Arab, Israeli teens promise to spread lessons of coexistence back home

By Stephen Kaufman
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- August 12, 2003, was a day, like so many others in the Middle East, marred by violence between Palestinians and Israelis, with two suicide bombings threatening a shaky cease-fire. But in Washington, voices of co-existence and even friendship between Israeli and Arab teenagers were heard as the second session of the 2003 Seeds of Peace program culminated in a ceremony held in the State Department's Loy Henderson Conference Room.

There, 160 teenagers from Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia, and the United States, once strangers with conflicting political world views, celebrated three weeks together working to transform hatreds and misunderstandings into friendships. At the State Department ceremony, they pledged to carry those sentiments back to their home countries in an effort to transform the Middle East from a region of conflict into a region of peace.

The teenagers spent three weeks at a camp in Maine playing sports, making art, and ultimately learning the views of others and discussing them as part of a program begun in 1993 by Seeds of Peace founder John Wallach. The organization's president, Aaron Miller, formerly a State Department negotiator between Arabs and Israelis, explained that the program is designed to train future leaders to rise above their own societies and seek out the views, fears and aspirations of their adversaries.

All of the 160 participants, said Miller, whether they knew it or not, made a personal choice "to stretch beyond what you thought you might be capable of, to even begin to come to this program."

"[Y]ou make an enormous stretch because you are willing to acknowledge the legitimacy, the identity and the stories of the others. There will be no peace anywhere until partisan conflict generally and honestly can come to terms and grips with the stories of the other," he said.

Ragia, a participant from Egypt, said that in her home country she felt life was moving so fast that "[w]e didn't give ourselves a chance to think and to imagine what the other side's life was like."

Seeds of Peace is "the best school that humanity has ever witnessed," she said. "[W]e don't just cram our heads with knowledge about the other side, ... we widen our perspective and open up to the world around. We share everything, we co-exist and work together as a team."

Amir, a 15-year-old Israeli from Jerusalem, said he was initially reluctant to attend the program, afraid of bitter confrontations with his Arab peers and his own inability to appreciate their views. But as the three weeks passed, he said he found himself "better able to hear them better and to understand what they are saying."

"Before you judge people or a people, you have to hear them out and learn about their point of view and their situation and about them personally. ... Even though we may have disagreed ... we learned to respect each other," said Amir.

One of the American participants, Zach, recounted how at the beginning of the program the eleven members of his coexistence group all held passionate and strong opinions about participants from groups they considered to be enemies. He said it was hard to go from playing sports together outdoors into a room where they would sit down and discuss very delicate issues.

But as one former Jordanian participant commented in a film shown at the event, "[i]f you want to make peace with your enemy, you've got to go to war with yourself."

"Now I realize that he who believes that sunshine is happiness has never danced in the rain," commented Ragia.

Lena, from Palestine, noted that she and her Israeli counterparts had been able to eat, play and sleep together at the camp in Maine. "So if we could co-exist together in a camp for three weeks, why don't we try to co-exist in a country together?" she asked.

Osama from Jordan said the 160 teenagers had "achieved in three weeks what our leaders could not achieve after years."

Secretary of State Colin Powell said the State Department and the Bush administration "will never stop working on the cause of peace" because "we owe it to you," he told the 160 teenagers.

"We owe it to you to give you a better world, a better part of the world than we have seen in these recent years," he said. "And I wish we had fixed it, and I wish we could fix it before you become young leaders and young professionals and young workers and young parents, ... but you have an obligation to prepare yourselves for that day when it becomes yours to do."

"You've got to go talk to your fellow students, talk to your parents, talk to your relatives, become leaders in your community to take this message of peace, to take this message of reconciliation, to take this message of confidence building and restoring trust between people and between nations, take that message back and live it every day in everything you do," said Powell.

David Satterfield, former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, and now a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the State Department in charge of Arab-Israeli Affairs, warned the teenagers that they would now be returning to "a different kind of life."

"You have to go back to a situation which is fraught with peril, with uncertainty, fear and all too often with a sense of prevailing hopelessness. You have to be engines of hope, engines of comfort, engines of reassurance, in the midst of that environment, and that is a very tough challenge," he said.

Satterfield told the participants that they were now a hope for change, both for their American hosts, and their home countries. "If you don't assume this charge, this responsibility, there never is going to be a better future," he said.

He said formal agreements or treaties between adversaries were always important in order to shape the context of the transition from war to peace. But, unlike personal communication and action, they do not "change the hearts and the minds of the people in whose hands will be the success or failure of those formal documents."

Seeds of Peace President Aaron Miller said that conventional diplomacy was not enough to bring lasting peace. He said he had left his position at the State Department convinced that a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace was possible, but nevertheless depended upon "relationships fashioned between individuals."

And the roadmap for Middle East peace?

"I see it before me," Miller said to the teenagers. "You are the roadmap to Arab-Israeli peace."