Seeds of Peace.

• Author: Greenberg, Joel
• Position: Arab and Israeli teens document their differences on film

FOR A FEW WEEKS EACH SUMMER, A GROUP OF ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN TEENAGERS LEARN TO LIVE TOGETHER AT A CAMP IN MAINE. BUT WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM WHEN THEY GO HOME?

Amer Kamal, a 17-year-old Palestinian from East Jerusalem, looks squarely into the video camera and addresses his Israeli friend, Yaron Avni, 18, who will soon be drafted into the Israeli army:

"I hope that you will be a good soldier who helps his society, who helps his people, and who works for the peace process. I don't want to see you ... running after Palestinians and killing them. I hope you're going to stay the Yaron I know."

Yaron says his Palestinian friend has no cause for alarm. "I can assure Amer that I will always stay humane," he says. "That's how I was brought up."

In the Middle East, where Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting each other' for generations, an exchange like this one is rare. Amer and Yaron are part of a team that filmed Peace of Mind, the first documentary ever shot jointly by Israeli and Palestinian youths, chronicling a year in their lives after returning home from an Israeli-Arab summer camp in the Maine woods.

The camp is run by Seeds of Peace, one of the best-known organizations promoting reconciliation between Arab and Israeli youth. Founded in 1993, the organization has won praise for bringing together Israeli, Palestinian, and other Arab teenagers for three-and-a-half-week sessions to build friendships and discuss ways to resolve the conflict between their peoples.

"But what happens when they go back home.?" asks Susan Siegel, co-executive director of Global Action Project, an educational group that produced the film. "That's the real story."

To find out, Siegel and director Mark Landsman chose four Israelis and three Palestinians, trained them in the use of video cameras, and asked them to document their lives starting in the summer of 1997. The teenagers shot 175 hours of tape and met periodically to review the footage and outline the film, testing their ability to work together and to portray some of the most wrenching issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

EXPLOSION OVER TERRORISM

At one point, an emotional argument about terrorism nearly broke up the group and threatened to end the project. Yossi Zilberman, 18, an Israeli, called bombers from the militant Islamic group Hamas "animals." Amer argued that although the militants were wrong, they were patriots who had sacrificed their lives for their country.

The debate ended in...