A Companion Called Hate Has Torn Their Worlds Apart

TEL AVIV — In some ways, 12-year-old Lely and 13-year-old Sami are mirror images. She is Israeli; he is Palestinian. They live an hour apart -- she in Tel Aviv, he in Ramallah. Both are privileged, middle-class children, raised by educated, worldly parents, and both have been marked by nearly three years of unrelenting conflict. The Times spent a day with them to see how their worlds have been shaped by the fighting -- and by the prospects for peace.

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TEL AVIV -- Lely Stadler flips the pages of a well-thumbed copybook filled with curving handwritten Arabic script, searching for the vocabulary words she plans to review before starting eighth-grade classes in September. Arabic, she says, is her favorite subject.

But despite her consuming interest in the language, Lely -- a lively and precocious Israeli girl, only days shy of her 13th birthday -- does not have a single Palestinian friend, and doesn't think she wants one.

"Of course not all Arabs are bad," she says, turning now to her computer. She likes to play at least one game before breakfast -- a beginning, an ending, a small dose of electronic certainty -- even before changing out of the faded Betty Boop T-shirt she sleeps in.

"But I hate the ones who are bad," she continues, with a single swift upward glance. "The ones who attack us. Who always attack us."

For a child like Lely, hovering on the cusp of adolescence as her country charts an uncertain course between war and peace, the notion of real friendship between Jews and Arabs isn't so much undesirable as simply unimaginable.

Violent conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over the last 34 months has consumed nearly a quarter of Lely's life. Both before and during the intifada, her home city of Tel Aviv has been hit repeatedly by suicide bombings. Lely was born only months before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and her mother nursed her in the family's "sealed room," where they huddled nightly during weeks of Iraqi Scud missile attacks aimed at Tel Aviv.

"God knows how it all affected her," murmurs her mother, Razia, whose own father's family suffered deaths in the Holocaust.

On a hazy summer's day, in the light-filled rooftop apartment in the heart of the city where Lely lives with her engineer father, her mother and two sisters -- one older, one younger -- the conflict could hardly seem more distant.