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Israel to Ease Restrictions on Palestinians After Sharon-Abbas Meeting
Following the meeting Thursday between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, the IDF will pull out of the hearts of West Bank cities and release 100 Palestinian prisoners. Israel Radio reported Friday that Sharon intends to give permanent permits for Palestinian officials to travel between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, increase the amount of tax money transferred to the PA by NIS 150 million a month, allow 25,000 Palestinian laborers to work in Israel, and ease restrictions on humanitarian organizations working in the territories. Sharon asked Abbas to immediately work to end the firing of Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. "It cannot be that while we are conducting negotiations, Qassam rockets are falling on our children," Sharon said. (Ha'aretz)

Sharon Laments 'Occupation' and Issues Clarification
Last Monday, a day after his government reluctantly backed the peace plan, Mr. Sharon told angry legislators from Likud: "You may not like the word, but what's happening is occupation. Holding 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is a bad thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy." Mr. Sharon was attacked as undermining his own government's effort to label the territories as "disputed," rather than "occupied." The next day, he said that what he had meant was that the Palestinians were occupied, but that the territory was not - a formula that appeared to satisfy no one. (New York Times)

Details Set for Bush Meetings in Mideast
President Bush will hold a three-way meeting in Jordan this week with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian prime minister. Mr. Bush is to go on Tuesday to Sharm el Sheik in Egypt, where he will meet with a number of Arab leaders, including Mr. Abbas. (New York Times)

"Jerusalem Day" Celebrated
An open letter from Minister Natan Sharansky: "Those of us fortunate enough to live in the capital of the sovereign Jewish State of Israel intensely feel its majesty and magic. Not one day passes without my taking a moment to try to fathom the miracle of our return. Nothing is more crucial to our unity, solidarity, and determination than Jews coming to Jerusalem to visit, if they cannot yet come to live here." (Jerusalem Post)

A Lost Generation
Salma al Debi, 22, works with youths, aged 14 to 18, at the Cultural Center for Youth Development in Nablus. "We have a lost generation. May God help them. They believe in violence. A culture of death has spread among them. Those who are willing to die as martyrs are in the thousands. About 65% of the group of 400 young people I work with believe in martyrdom. 'Your people want you to stay alive,' I tell them. Only living people can serve their homeland, not dead." (Independent-UK)

Issues on Campus:

Harvard: Students for an Ethical Divinity School
Students for an Ethical Divinity School was founded in response to the Harvard Divinity School's accepting $2.5 million from the President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan in July, 2000, for the creation of an endowed professorship in Islamic Religious Studies. Zayed funds the Abu Dhabi-based Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow-Up, a prominent think-tank of the Arab League founded in 1999. The Zayed Center promotes Holocaust denial, anti-American conspiracy theories, and hate-speech in its lectures, symposia, and publications. By accepting Zayed's money, the Divinity School honors and validates the hate-speech he promotes.
    Petition created by student Rachel Fish states, "We members of the Harvard University community - students, faculty, staff, and alumni - and the general public call on the Harvard Divinity School to return Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan's donation for the creation of a chair in Islamic studies. We support the creation of a chair in Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School, but we oppose establishing it with the money and the name of one who spreads hate and lies." (www.moralitynotmoney.com)
    See also: Local Student Gains National Attention over Harvard Issue (Johnson City [TN] Press)

Yale: Muslim Professor Attacks Jewish Students by James Kirchick
An e-mail sent by a Yale professor naming Jewish students from an Israel advocacy group as a "pro-war cabal" has caused an uproar at the elite Ivy League university. Students charge that listing the Jewish names was anti-Semitic; many claim they are outspoken opponents of the war against Iraq. "Just to insinuate that people who espouse pro-Israel views at Yale are automatically complicit in promoting the war is ridiculous and offensive," said Nelson Moussazadeh, co-president of Yale Friends of Israel. The e-mail, sent last week by an associate professor of genetics, Mazin Qumsiyeh, to the several hundred members of Yale's anti-war Coalition for Peace, contained the names of 64 students, nearly all of them Jews. This is not the first time that he has sent out a controversial e-mail. In late April, Mr. Qumsiyeh issued a mass e-mail that linked to an article containing a list of "Prominent Jews in the Media." In a January 24, 2003, column for the Yale Herald, Qumsiyeh wrote that "…Hitler thought highly of Zionists and Zionists regularly collaborated with the Nazis." After an outcry by those Jewish students who were wrongly listed as being members of the campus pro-war in Iraq group, Mr. Qumsiyeh backtracked and stated that he had confused the e-mail lists of the two organizations. Matthew Louchheim, a Yale senior from Los Angeles, said Mr. Qumsiyeh's sending a list of supposed pro-war students "smacks of McCarthyism." (New York Sun)

Voices from the Campus:

Columbia: Obscuring Our Vision by Ariel Beery
The most glaring example of poor reporting, which, if intentional, could be construed as bias, is that of America's supposed newspaper of record, The New York Times. Now that the "road map" has become the central issue, The Times' articles tend to focus on Israel's "delaying" and the Palestinians' "acceptance" of the peace plan. But were the articles to focus on the actions taken, and not on the rhetoric espoused, by both sides, the American people would learn that a totally different story is unfolding. Sadly, although the Palestinian Authority has professed to accept the road map, it has not taken any of the steps the road map requires, and The New York Times has not reported that which would muddy the waters of its simplistic portrait of the Middle East. (Columbia Spectator)

Stanford: Full Circle by Uri Pomerantz
Today's Daily brings with it my final words as a columnist here at Stanford. Last Friday, I drove to San Mateo to have breakfast with Elias Nabul. He: a Palestinian. I: a confused American/Israeli. The goal of the chat: to listen to one another's suffering and see if some good could come out of the whole mess. Elias was in his late sixties. He recalled losing his home and life as he knew it after moving from Jerusalem at the end of the 1948 war. He pulled the key and the title of old house from a musty drawer. It was 50 years later and this guy was crying in his own living room about concrete and brick. But change came swiftly. “Back home things are different,” he told me. “You and I stand on equal ground here in America. I am not threatened by you since I own this house and have started a new life. I just want you to know what I went through and why my people are angry.” Elias was looking me in the eyes and asking for peace. Even though he understood the concept of immense attachment and the suffering it causes, time seemed to have taught him the utter feebleness of clinging to memory. He had grasped impermanence. Time had taught Elias a lot about life and forgiveness. As young college students living in a fast-paced world, however, life often seems too loud, busy or important to listen to the wisdom experiences provide through difficult lessons. From one college kid to another, I'd like to tell you that here at Stanford we're damn smart, but we're never too smart to listen to people like Elias. (Stanford Daily)

American Students in Israel:

Sharansky Inspires 'Birthright Israel' Participants to Take Home the Truth
“You will be successful with your political activism if you are connected to the source of your moral truths," said Natan Sharansky, minister-without-portfolio responsible for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs, on Wednesday night to a birthright israel group of pro-Israel student activists. His speech highlighted the importance of activism on campus, drawing examples from his own personal history as a prisoner of the KGB. “Somehow the human rights movement which w as created by Jews and supported by Jews was somehow hijacked and turned into the biggest anti-Semitic movement in the world," he said. "We [Israel] are the light of the nations. We hold the moral example for the world. It's the challenge for us, as Jews, to take the banner of human rights back." (Jerusalem Post)

Hoop Dreams - Tamir Goodman in Israel
Once called the 'Jewish Jordan,' Tamir Goodman is content playing and praying in the Jewish State. Dubbed the "Jewish Jordan" in the American press and profiled in Sports Illustrated before he had graduated high school, Goodman entertained an offer from University of Maryland, then ranked second in the U.S., before receiving a three-year deal from national powerhouse Maccabi Tel Aviv last August. While an intense work ethic and a focus on improvement are among Goodman's defining characteristics, it is his religious convictions that have garnered him the most attention - in America primarily because of their novelty and in Israel largely because of their crowd appeal. He has become a hero to Orthodox children throughout the country. (Jerusalem Post)

Observations:

Back to School on Campus Advocacy by Mitchell Bard

• As my mother would say, the true crisis on campus today is that Jewish students don't know borscht about their history.
• Anti-Israel sentiment was never as pronounced as the media made it appear. Out of thousands of colleges, only a handful were ever truly hostile. Detractors make a lot of noise, but volume does not translate into influence. There was never the slightest chance that any major university would divest from Israel, but the Jewish reaction was near hysterical.
• To its credit, after decades of relative inaction the organized Jewish community became actively engaged in helping students, primarily through the 26-member Israel on Campus Coalition.
• The prevalence of outspoken anti-Israel professors remains the most insidious danger to Israel's standing on the campus.
• A network of pro-Israel faculty has not yet materialized. The community's top priority should be to endow chairs and establish centers for the study of Israel.
• Advocacy workshops are being conducted on a wider scale; however, a number of trainers have adopted the bizarre notion that students do not need to know facts. They are teaching students public relations tactics instead of history.
• Hillel and The Caravan for Democracy are among the few groups with active speakers programs, but the anti-Israel forces dominate the lecture circuit.
• More is being done today to help Jewish college students than ever before, but too much of the emphasis has been on putting out fires and not enough on teaching students the basics about their heritage, not enough on strengthening their identification with Israel and the Jewish people. (The Forward)

Mitchell Bard, executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, is the author of "Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict."