OTISFIELD, MAINE — “My name is Mustafa, and I am from Gaza,” declared the 16-year-old perched, however improbably, on a picnic table near the shore of Pleasant Lake, Maine. His backdrop — just days after sheltering from the Israeli mortars exploding near his home — was New England’s White Mountains. “I lived 20 days in third war. I come to Seeds of Peace camp to share my suffering.” Despite his peach-fuzz mustache, Mustafa speaks with the responsibility of a foreign ambassador and in a way, he is one: He’s one of just two Gazans who made it out to this rustic camp setting during the recent war. And now he’s primed to participate in the latest annual gathering of children from Israel, the Israeli-occupied territories, nearby Arab countries and America in a privileged summer camp: an idyll of sports, games, good times — and intense, life-wrenching encounters with children from other groups whom many of them have been conditioned to see as mortal enemies. Seeds of Peace, the hopeful brainchild of a Washington journalist in the early 1990s, has been growing for 22 years now. But the well-funded summer camp, which plucks an elite group of teenagers out of the cauldron of the Middle East and sets them down in the wilds of Northern Maine each year, is taking place this August in the immediate aftermath of the third, and bloodiest, Israeli military incursion into Gaza since 2008. When John Wallach, then the foreign editor of Hearst Newspapers, hatched the concept of the camp as a peacemaking venture, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was already many decades old; Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had been in place for 26 years; thousands and thousands had been killed. Wallach believed that a good part of the conflict’s intractability was due to the mutual demonization of the people on ...   Read more