Mideast Violence Uproots a Youthful Dream of Peace

In the dark and silent Seeds of Peace center, where Israeli and Palestinian teens socialized together daily a few months ago, staffer Huwaida Arraf has little to do these days other than scan Web sites for the latest death toll in the Israeli-Palestinian violence.

“Every day I check the list of martyrs, and every day I’m hoping that it’s not someone I know,” said Arraf, a Palestinian.

Arraf’s worst fears were realized once already, early in the clashes that began Sept. 28. Assil Asleh, an Israeli Arab who was a popular leader in the conflict-resolution program, was shot to death during a demonstration. Wearing his green Seeds of Peace T-shirt when he died, Asleh became an instant symbol for many Israelis and Palestinians of their shattered hopes.

Some of the best and brightest young people in both communities have been through the Seeds of Peace program, competing for the right to represent their people in what for most was their first extensive contact with “the other.” The idea was to build relationships among future leaders of Israeli and Palestinian society.

But today, Seeds’ young members find themselves on the front lines of a violent conflict that threatens to sweep away all that the program stood for.

More than 12 weeks into fighting that has claimed more than 325 lives, Seeds is in trouble--as is nearly every organization that has tried since the 1993 Oslo peace accords to foster grass-roots relations between Israelis and Palestinians. The personal contacts such programs promoted have withered as two societies pull apart into hostile camps.

There are still organizations on the Israeli far left that send volunteers to help Palestinians harvest olives, to distribute food to people living under curfew or simply to show solidarity. But they are few, and Palestinians regard their efforts with mixed emotions.

“We welcomed the Jews, we are happy that they come to show solidarity, but it creates a security problem for us,” said Hussam Daoud, council chief in the West Bank village of Hares, where Israeli activists helped pick olives last month. “We don’t know who are these Jews. People don’t feel secure about them being here.”

The teenagers who participated in Seeds have been hit hard by the breakdown of relations. In the program, they visited each other’s homes, partied together, took trips. Now, many no longer speak to each other, and some can only exchange bitter recriminations via e-mail.

“This goes out to Rita and to everyone who thinks like her,” wrote Amer, a Palestinian living in a refugee camp, in an e-mail sent to Seeds participants last month. “The intifada will continue unless your government will DO SOMETHING different than killing people. . . . I do go throw rocks and other ‘killing stuff,’ but at the same time I want peace, just peace. . . . I guess this is all I can say.”

Nadav Greenberg, a 17-year-old Israeli and graduate of the program, said he still e-mails and telephones Palestinian friends, but the exchanges are often difficult.

“Initially, there was a lot of confusion and anger and disappointment,” Greenberg said. “Our daily Internet newsletter was filled with a lot of angry stuff and people frustrated by the situation. But what amazed me was that even the Palestinians who sent angry letters cared enough to write.”

Some Palestinians concluded that Seeds gave them a falsely positive image of Israelis. Najib Makhlouf is one of them. The 16-year-old disc jockey who wears fashionably baggy clothes and a large silver crucifix on a chain around his neck lives in the West Bank village of Beit Jala, a graceful collection of stone houses and churches on hillsides just south of Jerusalem.

Four months before the current intifada began, Makhlouf was delighted when an Israeli high school class booked the Beit Jala disco where he works and danced the night away to the hypnotic music called trance.

Now he and his terrified family spend most nights huddled in the stairwell of their apartment building as Israeli attack helicopters and tanks fire into the village in retaliation for Palestinian gunfire on the nearby Jewish community of Gilo. His girlfriend’s father was killed in one such attack. His grandparents’ home was badly damaged in another. His 2-year-old brother screams whenever the shooting starts.

“When Israelis from Seeds called me after this started, they made me so angry,” Makhlouf said. “They said, ‘We need protection.’ I stopped taking their calls. They talked sense in camp, but now they talk nonsense. Seeds wasn’t reality, it was just words. Now I see the truth.”

Seeds of Peace was founded by American journalist and author John Wallach in 1993 and has since hosted 1,200 students between the ages of 14 and 17 at summer camps held in Maine.

Seeds is funded by the U.S. government and private donors. The governments of participating nations select delegations of students, which have included both the elites of Arab and Israeli society and teenagers from Jewish settlements and Palestinian refugee camps.

“Never before have our kids been put in a situation like this,” said Adam Shapiro, director of the Seeds of Peace center in East Jerusalem. “They have taken it harder as a group and have been caught off-guard. The shock they have felt may have been greater than [for] other people.”

The longer the fighting goes on, Shapiro said, the harder it will be for the teens to maintain their links, though he hopes the program will hold trauma counseling if and when the violence ends.

“These people feel isolated now,” Shapiro said. “People in their communities so easily fell into the old thought patterns.” Israelis and Palestinians who participated in coexistence groups have been taunted, even threatened, within their own societies for consorting with the enemy.

Organizations that promote Israeli-Palestinian dialogue have never been part of the mainstream in either society. Even after the Oslo peace accords were signed, contact remained largely superficial, confined mostly to business ties and negotiations between leaders. But several groups did try to touch on the real issues that divide the two sides and break down stereotypes.

“I look back nostalgically to the warmth of the relationships we had before this happened,” said Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom. He is the field director for Rabbis for Human Rights, a 12-year-old organization of about 100 Israeli rabbis who have worked on human rights issues with Palestinians inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The group’s activities are on hold, Milgrom said, and his friendships with Palestinians have been reduced to occasional phone calls.

“You get on the phone, you are at a loss for words,” he said. “You can’t compare the situation you’re in, living in West Jerusalem, and the situation they are in, sitting there expecting another volley of shots.”

The work of coexistence groups has also been hindered by actions of the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.

Early on in the current conflict, Palestinian nongovernmental organizations, with the backing of the Palestinian Authority, banned contacts with most Israeli groups promoting coexistence. The Israeli military’s closure of areas in the West Bank and Gaza also limited interaction.

Faced with the reality that contact between their Israeli and Palestinian participants could be dangerous, Seeds of Peace canceled a full calendar of events for the winter and spring. It is unclear whether Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and other Arab states will send delegations to the next Seeds of Peace summer camp, Shapiro said.

For now, the staff serves as a sounding board for confused, angry and grieving program graduates. It telephones Palestinians whose towns and villages are under Israeli military siege or bombardment, and counsels Israeli Jews who are angered and frightened by the rage they have seen in the streets and heard in their Palestinian friends’ voices.

“I know that some of our kids now feel it would have been easier for them if they had not gone through Seeds of Peace,” Arraf said.

Abdel Salam Khayyat certainly does. “Oh, yes, it would have been much, much, much easier for me,” said the 19-year-old pharmacology student at An Najah University in Nablus. Since the fighting erupted, Khayyat said, he has lost Assil Asleh and another close friend, who was standing near Khayyat when he was shot to death during a clash with Israeli troops in that West Bank town. Along with many other Palestinians active in Seeds, Khayyat is taking a time out from the organization and contact with most Israelis he knows through it. But he cannot unlearn the experiences he had during four years in the program, he said.

“I cannot forget something fantastic like Seeds of Peace,” he said. “But I spent four years with Seeds and 19 years with Palestine. My people love me and I love them. Every day, I’m seeing Jihad, my friend, before my eyes and thinking about Assil dying in a Seeds of Peace T-shirt. It is a huge conflict inside me.”

Before he went to his first Seeds summer camp in Maine at 16, Khayyat said, “the only Israelis I knew of were soldiers and settlers. If a bombing happened inside Israel, I didn’t think that maybe a friend of mine has been killed.”

But at camp, after nearly going home during the first week “because I could not imagine myself sleeping, speaking and eating with Israelis who are killing my people,” Khayyat found himself arguing with and eventually befriending Israelis. Even in the current crisis, he said, there are two Israeli members of Seeds with whom he stays in touch.

“Call Inbal,” he urged. “She’s a good friend. She is a very good friend. And she’s a settler.”

Inbal Shacked, 17, has lived in the West Bank settlement of Beit Arye since she was a toddler. Ariel Sharon, now leader of the right-wing Likud Party, was the driving force behind establishment of the settlement on a hilltop with a commanding view of the coastal plain and nearby Palestinian villages. The leafy community with its red-roofed villas is the only home she’s ever known, Shacked said. Until she joined Seeds, she never gave much thought to how its residents were viewed by her Palestinian neighbors.

“Before Seeds, I didn’t know much about politics, but I was a supporter of the Likud and I believed my way was the right way,” she said. “I didn’t call Palestinians Palestinians; I called them Arabs. I didn’t look at them as people who suffer but as terrorists who want to kill me and who are against my people. I went through a huge change in Seeds.”

She shares Khayyat’s confusion, and she too thinks life would have been simpler had she not volunteered when a teacher asked two years ago whether anyone in class was interested in politics, spoke English and might want to meet Palestinians.

“The last weeks have been so difficult,” she said. “On the one side, Seeds of Peace is saying, ‘We’re still here; you have Palestinian friends.’ On the other side, I am an Israeli and 36 Israelis have died. But so many Palestinians have died. I know that we must defend ourselves, but I ask myself: They are coming with stones and we are coming with tanks. Is it possible? Is it logical? Is it fair?”

Shacked said she called Khayyat after the violence erupted. She was taken aback when he told her that he had thrown stones at Israeli soldiers.

“I thought that I couldn’t call him anymore,” she said. Instead, she turned to a Seeds counselor, who suggested she put her feelings in writing as an e-mail to her friend. Then one day she found a short message from Khayyat on the screen of her cell phone, the way they used to message each other in happier times.

“He said, ‘There’s another Day of Rage tomorrow,’ so I messaged back, ‘Take care, where are you?’ ” Since then, they frequently message each other, and have spoken on the phone.

“I try not to talk too much about the conflict,” Shacked said. “I think I should leave it out of my discussions with him.”

Whatever happens, she is convinced that her bond with Khayyat will survive.

“He is the Palestinian me,” she said. “He didn’t look at me as a settler or as an Israeli, but as someone who feels just the same as him. He was the one who understood me the most. I’m sure that our friendship is stronger than anything; he touched me in my heart.”

Even when she gets angry at the Palestinians and thinks her government should do more to quell the violence, Shacked said, she thinks of Khayyat and wonders how she could go on if he became the next Palestinian victim.

Maybe, she said, “Seeds is the most crazy thing to believe in right now, but it might also be the only thing to believe in, the only pure and true thing, the only thing that can help.”