- WASHINGTON (JTA) -- A conference
room filled with suits is nothing unusual in this town -- except when the
suits are all filled by college students.
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- As part of an initiative to groom a new generation of
pro-Israel activists on campus, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
brought 240 students to Washington for four all-expense-paid days of intense
advocacy training.
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- When pro-Palestinian activism swept the country's college
campuses after the intifada began in September 2000, it seemed that nearly
every Jewish organization hatched plans to ``take back the campus."
The different groups often work together through a coordinating body, the
Israel on Campus Coalition, that formed last fall.
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- The effort appears to be working: Students say the anti-Israel
forces are on the wane on campus.
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- Within the Jewish community, there are ``clearly differences
of opinion when it comes to how to deal with detractors of Israel,"
said Daniel Frankenstein, 21, a junior at the University of California
at Berkeley, where he leads several secular campus groups.
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- AIPAC doesn't advocate for any specific policy, but pounds
out a simple message about the necessity of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship,
he said.
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- AIPAC teaches students the benefits of the relationship
to the United States and shows them how to pass that message along to campus
leaders.
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- "I knew why to advocate for Israel, but it was AIPAC
that taught me how," said Jesse Gabriel, 21. His cufflinks shining,
the suave Gabriel, Berkeley's student body president, explained that AIPAC
showed him how to engage the ``important people on campus," including
student leaders.
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- At its first such conference this summer -- the Saban
National Political Leadership Training Seminar -- AIPAC stressed three
objectives for student activists: circulating pro-Israel petitions, bringing
a member of Congress to campus and holding Israel forums.
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- At the second Saban conference this weekend, AIPAC added
three more objectives: having campus activists visit Congressional district
offices, convincing campus newspapers to write pro-Israel editorials and
getting faith-based groups on campus to issue statements of solidarity
with Israel.
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- The conferences are a segment of the Schusterman Advocacy
Institute, an expansion of AIPAC's 20-year- old student program.
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- The program now focuses on 60 campuses, chosen because
they have large Jewish populations and feed Congress with future leaders.
On each campus, AIPAC works with four ``portfolioed" activists --
each with his or her own designated tasks -- to turn Jewish leaders into
pro-Israel activists.
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- AIPAC officials say the new initiative will continue
even if Israel and the Palestinians reach a peace agreement -- because
it still will be necessary to educate Jewish and non-Jewish students about
Israel, the group says.
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- "This is the antidote to the apathy and an antidote
to the entropy which could erode the U.S.-Israel alliance, even if Israel's
detractors weren't hell-bent on driving a wedge between the two countries,"
said Jonathan Kessler, AIPAC's leadership development director.
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- Workshop attendants, most of whom are ``portfolioed activists"
on their campuses, say the challenge is raising the interest level among
students.
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- ``There's more ambivalence than there is anti-Israel"
sentiment on campus, said Arielle Bernstein, 21, a senior at the University
of Pennsylvania. But a key inroad was circulating a petition of solidarity
with Israel, she said.
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- ``It was the catalyst for a dialogue" and a ``start
to educate people," she said.
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- Currently, 13 of the 60 campuses targeted in the initiative
have published pro-Israel petitions in their campus newspapers. In all,
about 40,000 signatures have been collected, with a goal of 120,000 by
AIPAC's policy conference in late March.
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- AIPAC trains the activists to sway opinion by targeting
campus leaders.
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- "AIPAC said, 'Become friends with them, meet them
for coffee,' " said Toby Osofsky, 22, a senior at the University of
North Carolina, where she is the AIPAC campus liaison.
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- Osofsky can interest and influence campus leaders with
exclusive offers. With AIPAC's help, Osofsky arranged a 50-person lunch
with Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and
made an opportunity for certain guests, including the student body president,
to have some private time with Regev.
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- One challenge is to reach those on the left as well as
on the right. But many say that focusing on the American perspective of
the U.S.-Israel relationship can supersede politics.
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- ``Whatever side of the aisle you're on, this is an important
issue for America," Bernstein said.
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- ``What they're modeling for us is their national strategy,"
Bernstein said, referring to AIPAC's success in securing support from both
parties at the congressional level.
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- "AIPAC is in the relationship-building business,"
the group's leadership development deputy director, Brian Jaffee, said
in a discussion of bridging the partisan gap. "We see friends and
we see potential friends."
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- Meanwhile, AIPAC sees itself as part of a broader Jewish
communal effort to make campuses pro-Israel. "Activists, not AIPACists,"
the group's "campus creed" reads.
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- For their part, students seem to think that Jewish organizations
are doing a good job cooperating to equip them with resources. The anti-Israel
activists are losing ground, they say.
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- According to Frankenstein, there is a difference between
the anti-Israel movement and the pro-Israel one. While the former are a
small group of activists, the latter is an "entire Jewish community
that has come together and said in unison, 'We stand for Israel, we stand
for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship, we are proud to be Jewish and we
stand up for what we believe in.' "
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- For Frankenstein, the momentum has made a personal difference.
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- "I felt scared to be openly Jewish," he said,
fearing a personal attack at Berkeley -- a site of virulent anti-Israel
activism, culminating in a brick thrown through the campus Hillel last
spring and the takeover of a university building by pro-Palestinian activists.
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- Now the "pervading sense is that we have taken back
the campus" from "people who hate the State of Israel and are
anti-Semitic,'' Gabriel said.
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- The two anti-Israel protests on campus this year were
puny, he said.
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- And Frankenstein once again feels comfortable wearing
his Israeli soccer jersey on campus.
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