These camps, intended to help transform Palestinian and Israeli teens from enemies into partners, began in 1993 with Seeds of Peace in Maine, followed a year later by Building Bridges for Peace in Colorado. There are now over a dozen annual camps, including Peace Camp Canada, Peace It Together, Kids4Peace, and Oseh Shalom~Sanea al-Salam Family Peacemakers Camp.

          "Each camp has a different personality, " says Maha Gebara, co-founder of the Seattle Middle East Children's Peace Camp. "Yet our common experience of shared humanity is in our face-to-face, life changing relationship building with a new quality of compassionate listening to one another." In safe, natural environments, campers come to realize "an enemy is one whose story we have not heard."

          This is the "public peace process" defined by Dr. Harold Saunders, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, and facilitator of the Camp David Accords. Saunders asks citizens to participate fully in partnership with governments, noting, “There are some things that only governments can do, such as negotiating binding agreements. But there are some things that only citizens outside government can do, such as changing human relationships."

          "These camp experiences could reveal the single greatest source of new social intelligence for the Middle East public peace process," said Libby and Len Traubman, meeting facilitators and co-founders of the 12-year-old Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue in California, the oldest Sustained Dialogue of its kind.

          A press gathering will follow this historic meeting with these camp leaders from Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Canada, and the U.S. on Monday, January 31, 1:00 p.m. at the Seasons Retreat Center, in Kalamazoo, MI. Information is on the Web at:

Libby and Len Traubman
1448 Cedarwood Drive, San Mateo, CA 94403
LTraubman@igc.org --Tel: 650-574-8303