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Can Ultimate Frisbee Save the World?

One group is using it to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth together. So far, it’s working.

Credit...Tim Lahan

Contributing Writer

They’d gathered for supper one night in July, at the summer camp at the Kfar Silver school, in Ashkelon, Israel. For the last couple of weeks this group of kids — some from Israel, some from Palestine — had been trying to learn something about conflict resolution, by playing Ultimate Frisbee. Some of them had become friends.

That was when the air raid siren went off.

The rockets came from Gaza, part of the ongoing clash between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces. The missiles didn’t land in Ashkelon. But they did score a direct hit on the hopes of some of the people who had looked to the camp as an oasis of peace.

“Well, we’re not trying to bring peace to the Middle East,” said David Barkan, who volunteers as the chief executive of Ultimate Peace, which sponsored the camp. “That’s not the goal. It’s about changing a mind-set through the values of the sport that we know leads to peace between people.”

As I interviewed Mr. Barkan by phone last week, I felt the temptation to roll my eyes. As he described his hope of changing hearts and minds through Ultimate Frisbee, all I could think about were those incoming rockets, and the long tragic history of that endlessly conflicted region. I struggled to imagine how Frisbee — seriously, Frisbee? — might succeed where a half-century of diplomacy had failed.

And yet, when Mr. Barkan talks about “the values of the sport,” it’s not just idle talk. Ultimate — which is kind of a combination of football, basketball and soccer — has a unique twist: There’s no referee. The sport is wholly self-regulated by its players, and competitors from opposing teams are called upon, when there’s a dispute upon the field, to come to an agreement among themselves before play can resume.

I asked another Ultimate player, Steve Mooney, to explain this to me. (I’ve known Steve since the late 1970s, when we were both students at Wesleyan, and my roommate, David Garfield, was one of the game’s pioneers.)

“Let’s say I’m about to catch the disc and you hit me in the arm,” Steve said. “I say it’s a foul, and you don’t. The game stops, and we essentially have a conversation, you and me, over whether it was a foul or not. And at most levels of the sport we resolve it.”

If the conflict can’t be resolved, the disc goes back to the thrower, and the play starts over. But most of the time, the players work it out together. Occasionally, members of your own team come over and tell you, “Actually, I think you did foul him.”

While Mr. Barkan and Mr. Mooney were shepherding their campers, I was watching the World Cup — with its flopping and shirt-pulling and endless deceptions. The sport they were describing seemed to belong to a whole different universe.

“If you win,” Mr. Barkan said, “but you don’t gain the respect of your opponent, then what have you won?”

Let’s pause to agree that over the years there have been plenty of unlikely scenarios for bringing peace to the Middle East. Yitzhak Natan, a former principal of the Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts, in Tel Aviv, suggests that there be two states with the same borders, each governed independently. “Instead of splitting the prayer shawl,” he says, “everyone takes the prayer shawl.” The writer Lior Aziz, meanwhile, proposes a third state, in addition to Israel and Palestine, the “Peace State.”

There are other proposals too, each one slightly more far-fetched than the one before. And yet even the most harebrained peace plans seem, on the whole, less ridiculous than the ones devised for the waging of war. Is the idea of bringing about understanding through Frisbee really more ludicrous than the United States Air Force’s 1958 proposal for nuking the moon? Or the plan — developed by both the Soviets and the Americans — to use dolphins in combat?

What’s clear is that the Jews and Palestinians who’ve been part of the Ultimate Peace project have begun to see each other in new ways. “We’re talking about deepening understanding and building empathy for people you’ve always seen as your enemies,” Mr. Barkan told me. “They become best friends with these people, and they know that all the stuff they’ve been indoctrinated with is just a bunch of crap.”

At the end of one tournament, Mr. Barkan told me, a Jewish boy named Uri Sapir, 13, threw an incomplete pass, a mistake that cost his team the game. As he walked away from the high-five line, tears in his eyes, Ali Hamam — the 14-year-old Arab boy he’d been playing against — put his arm around him, and the two boys walked off the field together, arm in arm.

As for that missile attack, Mr. Barkan says that in its immediate wake, the camp fielded over 300 calls from worried parents. But not one child left the camp that night. Instead, when the all-clear signal was given, the children began to sing, in Arabic and in Hebrew.

At first their voices were tenuous and uncertain. Then they got louder.

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Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” @JennyBoylan

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