BY MARY K. FEENEY | MAINE The August day broke gray and chilly as a summer camp in Maine waited for its extraordinary visitors. Three Peter Pan buses were on their way from Boston, carrying 119 children and their escorts, to a ground-breaking experiment in making peace.

The trip to Camp Powhatan in tiny Oxford was only one leg of a long journey for the 12- to 14-year-old children of Seeds of Peace, a program to help Arab and Israeli children break the cycle of hate in the Mideast. They had traveled from middle-class homes in Cairo and Tel Aviv, from beleaguered refugee camps in Palestine and from cities in Jordan and Morocco.

In these two weeks in Maine, some would learn to swim, cradled in the arms of their former national enemies. They would argue, sometimes bitterly, about “taking land” and deaths and imprisonments in an ugly conflict over which they have had no control. They would discover, as journalist and former hostage Terry Anderson told last year’s campers, that the enemy would now and forever have a face.

On the camp’s “main street,” a long dirt road dimpled with potholes, Joel Bloom, the 78-year-old camp co-director, rumbled along on his green canopied golf cart, his preferred mode of transportation. Under his tan porkpie hat, Bloom’s eyes gleamed with excitement at the sight of the three green buses.

“Here they are! The buses are here!” someone shouted.

The children ambled stiffly off the buses, laughing and chattering with their friends. It seemed like a typical summer camp crowd at a typical summer camp (which is what it had been most of the summer). They carried—or wore—the spoils of their trip to Boston: in-line skates, Patriots hats, portable stereos, Barbies and G.I. Joes.

But the campers, and the camp, were anything but typical. One Palestinian boy would later ask why his counselor gave him two sheets for his cot; at home, he had only one, and slept on the floor. An Israeli girl would complain to her counselor after she was told not to wear a bikini, an apparent accommodation to the modesty of the Arab children.

Separate swimming areas were set up for boys and girls, but some of the Palestinians had never learned how to swim.

“There’s been a shooting war going on, and their families have to keep them inside,” said the camp’s founder and president, John Wallach.

Even the food came as a surprise.

“This together?” one Israeli boy asked, pointing to the peanut butter and jelly.

“What’s this?,” several asked, pointing to a container of marshmallow fluff.

“It was bad,” an Egyptian boy said of the first meal at camp. “But,” he allowed, “this is a new experience.”

‘A shared ordeal’

New experiences were what Wallach had in mind when he created Seeds of Peace last year. Wallach, an author and the Washington, D.C.-based foreign editor of Hearst Newspapers, believed that in this remote and rural Maine setting the next generation of Arabs and Israelis could get to know one another amid the Mideast peace process.

“The biggest lesson they can learn at camp is, what they think they know is not necessarily the truth,” Wallach said.

Another factor is the even playing field. “Nobody is dominant here,” Wallach said.

The children noticed. In one of the camp’s nightly “coexistence” sessions, which are designed to resolve conflict through discussion, a group leader asked the children what was “fair” at camp.

“A kid said, ‘We all have the same bad food, we all have to sleep in the bunks, we all have to sleep in the cold.’ It’s a shared ordeal,” said Barbara Gottschalk, the camp’s executive director.

Last year, Seeds of Peace had 46 boys from Israel, Egypt, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the United States. This year, it was expanded to include girls, and children from Morocco and Jordan. The children, some of whom are returning for a second year, are chosen in national competitions by their governments and the private sector, with an emphasis on geographic, ethnic and social diversity. With a budget of about $400,000 this year, the camp is paid for with donations of money and time, and through fund-raisers.

This year, the children spent almost a week in Boston, two weeks at the camp and another week in Washington, D.C., where they met with President Clinton and visited the Holocaust Museum.

Last year, the children witnessed the signing of the Middle East peace accord.

“Mr. Wallach told us that politics is just people signing a piece of paper,” said Tarek, a tall blond Egyptian boy. “We want to make peace the right way, in our hearts, not in our minds.”

‘They are talking’

The road to peace—and understanding the opposition—is not easy. Many of the Palestinians have been touched by the conflict, through living in refugee camps, or the deaths or imprisonment of relatives. For the Israeli children, the Holocaust is a dark and painful touchstone, while fear of terrorism and future wars remain.

“Every time I look at them, it seems they are blaming me for something I didn’t do,” Roy, of Tel Aviv, said of some of the Palestinian campers. (Only first names are used in this article, because of concerns for campers’ safety at home.)

Ruba, a Palestinian girl living in Jericho, said she had made some Israeli friends at camp, but that ill feelings from home linger.

“I think that [the Israelis] have had a bad experience with us. But I have had very bad experience with the Israelis.”

“They took my brother for 40 days to the prison. My father asked the reason,” said her Palestinian friend, Naheel. “They say, your son throw some stones. My brother was sleeping.”

The camp’s coexistence groups were devised to deal with such emotional and political issues.

“You want them to disagree. You want that to happen,” Wallach said. “You can’t get to know each other on the playing field superficially and resolve anything.”

In one group, children were asked to explore moral questions, such as stealing or racism. Other group leaders used role-playing, computer exercises and debates. In Bunk 8 one night, a group of 12 children began with the innocuous question, “What is democracy?” and simmered to a boil over terrorism and land rights.

“When Israel was asked about the land they wanted, they only wanted land in the Middle East,” said Alex, a Jordanian boy.

“The Israelis owned this land many times ago,” said Itay, an Israeli. “The Romans and others, they took it from us. We had a strong feeling that we wanted to live in this land again because it is a holy land. They wanted us to live in Uganda.”

“The PLO still has a basic target to kill all Jews. It’s still in their charter … The Arabs won’t live in peace until the Jews are all dead,” said Boaz, an Israeli.

When talk turned to Egyptian terrorists in Israel, Maged, an Egyptian boy, quickly spoke up. Because of his accent, the words came out slightly askew. It was one of the only light moments in the session.

“You started the war on Egypt because of a group of `tourists’ … Did you occupy all of Sinai just to stop a few `tourists?'” he asked. Everyone laughed.

“It’s terrorist. You say `tourists,'” one pointed out. Maged shrugged and smiled.

At the session’s end, the children agreed something important had taken place.

Barak, an Israeli, disagreed with a boy who said peace cannot be reached through discussion.

“If I go home and give the message to my friends, and one friend later becomes the prime minister or a member of the Knesset, they’ll want to change and have a new perspective,” he said.

“I didn’t want to get into these arguments,” Maged admitted. “But since I had this discussion, now I’m released inside.”

“They are talking,” said Sameh, a Palestinian boy. “This is good.”

Fueling memories

Something other than talk, however, brought the children closer together.

Shortly after 6 a.m. on Aug. 24, the third day at camp, co- director Timothy Wilson, who coaches sports and directs the camp’s international staff of counselors, was awakened by a smoke alarm. Jilson House, which had served as Powhatan’s headquarters for more than 70 years and Wilson’s home for the summer, was on fire.

Panicked and half asleep, Wilson tried—without success—to put out the fire. He escaped, and was later treated for smoke inhalation.

The campers were awakened and rushed to the field house, some padding barefoot through the cold, dew-moistened grass. A few campers and counselors threw buckets of lake water on the wooden building. When the camp’s rifle range ammunition began exploding inside, they, too, retreated.

By the time firefighters and rescue workers arrived, Jilson House was blazing. An hour later, it was destroyed, the official cause a chimney fire.

Bloom, who inherited Camp Powhatan from his father, tried but could not disguise his sorrow. Ira Bloom established the camp and adjacent guest cottages in 1921 when there were no camps in Maine for Jewish boys and hotels in the state did not accept Jews.

“A lot of the history of the camp is all gone,” he said—photos of his father and the camp, books and mementos.

Wilson, a Pittsburgh language arts teacher and former camp counselor, lost all of his belongings.

There was another, more immediate concern: the passports and airline tickets had been stashed in a wooden chest inside. Incredibly, firefighters salvaged most of them.

In the field house, Arabs and Israelis drew blankets around themselves for warmth, comforted one another, or slept. There was a closeness born of adversity.

“It was terrible; the kids were terrified. Now, the way we are, we’re going to be closer,” said Issa, a Jordanian teenager who lives in Yonkers, N.Y.

At all of the coexistence sessions that evening, leaders took time to talk about the fire. In one group, the children were asked to draw or write about the fire in terms of memories or immediate thoughts. Some said it reminded them of war. Most were concerned about Tim Wilson.

“When I hear `fire!,’ I really afraid,” said Mohamed, an Egyptian. “When they told me Tim house, I really sad, because Tim good man in this camp.”

Holy days

Religious services were held Friday around sunset. The Muslim children met outdoors, near the baseball diamond. Girls wore white veils, making them seem much older than the soccer players they had been only hours before. The boys covered their bodies from the waist to the knees; a few draped themselves with beach towels. They stood in straight lines, boys in a group in front, girls in back, as a male camper sang prayers in Arabic.

At the other end of the camp, the Jewish children met for the Sabbath. The boys wore yarmulkes to cover their heads, or improvised skullcaps with tissues or sweatshirts piled on their heads. Group leader Hadara Rosenblum lit two candles and recited a brief blessing. There were songs, the sharing of sacramental wine, and a Sabbath treat of Kit Kat bars.

“Shabbat Shalom,” the children said softly to one another at the close of the gathering.

Both Arab and Israeli children shot photographs of the respective services, perhaps because they had never seen them before, or never would again.

‘An honest war’

Two weeks of ball-playing, archery and swimming lessons were preparation for the Red and Gray games, the highlight of Powhatan campers for scores of summers. Two evenly matched teams—with rosters listing both Arabs and Israelis—compete in baseball, soccer, street hockey, archery, swimming and other sports.

The two-day event begins with a tug of war, and ends with the winners running, fully clothed, into Lake Pleasant. The losers follow.

Red led both days, although that didn’t quiet the Gray team’s cheers. The Arabs shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is Great!”) in Arabic. There also were American cheers, and the “woof-woof-woof” made famous by Arsenio Hall.

A basketball game sealed the Red team’s victory. The red shirts formed a scarlet streak as players jumped into the lake, splashed their teammates and then their former opponents, hugging and congratulating one another in the clear, emerald-tinted water.

“This war is an honest war,” Laith, a Palestinian boy, said later, “when people fight not with weapons but with skills and teamwork.”

That night, officially the last, campers attended a traditional awards ceremony with an Indian skit, including burying the hatchet.

Then, wearing cologne and their snappiest clothes, they trooped over to a dance in the indoor basketball court, an event they had requested. There were several requests that no photographs of the dance be published; for some in the Arab world, dancing is considered risque for young, unmarried people.

This is not to say romances did not develop. A few Israeli boys and girls had paired off. Arab-Israeli relationships were understood—if not proclaimed—to be taboo.

Not everyone followed the rules. The dance post-mortem was typical. From the boys’ bunks came whoops and taunts. The girls, silhouetted against the illumined bunk windows, talked of the dances they’d had, the music (“boring!”) and the boys.

In the darkness, a boy knocked on the door of a girl’s cabin.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m OK,” she said, looking downward. “I’m sad.”

Sad, perhaps, because she was an Arab, and he was an Israeli, and their friendship soon would be over.

Friends forever?

From the beginning, Wallach encouraged the children to make friends from other countries. He gently chided those who didn’t.

One cold night five girls huddled near the street hockey rink to watch the ending minutes of a game. One hugged Mimi, a tiny Moroccan girl, whose teeth were chattering.

“Come on, let’s walk and keep each other warm,” one of them suggested. And the girls—a Moroccan, two Egyptians and two Israelis—linked arms and walked off into the darkness.

Clearly, many had found new pals. Some said they would correspond. Laith, a Palestinian, and Yehoyada, an Israeli, were returning campers who had become buddies last year. They said they would continue to visit each other’s homes in Jerusalem, and talk on the phone.

Some bonds formed in the beginning of camp were fractured by a discussion over who had rights to Jerusalem, a holy city for Jews and Muslims. The Palestinians, angered by the answers they were hearing, began wearing pendants and T-shirts that claimed Israel and Jerusalem as their own. They said their actions were no worse than Jewish campers wearing the Star of David, which has political and territorial meaning for Palestinians.

“They think that we are not good and that we don’t want them in our country,” said Ruba, a Palestinian girl. “I fighted with two of my [Israeli] friends and now we are not very good friends.”

Tamar, an Israeli girl, said the Palestinian’s show of nationalism frightened her, although she sympathized with Palestinian children whose brothers had been imprisoned by Israel. “Fourteen-year-olds can’t sit in jail. It’s not right.”

Ahmed, an Egyptian boy, admitted he arrived at camp with opinions about Israel and Palestine. They changed.

“I found that Israelis and Palestinians can be close friends,” he said. “But I found that both countries are also suffering.”