In the middle of a hot summer day in Ramat Ef’al in central Israel, a group of Israeli teenagers sit quietly in a seminar room as they follow a presentation. The slides cover the military occupation of the West Bank, the siege of the Gaza Strip and settler violence against Palestinians. The seminar leader stops on a slide about October 7th, when Hamas carried out its attack on southern Israel, and she discusses how the day was covered by Arab media.
The presentation has been prepared by the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a group of Israeli and Palestinian families who lost loved ones in the region’s nearly 80-year-long conflict – now in a bloody new phase as the Gaza war rages on. The session in Ramat Ef’al is designed to prepare the young Israelis for a summer camp in Cyprus with Palestinian teenagers, after Israeli authorities denied permission for the peace camp to be held in Israel this year.
The group of Palestinian teenagers taking part in the camp received a similar session in the West Bank on the Israeli narrative, covering the history of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the extent to which military service is now a cornerstone of Jewish-Israeli identity, among other topics.
Many Palestinians and Arabs don’t believe in the Holocaust because they don’t want to have sympathy for “their enemy”, says Arab Aramin (30), a Palestinian co-ordinator for the camp, on a phone call from East Jerusalem.
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For many of the teenagers, it will be their second or third time taking part in the camp, but some of the Israelis are not returning this year. One Israeli teenager from the camp “abandoned his views” after October 7th, says Yuval Harif, who took part in the camp twice before.
The 15-year-old Israeli is connected on social media with Palestinian teenagers from the previous camp. On October 7th, some of them uploaded “pictures and videos of dead [Israeli] soldiers with laughing emojis”, says Harif. “It was hard to watch because they were friends with us.”
Another Israeli teenager, Meshi Taglicht (15), adds: “We don’t know if they were just posting because their friends were all posting these videos or they genuinely felt that way.”
The Cyprus camp
To reach the camp in Cyprus, the Israelis travelled via Ben Gurion Airport, while the Palestinians crossed the border into Jordan and took a flight from Amman. For almost nine days, the 40 teenagers went on hikes in the Troodos Mountains and swam at the beach, while engaging in often difficult discussions with each other. Some of the Israelis spoke a little Arabic, while none of the Palestinians spoke Hebrew, so the groups discussed sensitive topics in their second language, English.
In dialogue sessions the Israeli teenagers shared their fears for family members serving with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza. “I felt like [the Palestinians] were bored and not listening,” says Harif, who, with parental consent, messaged The Irish Times during the camp. “It’s really draining, but I feel like it’s rewarding because I know I’m not sitting and just ignoring everything. I am here to learn.”
During the camp, Palestinians frequently showed Israelis videos on their phones of the homes and families in Gaza devastated by Israeli rocket strikes.
One Israeli revealed that her cousin had been killed while serving with the IDF in Gaza. She said her family was sad and that her cousin had been defending Israel. In response, one of the Palestinian teenagers said: “I don’t feel bad about your cousin. He lost his life there because he’s a criminal, and he went to [Gaza to] kill kids.”
The two teenagers both “got mad at each other”, says camp co-ordinator Aramin, but after that day, they became “not necessarily close, but more open with each other”. He says they hugged when they were leaving.
The Palestinian teenagers, who are not named due to security concerns, often ask the Israelis if they will join the military. In a previous camp, one of the Palestinians told Taglicht that her aunt was beaten to death by a policewoman in an Israeli prison. “She said: if there was a good person there, they would have stopped her, and [her aunt] would still be alive,” says Taglicht. “We try to explain to them that we want to join the IDF because we want to make a change. The IDF is not going to disappear.”
On the second day of the camp, Aramin revealed that his nine-year-old sister Abir was killed in 2007 by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier. The story forms one of two strands of the novel Apeirogon by Irish writer Colum McCann. He wrote about Aramin’s father, Bassam, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli whose daughter Smadar (10) was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber.
Aramin told the camp group about his journey as a teenager who wanted to take “revenge” against Israelis before learning about the Holocaust and visiting a concentration camp in Germany, finally “making peace” with himself and becoming the last member of his family to join the Parents Circle, seven years after his sister was killed.
“We don’t have the same justice and we don’t have the same rights [as Israelis],” says Aramin. To many of them, he is “a terrorist”, “a criminal” or “someone who wants to kill them”.
He says Palestinians have two options: “The first one is very easy, which is to die, and the second option [is to talk]. It’s really difficult to talk to your occupier, or your enemy, or your jailer. But it’s very easy to die, just grab a knife and stand 100 metres from a checkpoint and you’re going to fall down right away.”
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