Arab, Israeli Youths Share Skepticism About Peace : Outlook: Continuing violence fuels more wariness than hope about what Palestinian self-rule may bring.

It was a sweet idea. Excited about the promise of peace, producers of the “I Care” program on educational television decided to bring together Israeli and Palestinian high school students to share their feelings about the hopeful new era.

But within minutes, it slid to this:

“Personally, I feel very afraid,” declared Yifat, a girl from a Jewish settlement. “The Palestinian police will be made up of murderers and terrorists who have been released from prison. The minute that our government gives weapons to murderers who will roam the streets, they’re putting our lives at risk.”

Lina, a Gazan, railed back: “That’s a racist approach, to say that all Arabs are murderers. That’s how you promote hatred against Arabs. You imagine that I’m a terrorist and all Arabs are terrorists. That’s something that was planted in you from childhood and you accept it. Your family persuaded you that all Arabs are murderers and terrorists.”

In other parts of the world, young people wear peace medallions and serve as a force for dewy-eyed idealism. Here, they serve as champions in their peoples’ struggles--Israelis in the army, Palestinians in nationalist protests and violence. They see little latitude for wishful thinking.

And so the Sept. 13 peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization has brought new hope but mainly a fresh gust of skepticism from the Israeli and Palestinian young. They volunteer few new plans and dreams about life in a peaceful region, expressing far more wariness about what happens now.

“I was very torn,” Jerusalem high school student Asaf Tsimerman, a ponytailed youth with an earnest brow, said of his reaction to the agreement. “I was very happy because it was a historic breakthrough, and on the other hand I felt fear because no one knows how it’s going to develop and where it’s going to take us.”

Palestinian youngsters went joy-riding in truckloads waving the PLO flag after PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on limited Palestinian self-rule. But now, said Mohammed Elayyan, 26: “Our people do not believe in theories anymore. We believe in reality. We’ve been hearing promises and speeches for a long time now. So now we are only ready to believe what we see with our own eyes.”

For Elayyan, owner of a small store in the West Bank town of Ramallah, it was a stretch to imagine what he will do if peace and a Palestinian state become reality. Maybe expand his business?

“I’m a part of the young generation that sacrificed,” he said. “I’m 26 years old. I’ve been going in and out of prison for eight years”--jailed for resisting Israeli authorities.

“I didn’t go to university. I couldn’t finish my education. If there was no (Israeli) occupation, maybe I would have gotten a degree and I would have built myself something just like everyone else in the world. But because of the occupation, in eight years I didn’t achieve anything.

“I belong to the Palestinian people,” he added. “Not on one day of my life did I feel deeply happy. Because every time I started building a dream, it crashed on the wall of occupation.”

Polls among Israeli youth show less resentment about how the conflict has affected their lives--most are eager to serve in the army. But distrust and hostility run just as deep as among Palestinians.

In the largest survey ever done on high school students in Israel, the Israel Institute for Military Studies found that 40% of those polled said they hated all, most or some Arabs--up from 32% in 1974. In some segments of the youth population, the Arab-hating contingent ran as high as 75%.

“This was very alarming,” said Reuven Gal, former chief psychologist of the Israeli army and now head of the institute. The survey was done in 1989, but he said there was no reason to think anything has changed. “It’s a red light.”

Hatred has never been a strong motivating factor for Israeli soldiers before, he said, but it is growing, evoked by the generalized fear that afflicted Israelis during the intifada , the Palestinian rebellion against the occupation.

Gal predicted that, if the peace agreement works out, hatred and fear will drop quickly. “I believe that the human creature, the human species, is an enormously flexible entity--we can change our attitudes and perceptions very drastically in a very short time,” he said.

But even among youth, the most flexible humans of all, that change does not appear to be coming yet.

For obvious reasons. Even among the most idealistic--the leftist Israeli youth and moderate Palestinians who have been meeting in encounter groups to try to find common ground--the continuing violence, which has abated little since the agreement, weakens their faith.

“The intifada stopped and kids are still being killed. We’re not better off now even though we have a peace treaty,” 10th-grader Adam Strier said. “There was euphoria, and we all felt peace was going to come and we were going to live together in peace and harmony. But now we see that there are no less difficulties than ever.”

It was a solemn, pained meeting on a recent Sunday of the Peace Now group that brings together Jerusalem high school kids and their counterparts from Ramallah. The week before, Rami Razzawi, a 16-year-old student who had flown kites with them in a joint event the month before, had been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers while he was throwing stones.

Fifteen of the Palestinian group members boycotted that meeting because of Razzawi’s death. Amr Nasser, 17, said they were disillusioned that “the killing had not stopped,” but “I decided to come because I think that we must stop the killing, and that can be achieved by talk.”

The Israeli educational system believes the same and runs programs aimed at Jewish-Arab understanding. It rushed out two special pamphlets for teachers on how to deal with the peace talks in class. But the programs are fighting an uphill battle against daily news of attacks and counterattacks.

A class called “Children Teaching Children” at the Givat Hayim kibbutz in northern Israel showed how deep the fear and hatred go even among sheltered sixth-graders.

In an exercise called “Hassan and the Monster”--meant to make the children more open to people different from them--a young boy confronts a monster, only to find that he is as frightening to the monster as the monster is to him. The children caught on quickly to the humanist line they are meant to take.

“That can happen with a boy too, that his appearance is really frightening,” one said.

“Among ugly people, we would look ugly,” another offered.

“If you’re different, you can still be friends,” tried a third.

Their teacher, Hila Ben-Porat, said the children have reached the stage where “they can say there are monsters among the Arabs but not all Arabs are monsters.”

But when they’re out of class and clustering in the courtyard, they admit they know perfectly well where all this sensitivity-raising is going. They are not sure they are buying.

Maayan Ofer, 11, a blonde with not a hint of shyness, said that when she saw the signing of the Israeli-PLO agreement on television, “I thought maybe it’s not good because I thought Arafat won’t keep it.”

Liron Shtern, also 11, said the accord “doesn’t seem so real if they keep killing.” When the group meets with Arab children as part of the program, she said, “I want to ask them what they think about the Arabs who kill. But maybe it will make them mad.”

Gal said the high level of fear and political awareness comes in part from a striking statistic: About 63% of Israeli high school students expect there to be a war in the region within the next five years. And they feel they must gird themselves for it.

At Bir Zeit University in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian youth also expect and even call for conflict. A coalition of Islamic and nationalist candidates opposed to the peace agreement won a slim majority in student council elections last week. A sign in the student cafeteria proclaims: “The administration of the Palestinian autonomy won’t be able to shut down the voice of our bullets. They won’t be able to protect the settlers.”

Adib, a 23-year-old leader of the Islamic bloc that claims to have the support of about one-third of the university, argued, “For us Palestinians to continue struggling against the occupation is 100 times better than signing the agreement.”

His eyes glowing with fervor above his wispy beard, Adib said he does not see the chance for peace as an opportunity to live a better life. “I don’t really consider my personal life that much. If the occupation is not eliminated from all of Palestine, we will never rest,” he said.

Equal fervor abounds among the Israeli youth of the Jewish settlements, who fear they may lose their homes if the final peace arrangement gives back all the occupied territories.

When the agreement was signed, “we felt anger that the people who did it did it at our expense and didn’t care,” said Menorah Katsover, 17, of the Elon Moreh settlement. “We decided we wouldn’t let this happen.”

About 700 students from various settlements gathered for a convention last month to decide how to bring their message to the Israeli public, how to reach the seemingly indifferent young of Tel Aviv and Haifa. They are not against peace, they say, but the agreement is unfair to them. They think the media are prejudiced against them, and they want young people to come visit them and see that they are normal people too.

“Our youth is generally more active than our adults. The old people are tired,” Katsover said. She and her fellow classmates plan to stay on at their settlements, come what may. “Throughout all the generations, Jews died for their country, and I hope it won’t happen. But it may, and it will be the government’s fault,” she said.

Daklah Tsabari, 15, observed: “I’m more extreme than my father. He says if (Palestinian) autonomy comes, he’ll leave, but I’m staying right here.”

Settlement youth are highly political even for Israelis, said Amnon Chever, vice principal of the girls’ religious high school on the settlement of Kedumim.

“They feel a great responsibility for their land,” he said.

Similarly, the most extreme of Palestinian youth tend to come from the crowded refugee camps.

“Every Jewish resident of the state of Israel is in essence an occupier of Gaza and the Galilee,” one girl on the “I Care” show said.

Then there are what some call the Kit-Cat kids, well-off Palestinian youngsters who care more about clothes and trips than about throwing stones. They stand out on the Bir Zeit campus, the exceptions that prove the rule.

“We of course felt very happy about the agreement,” said Nivin Hijazi, 18, on her way to class in designer jeans with an equally well-dressed friend. “We are new students here, and I’d like to study for only five years. Now, with the new situation, there may be no strikes, and we’ll have a better chance to study.”

It is a modest dream--to get through college without strikes turning five years into 10. At this point, it is hard even for the young to dream any bigger.