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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TEL AVIV -- Lely Stadler flips the pages of a well-thumbed copybook filled with curving handwritten Arabic script, searching for the vocabulary words she plans to review before starting eighth-grade classes in September. Arabic, she says, is her favorite subject.

But despite her consuming interest in the language, Lely -- a lively and precocious Israeli girl, only days shy of her 13th birthday -- does not have a single Palestinian friend, and doesn’t think she wants one.

“Of course not all Arabs are bad,” she says, turning now to her computer. She likes to play at least one game before breakfast -- a beginning, an ending, a small dose of electronic certainty -- even before changing out of the faded Betty Boop T-shirt she sleeps in.

“But I hate the ones who are bad,” she continues, with a single swift upward glance. “The ones who attack us. Who always attack us.”

For a child like Lely, hovering on the cusp of adolescence as her country charts an uncertain course between war and peace, the notion of real friendship between Jews and Arabs isn’t so much undesirable as simply unimaginable.

Violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over the last 34 months has consumed nearly a quarter of Lely’s life. Both before and during the intifada, her home city of Tel Aviv has been hit repeatedly by suicide bombings. Lely was born only months before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and her mother nursed her in the family’s “sealed room,” where they huddled nightly during weeks of Iraqi Scud missile attacks aimed at Tel Aviv.

“God knows how it all affected her,” murmurs her mother, Razia, whose own father’s family suffered deaths in the Holocaust.

On a hazy summer’s day, in the light-filled rooftop apartment in the heart of the city where Lely lives with her engineer father, her mother and two sisters -- one older, one younger -- the conflict could hardly seem more distant.

Lely’s room is an eclectic clutter of kid stuff and teen gear -- the computer, of course; a Harry Potter book by the bedside; a Mickey Mouse trash can; a curtain of plastic beads in the doorway; the trumpet she plays in the school band.

With shiny, waist-length brown hair and snapping brown eyes, Lely is pretty and funny and smart.

Born in Tel Aviv, she attends a magnet school for the arts, has an e-mail pen pal in her father’s native Argentina with whom she corresponds in Spanish, and speaks nearly perfect English as well.

Like many kids her age, she has a way of veering between dreaminess and classic teen-age disdain. “Annoying” is one of her favorite words, which she sometimes uses to connote mere irritation, and sometimes to talk about things that frighten her, or upset her in ways she cannot explain.

On this day, Lely is counting up the money she’d earned baby-sitting the week before -- 74 shekels, or about $16. In triumph, she telephones her best friend, Sahar Kaplan.

“We can go shopping,” she informed her. “I’ve got a lot of money.”

Done up like pint-size young adults in hip-grazing jeans and teetering platform shoes, the two of them head for Tel Aviv’s trendiest shopping area, Sheinkin Street. They stop at a fresh-juice bar, buy a pair of inexpensive earrings at a boutique called Moonstone, sign an environmental group’s petition to clean up the country’s beaches. Lely considers a henna tattoo for her shoulder blade.

“It’s just temporary, not a real one,” she says. “Are you kidding? My mom would kill me.”

It’s a life that appears to overflow with privilege, but one that is also constricted by very real fears.

Lely isn’t allowed to take buses -- after all, they might be blown up. An armed security guard watches over her school. She wants to go to a pop concert that evening on the beach. But even in these days of relative calm, crowds are a potential target, and she thinks her parents won’t allow it.

“Which is very annoying,” she says imperiously. But then she adds: “I worry a lot if my big sister ever comes home late, though.”

Lely idolizes her older sister Nufar, who at nearly 16 is only two years away from her mandatory service in the Israeli army. She’s also close to her little sister Nur, who is 8.

Lely was younger than Nur is now when she first became aware of what adults around her called “the situation” -- the conflict with the Palestinians. In between discussing music (she likes Avril Lavigne and 50 Cent) and boys (“The ones my age are very stupid. They’re not at all mature”) she remembers that day.

It was March 4, 1996. Lely, a first-grader, was riding in a car with her mother, Razia, near Tel Aviv’s busy Dizengoff Center. As they approached, there was a huge explosion.

“It was a significant point in her life,” says Razia, who is slender and red-haired, with piercing eyes, slightly turned up at the corners, that she has passed on to all her daughters.

“Since it happened, we don’t pass close to this particular spot. None of us can step near this place where the head of the suicide bomber was rolling on the pavement.”

Later, Lely learned that one of the 13 Israelis killed that day was the father of a classmate.

“Our teachers told us that Ben’s daddy was dead,” she recalled. “We didn’t really understand what it meant.”

A little more than two weeks afterward came another deadly bombing in Tel Aviv. This time, Lely cried less. Now that she’s nearly 13, if she hears a bang that sounds like an explosion, she doesn’t get scared, she says.

“You wait, and if there are no sirens, it’s OK,” she explains, sounding a little bored. “If there are a lot of sirens that keep going on, then it was probably a pigua” -- a terror attack.

Sometimes the situation makes her angry, but she’s not sure what to do about that.

In June 2001, after 21 Israelis, mostly high school students, were killed in a suicide attack on a seaside teen hangout called the Dolphinarium, Lely’s older sister told her that a boy she knew had joined a mob that stormed a nearby mosque afterward.

Asked if she thought that boy had been wrong, Lely only frowns.

But perhaps influenced by her mother, who is active in left-wing causes, Lely is uneasy about what she hears of the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Her older stepbrother, returning from military reserve duty, told how some fellow Israeli soldiers had taken potshots at the rooftop water tanks of Palestinian families. Lely got angry when she heard that.

“How do you know if there’s a terrorist living in the house, or if there are just normal people living there?” she asks. “And how are they going to get any water to drink?”

Ordinary day-to-day contact between Israeli Jews and Palestinians has withered during the last three years, but Lely is still troubled by an encounter nine months ago, when she and her classmates met up by chance with a group of Israeli Arab kids on a field trip to Mt. Carmel, near the port city of Haifa.

“We study Arabic, and they know Hebrew, so we could have talked to them,” she says. “But the kids in my class just said really bad things to them. It wasn’t nice.

“I didn’t say anything bad, but I didn’t try to stop the others either,” she continues. “I don’t know. They were just kids. I mean, they couldn’t hurt us. They couldn’t blow us up.”

Dark humor is something that many Israelis learn young, and Lely is no exception.

She particularly likes the Israeli comic Yatzpan, who specializes in political satire. Doing her own imitation of a Yatzpan bit about Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of the militant group Hamas, she laughs so hard she can barely speak.

The music of a Hebrew-language rap group called Subliminal also resonates with her. Turning to her computer, Lely cues up a favorite song, translating the lyrics as she goes.

“Tactics, politics, there’s no ethics,” she chants. “Shaking hands with smiles all fake.”

“That’s what I feel myself,” she says, switching off the music. “That all the handshakes and the smiles are fake. If someone says there’s peace, I don’t know if I can trust them.”

Later, even before asking her parents, Lely makes up her own mind not to go to the evening beach concert.

Not far from where the event was to be held, on the city’s seaside promenade, a young Israeli man had been stabbed to death a few days earlier by an Arab assailant. Lely mentions that attack; it scared her, she says.

“Everyone would prefer to live in a world where you don’t have to worry all the time,” she says, eyes downcast. “Also, it’s so annoying because a kid like me cannot do anything to change it.

“But I believe that sometime things will change here -- I hope.”