BY IAN HALPERN | Bushra Jawabri, a 17-year-old Palestinian from the al-Arub refugee camp near Hebron, sits inside a rickety minivan discussing the dreaded tawjihi matriculation exam. A third-generation camp resident, Bushra is escaping her studies today to meet the Kosovar Albanian refugees who’ve found shelter at Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael. She’s traveling north with another Palestinian and two Israeli teens on a trip organized by Seeds of Peace, a group that brings together youth from Israel and the Arab world.
When Noa Epstein, 16, from Mevasseret Zion outside Jerusalem, joins the ride, a smile crosses Bushra’s face. The two met at Seeds of Peace summer camp in the U.S. in 1997, and have kept in touch. With Adham Rishmawi, a jocular 16-year-old from Beit Sahur, telling jokes to 15-year-old Dana Gdalyahu from Rishon Lezion, the laughter nearly exceeds the noise from the old van’s engine.
Hours later on the kibbutz, the groups forms a tight circle on the porch, listening to Kreshnik Bajktari, 23, a Kosovar dentistry student with remarkable green eyes. Gazing towards the Mediterranean, he tells his story slowly. On April 3, after 10 days hiding in the basement of his parents’ home in Pristina, watching Kosovo erupt on CNN, he left with his mother and two brothers. Serbs were shelling the neighborhood, and police units were evicting residents by force. “I knew it would soon be my turn, and because I am young they might kill me,” he says. The Bajktaris fled to the Blace refugee camp in Macedonia, where Kreshnik served as an interpreter at the IDF field hospital, earning him a place among the first 111 refugees flown to Israel.
Kreshnik spent five days watching Serbian trains unload thousands of Albanian refugees. “Every day I counted train cars. There were 22 cars filled with people and the smell was terrible. I recognized many people. They were my neighbors.”
As the teens absorb the gruesome tale, sympathetic nods and knowing glances ripple through the group. They listen to the same story but hear different things.
“Some Israelis get upset about Holocaust comparisons,” says Noa, whose father fled the Nazis as a child. “But that’s the first thing I thought of, the stories of my grandparents.” The detail that stirs memories from Adham, a child of the Intifada, comes when Kreshnik says he recognized the smell of tear gas by age 6 and he’s only known Serbs as soldiers and police. “The things you saw on TV, I saw them with my eyes,” says Adham, whose father was arrested for leading a non-violent tax revolt.
On the drive back, chocolate chip cookies take some of the edge off and the kids decompress. They reflect on history’s victims. “There’s no need to compare pain,” says Noa. “We suffered, the Palestinians are suffering, and others are still suffering. Comparisons aren’t the point at all.”