It’s the International Day of Peace! Read this inspiring story about a special camp that promotes just that.

BY JOHN WALLACH | There was only one story on the news that February morning in 1993. In our home outside Washington, D.C., my wife, Janet, and I sat staring at the TV screen. A car bomb had exploded beneath the World Trade Center in New York. Commentators speculated that the terrorist act was the work of Muslim extremists.

As a journalist I was used to covering stories like this. Although I wasn’t reporting this one, I couldn’t escape the terrible irony for anyone in the media. A terrorist’s aim is to spread fear; reporting his action means he succeeds. Fear, in turn, leads to hate—which invites terror in response. It was a vicious cycle. I asked myself again as I had so often, Can people ever stop hating?

I remember the first time the question came to me. I was just six years old, lying awake in my bedroom in Scarsdale, New York, wondering at the fates that had let my parents survive and me be born. German Jews, they were taken from their home in Cologne to a death camp. They’d escaped, made their way to Nazi-occupied France, been caught, re-imprisoned, and escaped once again. A daring French priest guided them across the Pyrenees to Spain, from which my parents finally made their way to America and New York. Two years later I was born.

Even at age six I understood how rare our good fortune had been. A million Jewish children, I was told, had been burned in the ovens. What a “million” was I couldn’t have known—only that hate could do unthinkable things.

Can people stop hating? As I got older the question grew more insistent. One of the reasons I became a foreign correspondent was a desire to learn about other people—and help them learn about one another. If we knew one another, would we go on hating?

Janet is also a writer and in 1987 we accepted a reporting assignment in the Middle East. We lived for months with ordinary Palestinian and Israeli families. We shopped with them in the street bazaars, ate with them, played with their kids, went with them to synagogue or mosque, observed their decent, hardworking daily lives. And were struck by how alike they were. How much they had in common…far more than the differences that fatally divided them.

Yet because they never knew one another, zealots could sow fear and hate.

Another thread was woven into the pattern of our lives when Janet and I sent our younger son to a summer camp in Maine. There, Mike was thrown in with boys from different backgrounds. At first there were the usual misunderstandings and frictions among various groups. But the camp experience had a way of erasing these tensions. Bunking, swimming, eating, canoeing together led to bonding across cultures and classes.

All this, I think, was at work in my subconscious when I rose to make a toast at a Washington dinner party honoring Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister. The Egyptian ambassador and a representative of the PLO attended and I’d been included as part of the press corps. After dinner I stood to salute the peace efforts being explored by both sides. Then, without any intention of doing this, I suddenly heard myself saying, “I’m planning to hold a camp this summer for teenagers from the Middle East. I’d like to invite each of the governments represented here to send us 15 of your brightest youngsters. Perhaps in a casual setting we can sow some small seeds of peace.”

The surprise on the faces before me was nothing compared to my own astonishment at the words that had come out of my mouth. The delegations hastily conferred. No one wanted to appear to be against peace; before I knew it Seeds of Peace was born.

Fearing the governments would back out, I called a press conference the following morning. By afternoon the news was out: Israel, Egypt and the PLO were cooperating on a peace camp!

At first I carried on with my job for the Hearst newspapers. I was staying up nights to work out the endless details of getting the idea off the ground. We contacted Mike’s camp and found that we could book the facilities later that summer after the regular season was over. Of course this took money. We raided our savings, raised funds from family and friends to reserve the camp. The different governments chose the kids who would attend; we asked only that they be top students, proud of their heritage and proficient in English. Future leaders were who we wanted.

The last week of August 1993—six months after the World Trade Center bombing—45 boys arrived at the camp. In the bunkhouses they were assigned cots side by side with those they’d been brought up to regard as mortal enemies.

At first the kids were edgy and the chaperones appointed by each government overprotective. But before long, the youngsters were sharing universal camp experiences, such as lost sneakers, swapped jeans, mixed-up towels, awful camp food. (“American breakfast cereal is much too sweet!”) Bottom line, these were teenagers! Soon they were swapping tapes of favorite pop singers, playing baseball and soccer together, even attending each other’s worship services.

Before my eyes, my old question was being answered. In one small group, in one small place, antagonists were discovering that the enemy has a face.

But I soon learned personally some of the hard steps on the path to peace: the ancient, intractable conflicts of history and culture. Listening—really listening—to the other side turned out to be the toughest, and most important, skill required to build peace. We enlisted conflict-management experts to guide “coexistence classes” that became the heart of the camp program.

Every day the campers met in the big hall for a minimum of two hours, encouraged to confront the volatile issues. Who has a moral right to the land of Palestine? Who should govern Jerusalem? The boys were asked to share personal tragedies too, the death of a family member—perhaps at the hand of relatives of the kid in the next chair. The facilitators laid down only three rules. No violence. No insults. No interrupting. A pencil was passed from hand to hand; only the boy holding the pencil was allowed to speak.

By the end of the two weeks, the kids had formed friendships unimaginable back home. A Hollywood producer heard about the project and offered much-needed funding—if the governments relaxed their boys-only policies to include girls. A little to my surprise, all agreed.

We were off to a promising start. We extended the camp period to three and a half weeks and soon were holding three sessions every summer, hosting close to 200 kids at each one. With the camps taking more and more of my hours and energy, I decided to devote myself full time to Seeds of Peace. It was a scary step, but I’m convinced that God has a plan for every life, and I believed that this was part of his for mine.

In February 1995, I left Hearst. We sold our home and with $50,000 and a staff of four became a year-round nonprofit organization devoted to waging peace. A Palestinian-American friend of mine, George Rebh, designed our camp T-shirt: green and white, with three youngsters holding hands, their shadows forming an olive branch.

How fragile, though, was that little sapling! Bad news from home was sure to provoke episodes like the one that occurred during the fifth year of the camps in 1997. It was July 30, 11 days into this particular session. The kids were having breakfast when one of the Israeli girls received a phone call from home and came back to the dining room in tears. Arab terrorists had set off a bomb in the central vegetable market, the Mahane Yehuda in downtown Jerusalem, causing many deaths and injuries.

Panic swept the Israeli campers, fearful for their families. I asked everyone to assemble in the big hall. Instead of milling about, as they had the day before, the kids huddled in groups, Jews on one side of the room, Arabs on the other.

I told the kids this was a test for us all, exactly the kind of terror Seeds of Peace was formed to combat. “These are the situations,” I said, “when it’s most important that we go on talking to each other. Let’s see if we can make the sound of peace louder than the noise of war.”

Reluctantly at first, they did talk. “I think the Israelis will hate us so much,” said one Palestinian boy, “that they won’t let Jewish kids come here again.”

Back and forth they went. Arab and Jew, each side clearly convinced that the other was the aggressor in the long conflict and itself the victim. But out of the morning’s exchanges slowly emerged the realization that when violence occurs, both sides are victims.

Another Palestinian boy expressed it in a shaky voice: “I am crying because we are human beings and the people we killed were human beings too.”

Tolerance and understanding won out that day. But with every killing back home, the camps threatened to erupt in hostility. Some day, I feared, an eruption would blow the program apart.

By the fall of 1999, we’d sponsored peace camps for seven summers, graduated more than 2,000 youngsters, had an annual budget of three million dollars from private donations and were also holding camps in Europe and Asia to bring together Serbs and Albanians, Indians and Pakistanis, Greeks, Turks and Cypriots. In volatile Jerusalem itself, we’d opened a year-round Seeds of Peace Center, a 5,000-square-foot building dedicated to coexistence.

Then in the summer of 2000, the Maine camp nearly self-destructed.

This time it was an Arab who’d been killed—and he was the cousin of one of our own campers. The Palestinians demanded to hold their own funeral to coincide with the one back home. Such funerals are occasions for emotional anti-Israeli demonstrations. Because free expression of feelings was at the very heart of our program, we had to allow the funeral to take place.

The grieving, angry boys and girls gathered in an old frame building near the dining room. From where I stood outside, gazing at the serene vista of woods and lakeshore, I could hear their sobs, shouts and the sound of pounding drums. At last I was permitted to enter. Some of the kids were in tears, some praying, some calling for revenge on the Israeli campers. Would this be the end of everything?

One boy made sure I was looking, then stripped off his Seeds of Peace T-shirt, threw it on the floor and stomped on it. Other campers followed till half the kids in the hall were grinding their shirts into the pine floorboards.

Can people stop hating? I’d never been less sure than at this explosive moment when everything I’d worked for was being rejected.

Almost without thinking I started to pull my own Seeds of Peace shirt over my head. “You’re right and I’m wrong. If ‘peace’ is just a word on a T-shirt, I don’t want to wear mine either!”

The kids stared. For a long moment the room was silent as one small experiment in peace hung in the balance.

Then the Arab boy whose cousin had been killed picked up his shirt and slipped it on. Another youngster retrieved his. Then another and another, until all had put their shirts back on.

For that one moment, at least, I had the answer to my question.

About John Wallach
In 1993, John Wallach founded Seeds of Peace. Though he has passed away, his dream has expanded to include young leaders from Cyprus, South Asia and the Balkans, as well as the Middle East. Learn more at seedsofpeace.org.

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