Why We Took a Tour of Terror

Summer camps, in popular culture, evoke memories of bonfires, tents, and teenage crushes. For me, it evokes memories of gun-wielding terrorists on an El Al flight to Israel.

The hijacking, of course, was imaginary—a re-creation staged in an auditorium at Camp Interlaken, a summer camp sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Milwaukee. The bizarre scene involved counselors dressed up as Palestinian terrorists, wearing Palestinian keffiyehs and wielding fake guns, while the campers, some as young as 8, played the part of frightened air travelers.

"El Al hijacking night" was merely one skit among a series designed to educate the young Jewish-American campers. There was also "Holocaust night," when campers with "tattoos" inked on their arms in magic marker attempted to escape from concentration camps; "pogrom night," when we re-created the forced flight of Jews from shtetls in the Pale of Settlement; and, more contemporaneously, "refusenik night," where campers were supposed to re-enact Russian Jews' attempts to immigrate to Israel from the Soviet Union (with counselors hurling anti-Semitic insults in what was supposed to be a mock representation of Russian persecution).

Most of us came away from those evening re-enactments convinced that Palestinians would kill Jews on sight and that Russians lived for nothing more than taunting would-be Israeli émigrés. That was until one evening, back at the cabin, when Svetlana, a young camper and recent Russian émigré to the United States, starting sobbing. "But I miss Russia," she cried. "I had friends there."

Truth be told, Svetlana's Russian friends probably had treated her better than the American campers, who viciously mocked her thick accent, limited clothing selection, and haircut that looked straight out of the East German Olympic weightlifting team. Poor Svetlana wanted to escape Camp Interlaken and go straight back to Russia. Who could blame her?

Yet the evening activities—however morbid—were, I suspect, not that different from what goes on at other camps aimed at educating (or indoctrinating) children of religious or ethnic minorities. At Ukrainian camps in upstate New York during the Cold War, the children pretended to be nationalist fighters, doing battle with the Russian Communists; an Armenian-American writer describes attending summer camps where the "regions of the campground were named for Armenian battlefields" and "songs about war, bloodshed and revenge against Turks constituted the daily sing-a-long."

After five summers at Camp Interlaken, I convinced my parents that I'd had my fill of hijackings and that my time would be better spent at academic camps, studying math. They agreed, and over the next two decades, I left Israel and its politics behind me. I traveled to Israel just once in the mid-1980s to visit family friends. Neither deeply religious nor particularly interested in intractable conflicts, I spent my time there hanging out on the beach and sneaking into nightclubs with teenage friends.

In late 2007, I came across an advertisement for the "Ultimate Counter-Terrorism Mission"—a one-week tour of Israel dedicated to exploring the country's response to terrorism and suicide bombings. Memories of "El Al hijacking night" suddenly flooded back. So, I proposed to my husband, Nathan, that we go together: a secular Jewish American and a Presbyterian, whose only summer camp experience was a dismal two weeks spent learning to march for the Walnut Hills High School band.

While these dispatches are written jointly, there is no getting around the fact that our different backgrounds color and influence how we respond emotionally to propaganda, particularly that which pulls at ethnic heartstrings.

"This wouldn't convince anyone," Nathan scoffed, as we sat on the tour bus, watching a video of first-person testimonials by young Jewish Americans who had made Aliyah—immigrating to Israel—specifically to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

"You," I had to remind him, "are not the intended audience."

—Sharon Weinberger