Palestinian students attend the funeral of eight-year-old Zeina Hamad in the West Bank town of Ramin, east of Tulkarem. (Mouid Ashqar, Maan Images)

Teaching Israeli and Palestinian children to "get along" at best only buries the real problems. One hesitates to criticize these enterprises. They're so well meaning, and it seems so curmudgeonly. But the myriad efforts around the world to bring the children of political conflicts, most notably the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, together in some kind of forced intimacy -- schools or camps or the like -- so that they can get to know each other and learn that each is human, can and often do actually perpetuate the conflict. These well intentioned efforts ultimately divert attention from real problems, real grievances, and lull people into thinking that all this sweetness and light is some kind of progress toward resolving the conflict.

One of these camps for Israeli and Palestinian girls meets several times every summer at a mountain retreat near where we live in New Mexico. For the last several years, this camp has brought together teenage girls from both sides for two weeks of living together -- sharing rooms, eating communally, doing crafts and musical activities together, and talking endlessly about themselves, their societies, their fears of each other. They leave with a new perspective, able to see each other as real people with similar concerns over boys, similar teenage angst, similar difficulties with parents. But, however equal they may be in the mountains of New Mexico, they do not return home as equals or return to a new and different set of circumstances in their daily lives.

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There are other similar efforts in many places. Seeds of Peace has been bringing the children of conflict, particularly Arabs and Israelis, together in the Maine woods for decades. An international school, part of the United World College system established decades ago by Lord Mountbatten in the hope of bringing future world leaders together to learn of other cultures and foster civility at a young age, exists at another location not far from our hometown. There are schools in Israel and Palestine for the children of both sides, supposedly teaching them each other's narratives. In Jerusalem a few nights ago, we met one of the lead promoters of the most recent attempt to establish schools for youngsters in Palestine-Israel. This man, an American with a new-found interest in the conflict, is gathering Israeli and Palestinian teachers to devise a curriculum that will teach the children of both sides that they can accomplish more through openness and friendship than through anger.

It is obviously never a bad idea for enemies to get to know each other, and it's a great idea to train the young in opposing societies to look across the divide and see decent human beings rather than monsters. But unless there is some reasonable prospect that the circumstances to which these children return will change dramatically, the experience is more a diversion and a detriment than a step forward. The girls in the summer camp may gain a new perspective, but if they return to their separate existences as the daughters of an occupied population living under the domination of the daughters of an occupying power, nothing will have changed. The notion that these young people will grow up to be their countries' leaders and, having had this heart-warming experience getting to know "the other," will foster serious change when they grow up is not enough. For one thing, in a conflict like that in Palestine-Israel, too many people will die in the 20 or 30 or more years before these young people are in any position to assume power in their societies. For another, whatever changes in perspective and thinking they gain from what they learn about each other at age 15 or 16 are unlikely to endure unless the circumstances in which they live also change dramatically.

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