A Companion Called Hate Has Torn Their Worlds Apart

In some ways, 12-year-old Lely and 13-year-old Sami are mirror images. She is Israeli; he is Palestinian. They live an hour apart -- she in Tel Aviv, he in Ramallah. Both are privileged, middle-class children, raised by educated, worldly parents, and both have been marked by nearly three years of unrelenting conflict. The Times spent a day with them to see how their worlds have been shaped by the fighting -- and by the prospects for peace.

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RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Morning came in cool winds and white sunlight, and Sami Najjar slipped from his sheets to fix himself a cheese sandwich, thick for strength. The shadows were still long; his mountain bike waited downstairs.

The silver 21-speed with rusting spokes is everything to 13-year-old Sami -- the edges of his universe are traced by its path. All summer long, the boys have clattered off at daylight and panted home at sunset. On Thursday they had a plan: They’d go to the edge of town, farther than Sami had ever ridden.

Even though gunfire in the street rattled Sami awake the night before, his mother has declared the intifada over. That means that, for the first time in nearly three years, Sami and his sister can leave the neighborhood without worrying, too much, that the town will become a war zone and that they will be stranded in the streets when Israeli soldiers impose a curfew.

By the time Sami got to the curb, Tamer Salen, a longtime friend whose curls were frozen stiff with styling gel, was ready. Together they waited for a third boy. Sami slipped a salmon pink mobile phone from his pocket, glanced up and down the street and glared.

“Nobody keeps appointments,” he said, dialing. “We’ve been waiting for an hour!” he groused into the phone; in fact, it had been five minutes.

A boy with dimpled cheeks and limbs so lanky he resembles a colt, Sami is wealthier, and more Westernized, than most Palestinians. He and his friends sport slumped Tommy Hilfiger jeans and spray Boss cologne onto their necks. Sami is the proud proprietor of a single cigar, which he is allowed to admire, but not to smoke. He has Nike sneakers, a poster of Britney Spears alongside his computer and a thick silver bracelet with his initials engraved in English -- “It’s prettier than Arabic,” Sami said.

Sami wasn’t raised to hate Jews -- but he does. His father works as a technician in an Israeli hospital; his mother is a banker. They went to dinner parties with Jewish friends when Sami was younger. Those were the heady days of the Oslo peace accords, when fashionable Israelis danced in Ramallah’s jazz clubs and well-heeled Palestinians frolicked on Herzliya beaches.

Those days are long gone. Sami’s family barely talks to the old Jewish friends anymore; Sami’s mother admits that she has come to “hate them.” Her son has lived his short life just a few minutes’ drive from the Jewish state, but it might as well be the other side of the ocean.

“They all have guns. They’re all soldiers and settlers,” Sami said. “We used to think they were just people, like us, but now I look at them as the enemy.”

From school, television and conversation, he has come to regard the Israelis as invaders who have come from around the world to swell the ranks of a nation at the expense of the Palestinians. “They take our things, our homes, our trees. They steal our land and our history, and then they tell their children it’s their house, their tree.

“They think it’s their land. They want to take it from us. And they think we’re the problem! We believe it’s our land. It’s going nowhere.”

Sami thinks suicide bombings are a fine idea. “Because it scares them,” he said. “Anyway, we don’t kill that many of them -- they kill many more of us.”

If his parents struggle with nuanced political dilemmas, Sami’s view is uncomplicated. “They’re one thing,” he said, “and we’re something else.”

On the dizzying hills of Ramallah his friends are fast, but Sami is the fastest. The streets swam past -- cliff, house, pavement, mosque. The boys rode to the city’s edge, scanned the shaded rocks for snakes and sat down in an olive grove. The arrival was a long-awaited feat, but what next? Sami, ever restless, leaped back to his feet. “Come on -- you want to stay forever?”

“There isn’t very much for them, they don’t even have nice things to think about,” Sami’s mother would say later. “They are trying very hard to make the best of things, but they are growing up too fast.”

By “things,” she meant that Sami and his friends have spent the latter part of their childhood hemmed into their neighborhoods by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank -- that they have been frightened by fighting so often that fear has been braided into their characters, and that their world has shrunk dramatically. To pass the long summer days, the boys make kites and play computer games. They prowl alleys and orchards. They watch James Bond films. The mobile phones are more than a luxury -- their parents are nervous every time they walk out the door.

Summer wasn’t always so cloistered. The Najjars used to drive to the Israeli seaside, to walk along the sand and cool their sweat. The family took trips to Spain, to that country’s Canary Islands and to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

These days, the family doesn’t dare venture 45 minutes down the road, through a string of Israeli army checkpoints, to visit Sami’s aging grandfather in the West Bank city of Nablus. “It’s easier to get to Dubai now,” Sami said. He hasn’t seen his grandfather in three years.

He still gets angry when he remembers the days -- it happened twice, residents say -- when Israeli soldiers crashed into his apartment building, yelling orders in Arabic and kicking the doors open. They corralled the families into a single flat and turned the building into an overnight army base. They left the beds mussed, the belongings rifled, the bathrooms wet from soldiers’ showers.

Sami remembers the day gunshots were fired in the direction of his grandmother’s house, and the time a missile crashed into the seventh-grade classroom at his school. He has come to know the beat of helicopter blades and the roar of F-16s in the sky. He has seen tanks growl through the streets while he and his sister cowered in the bedroom they share, debating whether they would be better protected from shelling if they crouched on the floor.

“I’m used to it now,” Sami said with adolescent bravado. It’s his older sister who has nightmares, he said, not he. There was one day, he confessed, when “it was like a war.” There were helicopters, airplanes and shells exploding like popcorn.

“That night I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had bad dreams,” he said, gazing down into the bars of his bicycle.

Years ago, his father gave him advice for the streets. If you see a soldier, don’t run, he said. Stop and talk. If you don’t hurt them, then, one hopes, they won’t hurt you.

Sami thinks his father’s suggestion is impractical. “It’s better to run away,” he said, “as fast as you can.”

Adrift in streets blasted empty by the July sun, the boys came to the usual problem: Even though they’d been to the edge of town and back, there was still nowhere in particular to stop. They pedaled uphill, to a park that was smaller than many American living rooms. There were two olive trees, two swings and a seesaw. The Japanese government paid for this stamp of earth; the yin and yang are inlaid on the cement by the gate.

The boys straddled their bikes in the shade. The sky stretched brilliant overhead; the rocky hills smudged off toward a blue horizon. Music spilled from an apartment. Sami brightened. “Shakira!” he exclaimed, and hummed a few bars.

Sami is better versed in pop stars than politics. He knows, of course, who Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat is, and considers Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a “butcher.”

But he has never heard of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen. “Abu Mazen? Abu Mazen? I don’t think I’ve talked to him before. Who is he again?” Sami tightened his eyebrows in embarrassment, stared at the dirt. “Is he one of those governors or something?”

“No!” Tamer groaned. “It’s the one who goes because Arafat isn’t allowed.”

“Oh,” Sami said.

“The one trying to implement the road map,” Tamer said, showing off.

“Oh,” Sami said, and changed the subject. “Let’s get out of here.”

At Skippy’s hamburger shop, Sami ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke, and perched at a silver table that refracted the afternoon light like the underside of his favorite Eminem CD.

“Look,” he said softly -- the colors of the Palestinian flag flowed on the side of his soda; it was a commemorative can marking the fifth anniversary of Coca-Cola bottling in the Palestinian territories. Sami ran a finger over the red, black, white and green.

“A state is a good idea for us, if it’s really going to happen,” he said. “If things get better here, maybe I would stay. But I dream about going to Germany. I think I’d like it there -- a friend of my father showed me some pictures. It looked nice.”

At the end of the summer, Tamer’s family is to move to Canada. The boys don’t know when they’ll see each other again. Study hard, Sami’s parents tell him. Don’t get trapped on this land -- but don’t give it up either.

Back at the apartment, Sami’s mother waited. Maha Najjar is a slender woman with carefully painted eyes, a tailored skirt and a tidy bob. She spoke fluent English and ran a manicured hand over Sami’s sweaty hair. “It’s so hard for the children,” she said, watching her son’s face. “Even 3-year-olds -- they see a Jew and they pick up stones. They don’t even think.”

Sami and Tamer were squirming again. They wanted to go to the Greek Orthodox club, where they shoot baskets on a scabby lot. Go ahead, Sami’s mother told them. “You can’t try to control them too much. You can’t pressure them,” she said as the boys leaped toward the door.

“The intifada is over,” she said, as if to reassure herself. “It’s finished.”

Sami doesn’t think so; he clicked his tongue scornfully.

“It’s just begun,” he said.