Separated by more than 7,000 miles and a world of differences, the eight teens fall into typical adolescent banter.
Julia Rabinovich, a 17-year-old Jewish girl, and three classmates from San Francisco’s Lowell High School trade observations about movies, dating and drugs with four students from Jordan’s Amman National School.
There is even some long-distance flirtation during the satellite exchange, now the subject of a just-completed hourlong documentary.
“I hope we disagree,” Rabinovich says on film before the start of the taped conversation last spring. “We can talk about our disagreements and maybe help each other understand.”
Rabinovich quickly got her wish when the conversation turns to the deadly business of suicide bombings and the hatred often splitting Arab and Western cultures.
At one point in the dialogue, a Jordanian student complains that many media outlets “are owned by Jews.”
The conversation had its frightening moments, said Rabinovich, who moved to the United States from Ukraine when she was 6 years old and is a former student of San Francisco’s Hebrew Academy.
“One of the girls said she admired the suicide bombers. That shocked me,” Rabinovich said last week, after seeing the film at its first screening viewed by school officials, media representatives and hundreds of her classmates in Lowell High’s auditorium.
“I don’t know how you can admire someone who takes their life and is at the same time also killing an innocent bystander.”
But Rabinovich said she also took away a message of hope from the discussion, which resulted in a satellite television program called “Face to Face: Young Arabs and Americans.”
The show was produced by S.F.-based WorldLink TV, a satellite network that airs unfiltered news from around the globe. WorldLink programming director Stephen Olsson, a Lowell graduate, arranged the conversation.
The Jordanian students, who were seated facing the Americans through a television hookup, repeatedly questioned how well Americans understand the Arab world.
“Did you think we lived in tents and we rode camels?” asks one of the Jordanian girls, who like her classmates, speaks fluent English.
The teens from both countries blast the media. “I understand you guys are being stereotyped,” says Dennis Moy, one of the Lowell students. The other Lowell students are Rene Pena-Govea and Hasan Tbeileha.
But the mood takes a dramatic shift when the talk shifts to suicide bombers.
One of the Jordanians implores the American students to consider the plight of Palestinians. “We’d like you to feel what the Palestinians are feeling right now,” she says. “This is their home, this is their dignity.”
A Jordanian student goes on to say, “suicide bombers, I can understand what they’re doing.”
The American students react strongly. “It doesn’t help anybody,” says Tbeileh, whose father is Palestinian and mother is half-Jewish. “It hardens people’s resolve when people are attacked. It just solves nothing.”
To that, one of the Jordanian students replies, “They want people to know what’s going on.”
Tbeileh, a 17-year-old senior, responds, “It doesn’t work at all. Suicide bombing can’t work.”
Suicide bombings, added Rabinovich: are “only making peace harder.”
A Jordanian student replies, “We just want peace. We don’t want innocent people to die on both sides. We just want our land.”
The Jordanians say fellow students are boycotting American products to protest U.S. support of Israel.
“That’s better than suicide bombing,” Rabinovich observes.
A Jordanian student says, “Of course we know suicide bombing is not the answer, but we should find one.”
The exchange ends with a request by the Jordanian students to trade e-mail addresses “so we can stay in touch.”
After the conversation, the two sets of students are taped separately, commenting on their dialogue.
“I didn’t expect them to know so much,” one of the Jordanian boys says in Arabic.
Rabinovich, however, questions whether she should have said more about suicide bombing. “At the same time, I can see where they’re coming from and there’s no point in fighting.”
The earlier exchange had some unexpectedly light moments.
With his teen idol good looks, Tbeileh says he doesn’t speak Arabic but tells the Jordanian students that he’d like to visit the Middle East some day. One of the girls from Amman replies with an enthusiastic, “You should!”
Watching the film in the Lowell auditorium, Tbeileh’s classmates roared their approval with cheers and hoots.
The camera then pans back to the Jordanian students, where one of the male students wryly observes in Arabic that his female classmate and Tbeileh seem to be hitting it off.
Interviewed after the screening, Rabinovich described the exchange as “a really amazing experience.”
“I came away feeling much better,” she said. “I was speaking to these people who were supposed to be so anti-Israel. If people could talk, a solution would be near.”