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Building bridges for peace

Mideast teens span religious, cultural divides

James B. Meadow, Rocky Mountain News

Published August 12, 2006 at midnight

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STEAMBOAT SPRINGS - The sky above is an impossible shade of blue. The clouds look like spun cotton. The breeze that saunters by is more caress than wind. The looming mountains are fortifying and protective. The voices that coalesce to sing Down By The Riverside are sweet and joyous.

And yet for the girls, war always lurks nearby. A lifetime of war. A future brimming with war.

A war that always was and always will be can make even the softest heart hard and filled with hate, but even Klil was not prepared.

"Maybe I was naive to not know it," says the girl from Kibbutz Geva, "but they came with so much anger at us and had so much hate. I guess I should have known, but it was like a big bubble around me popped when I saw all the hate."

Klil is 17. She is Israeli. She is one of the 52 teenaged girls, Jewish girls, Muslim girls, Christian girls - many from Israel and the West Bank, some from the U.S. - who arrived in Colorado two weeks ago to be part of Building Bridges for Peace, a Denver-based program that hopes to create small ripples that will slowly counter the tide of hate and mistrust and ignorance that separates so many in the Middle East.

Sitting next to Klil on the grass, sitting so close she is touching her, is Yafa, 16, who lives in Ramahal, on the West Bank. Yafa is glad they are touching. She is "really proud to have an Israeli friend," something "I never thought possible before."

When she arrived, Yafa was uncertain about what to expect. She was sure that "I have too much angry to talk to Israelis." Her grandmother did not want her to go. You cannot trust them, she told Yafa.

Internal transformation

Melodye Feldman, founder and executive director of BBfP, has heard this kind of talk before. She knows that some of the girls receive e-mails from home saying, "Remember your people."

She knows that for some girls, merely coming to America represents a risk, a risk she hopes to minimize by only allowing their first names to be mentioned.

This year, however, the situation is even harder. The eruption of the Israeli-Hezbollah war has ratcheted up the tension; old fears get a fresh face. One Palestinian girl learned there had been a rocket attack on a village next to hers. Was anyone she knew killed? She didn't know. And this very morning, this beautiful morning, Klil learned a soldier from her kibbutz had been killed. How does she feel about it? A quick shake of her head, eyes holding back tears, banishes the question.

Given this, after 13 years - plus two weeks - Feldman has also seen how hard it is for some girls "to admit they can find compassion with the other side. That would be a betrayal or disloyalty to their group."

But Feldman also knows that even if some girls cannot publicly admit it, they can feel it. And "that is how we see the transformations begin to take place - internally."

Of course, these transformations take time.

"You don't just plant a seed and expect a forest to grow in two weeks," she says. "You wait. Some saplings come up. Some survive; some don't. But nothing happens overnight."

Minds pried open

To nurture those potential saplings, BBfP takes the girls up to the mountains for two weeks.

This year, Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs is the site. Two girls to a room, almost always girls from different backgrounds and beliefs - Israeli and Palestinian, Christian and Muslim, Muslim and Jew.

Then there are exercises and activities - singing, hiking, dancing, pottery, soccer, literally touching the other's pulse points, having to answer questions the way they think the other would - all designed to begin chiseling away walls.

And then there are the word association activities, where the girls are shown a word and told to write their response to it and put that response in a paper bag where it becomes public but anonymous.

Here is where the eyes - and sometimes minds - get pried open. Here is where, for the word Judaism, some wrote, "my life," "the most thing I hate," "balance," "terrorism." Here is where for Islam, some wrote, "life," "war isn't holy." Here is where for Palestine, some wrote, "just a dream," "weak," "the mother of the world," "take it. It yours." Here is where for Israel, some wrote, "doesn't exist," "a strong country," "blood suckers," "home, my country, complicated."

Here is where Noga began to really experience the hatred some Palestinians felt toward her people. And here is where she began a discovery.

"I always thought Hezbollah was a killing machine. But then you understand that where a lot of the girls come from, they don't have an army to fight for them. A girl said to me, 'I don't want innocents, a 5-year-old child, to be killed. But I want someone to fight for me.' And now maybe at least I understand it a little better."

Just as Yafa understands that "now, not all Israeli girls agree 100 percent with what their government and army is doing." She also knows that even though she knows that some of the Israeli girls will be going into the army shortly after they return, "They go because they must, not because they want to."

Dalal, too, understands a little more. When she arrived two weeks ago, she percolated with rage against Israeli soldiers who she said robbed her family and shot at innocent people. She said she hoped the program would "Maybe change my idea about Jews."

And has it?

"It did change my idea about Jews a little bit," she says, adding, "but not all. I can't let it go that easy because I'm still suffering. We're still suffering."

But then she looks over at Kahal, an Israeli girl who has become her friend. And because of Kahal, "I will take back with me that not all the Israelis are bad. If there are girls like Kahal, then there must be more of them like her."

What future do I have?

Even if publicly admitting compassion for another is too much, the late-night discussions that Feldman knows go on privately, long past curfew, is a small victory.

So is the sight of Reem, a Palestinian, absent-mindedly but affectionately stroking the ponytail of Ofer, an Israeli. Or the way Dima invites Klil to lean back on her during a group discussion.

And if it is true that, yes, the girls tend to coalesce along religious and ethnic lines when they do eat their meals or wander through town on ice cream and shopping trips, at least some are aware of that. Some can say, as one Israeli girl did in a discussion group, "When we must do it (intermingle), we do it well. But when it's free time, we don't do it so well. At lunch, everybody sits with the people it is easier to be with. We don't do it when it's hard, and we must learn to do that better."

Feldman can't help but smile when she hears that. But she also can't help slowly shaking her head when she thinks about what will happen when the girls fly back to their homes Sunday, back to war, back to madness.

Perhaps she is thinking like Klil, who says with worry in her voice, "It will be like another bubble around me is popped. Dead bodies on both sides again," while, meanwhile, "here are Yafa and me, two teenage girls who became friends and want to meet again, but probably we can't."

"The situation in the Middle East is casting a pall over everything," says Feldman. "There's a feeling among them of, 'What is the future? What future do I have?' "

Feldman knows she can't answer that, knows that all the program can do is try to keep the girls connected who want to stay in touch. Try to build on the past two weeks. Try to nudge those transformations further along.

She also knows that "we have to keep this whole thing about reality. We can't make promises to these kids that we can't keep. I can't tell them that when they go home, everything will be OK because it damn sure won't be."

Then Feldman looks over at a group of girls sitting and eating and laughing together under that fairyland sky and a small smile appears.

Maybe instead of the wind what she hears is Yafa saying, "I discover Israeli girls hurt, too. War is bad for everybody. Really, I want to build my future with lots of peace." Or Noga saying, "I was not optimistic before, but now I have hope. I have the power to influence the people I'm around."

And maybe what she is seeing isn't a group of girls weaned on war, but the birth of a forest.

or 303-892-2606

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