Camp With Kids From War-Torn Regions Gives ‘the Enemy’ a Face

Otisfield, Maine —  Otisfield, Maine

At a beautiful lakeside campsite here one night last week, a genial mob of teenagers was squealing through a coed basketball game while hip-hop blared through loudspeakers and adults on the court did their best to maintain a semblance of order. It was a typical night at summer camps all along the Maine coast.

Except that the adults clowning with the kids were a group of young National Basketball Assn. players. And the kids slapping each others’ backs and shouting with excitement at each basket made and missed included Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians, along with a sprinkling of teens from other Middle Eastern countries and the United States.

All were there as part of a unique program called Seeds of Peace that brings to America teenagers from parts of the world torn by conflict.

Founded on a shoestring a decade ago by journalist John Wallach (who died last year), Seeds has grown into a nearly $5-million-a-year project. Although it has drawn remarkable support from governments that can’t agree on hardly anything else, it is funded almost entirely by foundations and private donations.

Seeds hasn’t found a silver bullet to solve the problems that have long divided these societies. But it has, kid by kid, advanced a goal at once simple and profound: to give “the enemy” a face. It forces these teens to do what very few people in any society ever do: consider those on the other side as individuals, with needs and desires, strengths and weaknesses, much like their own.

That difficult process begins at the camp here. For each three-week session, Seeds brings together kids chosen by governments on opposite sides of one the world’s bitterest conflicts. This summer began with young people from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The current session has 160 Arab and Israeli kids. Teens from the Balkans are due later this month.

In the camp, borders are erased. Kids from each side of the conflict sleep in the same cabins, eat at the same tables, play on the same soccer and softball teams, and even watch the others’ religious services. Often it is the first time they have ever met anyone from the other side. “It’s kind of funny,” says Lior Bruckner, a lanky 16-year-old Israeli, “that you need to take a plane all the way to the U.S. to meet a Palestinian girl who lives 20 minutes away.”

Four days a week, the kids meet for extended “coexistence sessions,” where they air the grievances and debate the issues that divide their elders. But they may forge deeper connections from the chance to swim or play ball or just hang out without worrying about being ostracized for socializing with the enemy.

New Jersey Net Jason Collins, part of the troupe of basketball pros that Los Angeles-based sports agent Arn Tellem brought to Seeds last week, may have put his finger on a secret to the camp’s success: “It gives kids an opportunity to be kids.” In other words, it lets understanding sneak up on them.

The process isn’t painless. The kids arrive with all the anger, fear and pain of societies that have literally bled each other for decades. Fadi ElSalameen, a 20-year-old Palestinian now studying at an American college under a scholarship arranged by Seeds, remembers arguing constantly with Israeli teens when he first came to the camp.

Growing up near Hebron on the West Bank, the only Israelis he had ever been exposed to were the point of the spear -- “soldiers and settlers.” His anger at their provocations was so great that he couldn’t hear the pain of Israeli teens who had lost friends in suicide bombings.

Gradually, however, exposure changed his perspective. “Today my main concern is not who is being victimized,” he says, “but whether we can get along as Palestinians and Israelis.”

Seeds makes extraordinary efforts to nurture the spark it kindles here. It runs a private Web site where the kids, in impassioned postings, share the pressures of trying to incorporate new feelings into old lives when they return home. It has negotiated scholarships for its alumni at nearly three dozen American colleges. Most ambitiously, it has opened a center in Jerusalem where former campers meet, and try to bring family and friends into the network.

Yet the reality of life in the region inevitably limits these new relationships. Several kids said reunions outside of the Seeds center never panned out, as kids from both sides were reluctant to travel. Rawan Abu Samaha, an 18-year-old Palestinian girl from Jerusalem wearing a baseball cap backward, says her father imposed one condition when he let her come to the camp for the first time last year: She could not visit Israelis in their homes when she returned. “It’s like a dream here,” she says. “But then we get home and we’re back to reality.”

Indeed, events every day in an area under siege challenge the understandings reached here. The grievances these kids hold toward the other side are not just heirlooms passed down from generation to generation; they are renewed for each generation by their own experience.

Even after attending the camp, ElSalameen found himself infuriated when the Israeli army shut down the main road from his town into Hebron -- and then slashed the tires of a taxi driver he knew when he tried to use it. “When you see something like that, it’s just sowing seeds of hate,” he says, eerily and unconsciously inverting the group’s name.

Those sentiments are a measure of the tide Seeds is pushing against. Yet ElSalameen’s time in Maine has given him a contrary thought that softens his anger when he thinks about his taxi driver friend: If Israelis and Palestinians can get along here, why can’t they do it in their own homes? “Here,” he says, “you see it work; you see it can be possible.”

That insight may be the real contribution Seeds of Peace is making. It can’t erase the factors that fuel the conflict in the Mideast, or the Balkans or South Asia. But it allows these kids to envision a life for themselves and their people beyond the conflict. In today’s reality, that’s only a dream. But as these young people grow into careers and influence it is likely to be a dream they will work toward in ways large and small.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at www.latimes.com/brownstein.