad, 25, was killed, said: ”If the police killed 13 Jews, what would they do? That’s why we’re third class.”
The panel, the fifth such commission of inquiry into any subject in Israel’s history, questioned 377 witnesses.
While identifying a number of ”deep-seated factors” in leading to the violence, including less government financial support and law enforcement ”in the Arab sector,” the panel also zeroed in on the roles of particular officials. The committee found that Ehud Barak, then the prime minister, ”was not sufficiently aware and attentive” to developments among Arabs that ”created the possibility of widespread riots.”
The commission did not recommend that Mr. Barak be barred from running again for prime minister, should he choose to do so. But it did recommend barring Shlomo Ben-Ami, then the minister of public security, from ever holding that portfolio again.
Both Mr. Barak and Mr. Ben-Ami testified to the commission. Mr. Barak, who had ordered the inquiry, testified that the violence had taken him by surprise, saying that ”there was no concrete warning of such an eruption from any intelligence agency.” Mr. Ben-Ami, who has since left politics, also said he had no warning. He said that the police had failed Israel’s Arab citizens.
The commission issued several specific recommendations to the Israeli police, including that it halt the use of rubber-coated steel bullets for crowd control. ”It was determined that the police must take this weapon out of its inventory,” the report stated. Such bullets are also frequently used by Israeli forces against Palestinians.
The report stated that ”it should be pointed out in a completely non-ambiguous way that the use of live fire, including live fire by snipers, is not a means of dispersing large crowds by police.”
Gil Kleiman, a police spokesman, said the police had made several changes over the last three years, including investing in more nonlethal crowd control equipment like water cannons.
He said that the police were still permitted the firing of rubber-coated steel bullets, but that 17,000 of Israel’s 26,000 officers had now received special training in their proper use.
Azmi Bishara, one of 10 Arab legislators in the Parliament, praised the report for criticizing the police as treating Arabs as though they were not citizens. But, he said: ”There is a real problem, and it has its roots in the attitude of the police toward the Arab citizens of the state of Israel. It’s getting worse, it’s not getting better.”
Mr. Bishara and another Israeli Arab legislator, Abdulmalik Dehamshe, were accused of making statements before the clashes that conveyed ”support for violence as a means to reach the goals of the Arab sector.” But the panel recommended no penalties against them.
JERUSALEM | A formal inquiry this month into the police killing of 13 people in violent protests by Israeli Arabs in October has raised questions about several of the shootings, particularly whether the police needed to fire live ammunition. It has also served as a platform to air what Israeli Arabs say is discrimination that has gone on for decades.
The three-member commission, headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor Or, drew attention last week during its inquiry into the death of Asel Asleh, a 17-year-old Israeli Arab peace advocate killed by police gunfire during a stone-throwing protest, part of a wave of Israeli Arab protests last fall in support of the Palestinian uprising.
Asel Asleh played a leading role in Seeds of Peace, an American-based group that promotes conflict resolution between young Israelis and Arabs. He attended a summer camp run by the group in Maine, was prominent in many of its local activities and had many Israeli Jewish friends. He was killed wearing the group’s distinctive green T-shirt.
At a June 6 hearing, several police officers who were near the youth when he was killed at his village of Arabeh on Oct. 2 testified that they did not know who fired the fatal shots, drawing angry accusations from his parents that their testimony was a coverup.
Dressed in black, Jamila Asleh, the youth’s mother, sobbed as she listened to the officers’ accounts. Outside the hearing room at the Supreme Court, she shouted at other police officers, “Murderers, you are murdering and lying!”
Hassan Asleh, the youth’s father, testified a day earlier that he had witnessed the events leading to his son’s death. He said his son had been watching the protest when three police officers chased the youth into an olive grove, kicking and hitting him with a rifle butt before he fell. The father said he then heard three shots, and saw the officers leave.
Umran Asleh, a cousin, testified that he had seen the chase and a gun pointed at the teenager’s head before hearing three shots. A doctor who treated the youth testified that he had been shot in the neck at point-blank range, and that crucial time had been lost when the police delayed the arrival of an ambulance.
In their testimony, police officers described a scene in which hundreds of rioters attacked them with stones, bottles and slingshots. At one point, the policemen said, a group of officers ran into an olive grove to arrest rioters after an Arab was spotted hiding among the trees, and Asel Asleh was discovered bleeding on the ground. One officer said he had seen the teenager run, stumble and fall.
Questioned by the three members of the inquiry panel about how the teenager had been shot, the officers said that they did not know.
“I have no explanation sir,” said Avi Karasso, one of the officers who ran into the olive grove. Another officer in the group, Ovadia Hatan, said none of them had opened fire. “I really don’t know how he was shot and from what direction,” he said.
Mr. Asaleh, the teenager’s father, stood up and shouted at Mr. Hatan from behind a glass wall erected to protect the witnesses, “Why don’t you say you murdered in cold blood?”
Yitzhak Hai, the commanding officer at the scene, testified that his men, members of an antidrug unit drafted into riot duty, were ill-equipped and untrained for the job. They had no rubber bullets, and there was a shortage of tear gas, leading him to use live ammunition to repel rioters, he said.
Another officer, Michael Shapshak, told the commission, “Had we used rubber bullets, it would have prevented what happened.”
BY JOEL GREENBERG | Looking squarely into the camera, Amer Kamal, a Palestinian teenager from East Jerusalem, delivers a message to his Israeli friend, Yaron Avni, who will soon be drafted into the Israeli Army.
“I hope that you will be a good soldier who helps his society, who helps his people and who works for the peace process,” Mr. Kamal says. “I don’t want to see you in the West Bank or in Jerusalem or in the Gaza Strip running after Palestinians and killing them. I hope you’re going to stay the Yaron I know, not to change your opinions but go for peace and help us to work for peace.”
The scene is from “Peace of Mind,” the first documentary film shot jointly by Israeli and Palestinian youths, chronicling a year in their lives after returning home from an Israeli-Arab summer camp in the Maine woods. The camp is run by Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings young Israelis together with Palestinians and other Arab teenagers to build friendships and discuss ways to resolve the conflict between their peoples.
“Peace of Mind,” which will be shown a few times around New York in the coming months, had its Israeli premiere in November after being shown at the Hamptons International Film Festival in October. The producers say that showings are being considered by PBS and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival this summer. Israel Educational Television and the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation are also planning to show the movie, which the producers hope will become a teaching tool in schools.
The documentary was conceived by Susan Siegel, co-executive director of Global Action Project, an educational group that has produced youth documentaries on social issues in the United States as well as on conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Balkans. She said she wanted the cameras to follow the campers when they left their idyllic surroundings in Maine and returned to the Middle East. “What happens when they go back home: that’s the real story,” she said.
Producers chose four Israelis and three Palestinians, trained them to use video cameras and to work as a team, and then sent them back to document their lives after the 1997 camp session. The film, produced and directed by Mark Landsman, took two years to complete, and the process produced fast friendships and heated debates.
A major challenge was how the history of the conflict should be presented. The two sides have opposing narratives of the same events, and the young filmmakers struggled to meld them. They argued over terminology and historical perceptions: Were the Palestinians expelled from their land? Or did they flee a war started by Arab states bent on destroying Israel?
“It wasn’t possible to come up with a unified history,” Mr. Landsman said. “It doesn’t exist. The Palestinian youths produced their version of history, and the Israelis produced theirs.”
So the film shows two separate archival sequences: the Palestinians show the displacement of their people in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the Israelis depict the return of Jews to an ancient homeland after the Holocaust.
An emotional argument about terrorism almost broke up the group. The Palestinians grew defensive when Yossi Zilberman, an Israeli participant, called bombers from the militant Islamic group Hamas animals. Mr. Kamal, the Palestinian, argued that although the militants were wrong, they had sacrificed their lives for their country.
“It boiled my blood that someone from Seeds of Peace was defending them,” said Mr. Zilberman, 18. A heated argument ended in tears, threatening the project’s future. Sivan Ranon, 17, an Israeli, said of the Palestinian arguments: “It was scary to hear your friend talking like that. Suddenly you felt that you don’t know this person.”
In the end a sense of common purpose kept the group together. The movie includes a scene in which Bushra Jawabri, 18, a Palestinian, calls her Israeli friends from her home in a West Bank refugee camp to express sympathy after a deadly suicide bombing in Jerusalem.
“It meant a lot to me that she called,” Mr. Zilberman says in the film. “I think that this is the first step.”
Hazem Zaanoun, 17, a Palestinian from Gaza, said, “We had strong unity between us that really served us.”
There were also concerns about the Israelis’ impending army service, which is compulsory in Israel after high school. “What if they ask me to go and be in a base in the West Bank or East Jerusalem?” Reut Elkobi, 17, an Israeli, asks in the film. “I have friends over there. God, Amer lives in East Jerusalem. Maybe one time I will have to stop him from throwing stones at me. Is this ever going to happen? I don’t know what I’m going to do if they put me over there.”
Ms. Jawabri, who formed a close friendship with Ms. Ranon, exchanging home visits they documented in the film, said she was concerned about what her Israeli friend might do when she puts on a uniform. “Although I trust her that she really wants coexistence, what if her government asks her to do something against the other side?” Ms. Jawabri asked. “I don’t want to see Sivan carrying a gun in front of me, and me carrying a stone against her.”
Ms. Ranon, for her part, said that no matter how close she was to Ms. Jawabri, her friend’s dream of returning to her refugee family’s native village inside Israel remained a barrier. “She represents a whole population that wants to come back and live in our place, and that’s scary,” Ms. Ranon said. “Her dream is my nightmare.”
That contradiction is powerfully portrayed in the film’s climactic scene, in which Ms. Jawabri visits Mr. Zilberman at his home in Kiryat Gat, a town of immigrants built next to the ruins of her family’s village, which was destroyed in the aftermath of the 1948 war.
The camera lingers on their faces as he leads her to an abandoned grave of a Muslim holy man, points out trees planted over the ruins of Arab homes, and offers her shards of pottery that were left behind. Ms. Jawabri kneels in silent prayer near the grave and later fills a glass jar with soil to take back to the refugee camp.
For Ms. Jawabri the visit was a jolt. The arid landscape and sandy soil were nothing like the fertile green village fields described to her by elders in her camp. The village homes had vanished, giving way to the apartment buildings and industries of Kiryat Gat.
“I was really sad, and I felt bad for those people who still have their memories and still have hope of going back,” she said. “I now have less hope of returning. I don’t want to say it’s impossible. That’s too hard to say.”
Mr. Zilberman said: “I tell friends that we’re strong enough to acknowledge that there was a community here, that there were people here, with the emphasis on was. There was a war. We didn’t start it, and this is the history of the place. I was quite proud to show Bushra my town. Now it’s my place.”
In retrospect, he said, thrashing out painful issues with his Palestinian friends had made him more hard-headed about the odds of a peaceful resolution of the conflict. It will take a long time for true reconciliation, he said.
On both sides there are reservations about the finished film. Mr. Zilberman and Mr. Avni, 18, wrote a letter to Mr. Landsman criticizing portrayals that they thought were unfair to the Israelis and too sympathetic to the Palestinians. Mr. Kamal, 17, said the Palestinian views on Jerusalem were lacking, and Mr. Zaanoun said a broader range of Palestinian voices should have been heard, including the militant opinions of some people he interviewed.
All in all, Mr. Zilberman said the project proved to be a reality check.
“We got to know each other, for better and for worse,” he said. “I’m still for peace, but I’m much more realistic. I know what I’m up against. I’m more sober. We’re all more sober.”
