BY PHIL HIRSCHKORN | OTISFIELD, MAINE
RUDI BAKHTIAR, ANCHOR: It’s not Camp David, but the goal is the same. This summer saw an ongoing effort to broker a lasting peace in the Middle East. It didn’t involve statesmen or world leaders, but rather a group of 13- to 15-year-olds at a special camp in Maine.
Phil Hirschkorn has the story.
PHIL HIRSCHKORN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Summer camp in Maine. The games are competitive, the campers diverse. They’re teenagers from 10 different countries in the Middle East, not only here to play, but to plant a seed for peace.
JOHN WALLACH, FOUNDER, SEEDS OF PEACE CAMP: Good morning, Seeds! UNIDENTIFIED MALES AND FEMALES: Good morning, John!
HIRSCHKORN: John Wallach founded the Seeds of Peace Camp eight years ago.
WALLACH: Seeds of Peace is not some left-wing, you know, make love not war, sing a song, plant a tree, call it peace. Seeds of Peace exists in the real world. It exists among people who’ve been taught and grown up to dislike each other, often to hate each other, and it’s finding some basis for them to coexist with each other.
HIRSCHKORN: Muslim and Jew, Arab and Israeli, Jordanian, Palestinian, Egyptian, 400 kids in two summer sessions play together, eat together and live together.
WALLACH: Living in the same bunk with each other can be one of the most difficult adjustments because you’re sleeping with the enemy. And I remember in the first or second year—this happens almost every year—we had an Israeli who was walking outside the bunk at 2:00 in the morning. And we said, why aren’t you sleeping? And he said, well, I can’t fall asleep because I’m afraid that the Palestinian in my bunk is going to knife me.
HIRSCHKORN: Nothing like that has ever happened.
TAMER SHABENEH, 15-YEAR-OLD PALESTINIAN: We used to know them as a gun—soldiers and checkpoints—know them as settlers and whatever. And now we see them.
ARIEL TAL, 15-YEAR-OLD ISRAELI: We’re friends. The stereotypes break in the first few days.
HIRSCHKORN: Six days a week, campers break down barriers in coexistence sessions, a kind of political group therapy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That land’s their land. It’s their grandfather’s land. It’s their ancestors’ lands …
HIRSCHKORN: Topic number one, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how it affects them personally.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don’t have a problem that you will be my neighbor, but I have a problem if you will be — if you come and take my home.
HIRSCHKORN: Arguing over national boundaries and trading territory to avert future wars.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This doesn’t mean the settlers don’t want to get out and the government doesn’t want to force them.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. You want to be an independent country, right? Do why do you blame us?
HIRSCHKORN: When the conversation gets too heated, counselors find a way to calm everyone down.
CAMPERS: One, two, three!
(on camera): The philosophy behind Seeds of Peace is fairly simple. If you can understand that you can disagree with someone, even an enemy, and still live with them, that’s what peaceful coexistence is all about.
WALLACH: Hands up if you’ve made one real friend.
HIRSCHKORN (voice-over): This generation from the Middle East looks to leaders like Egypt’s Anwar Sadat or Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin, who were both assassinated after taking bold steps to make peace. These campers are learning to take small steps together.
MAMDOUH ZAKI, 14-YEAR-OLD EGYPTIAN: I was thinking the same thing like the Egyptians: We can never be friends with the Israelis. And the proof is we didn’t become friends at camp, we become friends at the playing.
SERGEI KHAZANOVICH, 15-YEAR-OLD ISRAELI: I actually—I’ve heard that I will have to shoot like—to make a war with the people that I met before, and I know that that isn’t the way. The war, that isn’t right.
HIRSCHKORN: Some campers have to overcome personal scars from the Arab-Israeli conflicts.
ABDUL JARWAN, 15-YEAR-OLD JORDANIAN: It entered from here and went out from this side.
HIRSCHKORN: Abdul, a Jordanian, was hit by a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration in Jerusalem when he was 6 years old.
JARWAN: From that time until I came to this camp, I extremely didn’t like Israeli people. I just hated them.
HIRSCHKORN: Now he has Israeli friends. Though mostly privately funded, Seeds of Peace is embraced by public leaders, each country’s government selecting the teams who go to the camp. A few, like Egyptian Tamer Nagy, have returned year after year to work there.
TAMER NAGY, COUNSELOR, SEEDS OF PEACE: After yelling and arguing for a week or two, you’ve yelled all you could, you’ve said everything you have to say, and then you get to the point when you can really start to learn how to listen to the other side.
HIRSCHKORN: In this Idyllic setting, where the water is called Lake Pleasant, where the kids where the same uniform and play on the same team, it’s easier to pull for the same goal. The real work comes when they go home.
WALLACH: This is a movement. It isn’t just a summer.
HIRSCHKORN: There are now more than 2,000 Seeds of Peace veterans, who the camp hopes will emerge among the next generation of Middle East leaders.