February   2007

In Israel
	The Porter School of Environmental Studies at TAU announced a new round of applications  to the Sir Leslie Porter Fellowship Program for Excellence in Environmental Studies.
	The Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, has recently published another issue in the “Arabs in Israel” Update series, entitled: "The Future Vision of the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel."
	The Institute for National Security Studies organized a conference on Nuclear Iran. Among the speakers were Prof. David Menashri, Dean of Special Programs, Director of the Center for Iranian Studies and incumbent of the Parviz and Poura Nazarian Chair in Modern Iranian Studies; Dr. Ephraim Kam and Dr. Emily Landau of the Institute; and Knesset member Binyamin Netanyahu, head of the opposition and former prime minister.
	The Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies and the Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel organized a conference on "Israeli Elites: Continuity and Regeneration." Among the speakers were Prof. Amal Jamal, Head of the Department of Political Science; Prof. Gideon Doron of the same department; and Prof. Yoram Peri, Head of the Caesarea de Rothschild School of Communication and of the Chaim Herzog Institute for Media, Politics and Society.
	The Porter School of Environmental Studies held a conference on "Nature Preservation versus Budgets of Billions for Infrastructure Development." Among the participants were Dr. Arie Nesher, Professional Director of the school; Roni Bar-On, Minister of the Interior; and Shai Avital, CEO of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
	The Stanley Steyer School of Health Professions held a conference in honor of Prof. Reuven Feuerstein. Among the speakers were Prof. Zeev Dvir, Head of the School; Dr. Naomi Hadas-Lidor of the school; and Prof. Feuerstein.
	The Netvision Institute for Internet Studies and the Sackler Faculty of Medicine organized a conference on "The Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Internet Era." Among the participants were Prof. Yossi Mekori, Dean of the Faculty; Prof. Michael Weingarten of the Faculty; and Dr. Benni Peretz of the Maurice and Gabriela Goldschleger School of Dental Medicine.
	The Bob Shapell School of Social Work held a conference on "Women in Poverty." Among the speakers were Dr. Idit Weiss and Gavriel Frid-Bell of the school.
	The Cymbalista Jewish Heritage Center at TAU organized an event in honor of Scott Shay on the occasion of the publication of his book Getting Our Groove Back. Prof. Itamar Rabinovich, President of TAU, and Scott Shay discussed the subject of "Life in the Diaspora – Revitalizing Jewish Life in the US."
	Building Bridges in Their Own Write: Tel Aviv University Held First Conference on American Aliyah Literature. The one-day conference highlighted the immigrant experience for American writers in Israel  They come from all corners of America bringing with them university degrees, published manuscripts, suitcases of poems, and scribblings of novels in the works. They aren’t running from religious persecution nor do they seek fame or fortune. They are American-Israeli writers, and they have chosen to make “aliyah” and live and work in Israel. For decades now they have been an essential voice for translating life in Israel into English -- the international tongue of literature. And for the first time in history, Tel Aviv University (TAU) has brought these writers and scholars together under one roof to share in each other’s successes and shortcomings. Professor Hana Wirth-Nesher of the Department of English and American Studies at TAU gave opening remarks at the one-day conference, American Aliyah in Literature and Research. “To be an Israeli poet, novelist, or scholar,” said Wirth-Nesher, “is to send our work out into the world with a voice that will be perceived as Israeli, although that same voice here in Israel will be perceived to be American.” A group and panel of about 60 American-Israeli writers listened attentively to Wirth-Nesher and other guest speakers, which included TAU professors, accomplished writers and poets, members of writers’ associations and journals in Israel, and faculty from other Israeli colleges and universities. Among the day’s readings, discussions and Q&A sessions was a talk and poetry reading by Shirley Kaufman, 83, who won the President’s Prize for literature this year. The Seattle-born poet made aliyah more than three decades ago at age 50 during the Yom Kippur War; she is one of the rare instances where an English writer in Israel is getting credit for her work by the state. “English writers are part of a marginal group in Israel, but are not getting recognized in the same way Russian, Arab or religiously oriented poets are,” says TAU senior lecturer Karen Alkalay-Gut, an acclaimed poet, translator, and performer who has lived in Israel since 1972. After a golden period for American poets in Israel from the early seventies until the mid-eighties, the last ten years have been difficult for the growing group of American writers who have made aliyah, says Alkalay-Gut. She wonders if these writers may be feeling competitiveness rather than kinship among the other English writers in Israel as a result. Alkalay-Gut hopes this recent conference will turn into an annual event and help American writers in Israel build a fertile meeting ground for discussing their work. American-Israelis have an important set of boots to fill, believes Alkalay-Gut. They have a task to translate the Israeli experience to a language the world can understand. And unlike other olim groups from places such as the former Soviet Union or South America, “Only American Anglo-Saxons came here because they wanted to and because they had that choice,” notes Alkalay-Gut. “The person who works in English can return to his country. That makes every day a reaffirmation to live here.” Besides sharing creative samples of their work and analysis of the American writer’s experience in Israel, the panel and audience discussed some of the setbacks for English writers in Israel. The writers, however, recognized that these very difficulties of life in Israel could easily be converted to the fuel needed for motivation and inspiration. “Aliyah has been the most defining act in my life,” said Haim Chertok, a biographer and lecturer at Ben Gurion University. Life was very different in America, he says, where he felt his choices were already laid out for him. “Had I not come to Israel I would not be the writer that I am today,” he says. “Coming here forced me to come to terms with myself, and force myself to explain myself to me. And that process continues. I am still up against my experience and I try to explain that again and again in my work.” The writers attending the conference also saw the importance of their role in writing about Israeli Jewry for other Jews around the world, who are often shut out of the Israeli experience for lack of adequate Hebrew literature translations. “It is hard to bridge that gap,” notes Jeffrey Green, from the Israel Association of Writers in English, who made aliyah 33 years ago. “And it is hard for others to understand that the most important fact in our lives is to live in Israel. For people who didn’t make that decision and still live in America -- it is an enormous gap for readers to overcome.” Kaufman, the poet, made aliyah at 50 and even though she would have liked to, she was never able to make the switch from writing in English to Hebrew. “That has been one of the saddest things about my life here,” she notes. However, achievements such as winning Israel’s President’s Prize this year gave the poet a boost, telling her that Israel is finally a large enough country to be able to recognize the languages living within its borders. “This is a mark that Israel has come out of all provinciality,” she adds. Sponsors of the first American Aliyah in Literature and Research conference included the Department of English and American Studies and Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of Humanities at TAU, and the Israel Association of Writers in English. The Fred Simmons Fund, founded by American poet Fred Simmons, also sponsored a number of sessions. TAU’s Department of English and American Studies is the only department of its kind in Israel. Prof. Wirth-Nesher, former chair of the department and incumbent of the Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, says, “This is a unique department in Israel because we are the only ones who teach courses each year on Jewish American literature and culture. Our sponsors also enable lecturers from abroad to visit and conferences to take place between nations, such as the 350th anniversary of Jews in the United States.”
New projects
	Shaping Social Justice:  Tel Aviv University Legal Clinics Inside a low-security wing of Maasiuahu Prison in Ramle, Israel, scores of Sudanese refugees sit and await their fate. They have entered Israel on foot – illegally – to escape religious persecution, threats of genocide and grinding famine back home in Darfur. “The only crime these detainees have committed is the desire to be safe and free,” say attorneys Anat Ben-Dor and Michael Kagan of the Refugee Rights Legal Education Clinic at Tel Aviv University (TAU), where they and a team of law students are working to secure the asylum seekers’ release.  The legal clinic is one of six run by the Elga Cegla Clinical Legal Education Program at TAU’s Buchmann Faculty of Law. The five other clinics specialize in human rights, criminal law, social welfare, the environment, and small business law. All the clinics have the same dual goal: to make sure all people in Israel are given access to justice and freedom, and to give the next generation of outstanding young Israeli lawyers hands-on experience in bettering Israeli society. Funding support has come from private donors and organizations such as Hadassah and the Ford Foundation. As part of their work as educators, Ben-Dor and the other clinic lawyers open their files to some 25 students each year in each clinic. The clinics place students at the front line of legal and social problems faced by marginalized groups in Israel, such as access to healthcare, inheritance rights and environmental pollution, while also providing academic credit. For some young lawyers, work at a clinic primes them to be more compassionate in their future careers as criminal or corporate lawyers; for others, the experience has motivated them to devote their lives to social welfare and causes. “Life changing” are the words law student Michal Sarig, 25, chooses to describe her work at the Refugee Rights Clinic two years ago. As Ben-Dor’s protégé, Sarig got to play a small part in shaping Israeli asylum law well before she earned the right to practice law. Sarig couldn’t have done this anywhere else in Israel, as the TAU clinic is the only human rights program in Israel with the expertise to represent refugees at every level, including at the Israeli Supreme Court and United Nations High Commission for Refugees. “Working for refugee rights has no doubt had a great impact on my career choice,” says Sarig, who today volunteers at a human rights organization and hopes her law career will go in that direction. Sarig and Ben-Dor began reviewing cases of Sudanese refugees at the TAU clinic when the first wave arrived in early 2005. Since then some 220 Muslim and Christian Sudanese have braved the long desert journey to seek political asylum in Israel – only to find themselves thrown into jail. “It is not easy for the State of Israel to accept these refugees,” notes Ben-Dor, “because Sudan is classed as an enemy state and the Sudanese government has a frightening record of violence against non-Muslims. For these reasons, Israel sees all Sudanese refugees as a threat.” Ben-Dor and his team of students personally work with the refugees, using their knowledge of the Israeli legal system to win individuals asylum and to persuade the Israeli government to change its policies toward Sudanese refugees. Thanks to their efforts, four refugees have been released to start a new life in Israel. The clinic expects many more will be released in the coming year. The Refugee Clinic is just one example of how the Cegla Legal Education Clinics are helping develop laws and policies in Israeli society for the common good. Recently, the Social Welfare Legal Clinic helped reform migrant workers’ rights by ensuring access to healthcare and enabling the switching of employers. The Environmental Justice Legal Clinic lobbied and won the case for sewage treatment in unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev desert; and the Human Rights Legal Clinic fought and won in favor of same-sex inheritance claims – even if the partner dies without leaving a will. Other reforms the clinics have initiated and brought to pass include opening access to public beaches and making cochlear implants available to all people in Israel. Dr. Neta Ziv, academic director of the clinical program, says all six Cegla Legal Clinics have a two-pronged goal of teaching law and improving Israeli society. “We pull in students as they go through law school and teach them that being a lawyer includes social responsibility, ethics and social justice.” Through her own devotion to a number of causes, Ziv sets a good example of how a lawyer can align her professional work with serving society. Ziv is a founding member of the Israel Women’s Network Legal Center; is the chairperson of Bizchut – The Israel Human Rights Center for People with Disabilities; and is board member of Itach – Women Lawyers for Social Justice. “At the clinics we provide legal assistance that helps people solve their problems, and on a higher level we work to change, create and enforce laws,” says Ziv, who believes poverty, limited access to justice, and lack of essential resources in segments of the society are the top three problems Israel as a country faces today. As part of her daily work, Ziv exposes students to both small and large problems. She asks students, “How can we improve the lives of children in development towns when their libraries are shut down? How can we improve the study conditions of Bedouin children when there is no electricity in their homes?” Then through their work at the individual clinics, the law students attempt to answer those questions. Attorney Dori Spivak, deputy director of the clinical programs at TAU, says the Cegla Clinic has the largest human rights legal team in the country. It not only works to educate young law students, it also partners with local NGOs, giving them a team of lawyers at arm’s length for counsel or representation in court. “There are great advantages to working on social justice issues within a university,” says Spivak. “Here we can leverage the experience and expertise of the university’s law professors and at the same time tap into the motivation and talent of the law students to accomplish our goals.” Contacts: Dr. Neta Ziv, Director of the Cegla Clinical Law Programs zneta@post.tau.ac.il 972 3 640 5237 :;
Appointments and honors
	Prof. (emeritus) Zvi Hashin Prof. (emeritus) Zvi Hashin of the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering has been awarded the Israel Prize in Engineering for 2007.
	Prof. Elisha Efrat Prof. Elisha Efrat of the Department of Geography and Human Environment has been awarded the Israel Prize in Geography for 2007.
	Prof. Daniel Friedmann Professor Emeritus of Law and former Dean of the Buchmann Faculty of Law at TAU, and winner of the 1991 Israel Prize, has been appointed as Israel`s Minister of Justice.
Visitors on campus
	Pianist Dr. Leslie Howard visited the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music and lectured on "Liszt – The Known and the Unknown."
Tel Aviv Notes
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The Struggle for Lebanon  by Prof. Asher Susser The war in the summer of 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah and the ongoing standoff between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Seniora are part of a struggle for power that reaches far beyond the borders of Lebanon. In fact, this is a struggle for regional hegemony between Iran, on the one hand, and a number of Arab states and Israel, on the other. In recent decades, the most important shift in the Middle Eastern power structure has been the steady decline of the relative power and influence of major Arab states such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, coupled with the concomitant increase in the regional clout of the region’s non-Arab countries—Iran, Israel and Turkey. Turkey is seemingly being gradually edged out of Europe. Its religious-conservative government and large segments of the public are becoming evermore attentive to Turkey’s Middle Eastern hinterland. This trend has been greatly accelerated by the possible break-up of Iraq in the wake of the US invasion, and the resultant political vacuum in the Arab East. Kurdish independence in Northern Iraq would impinge very directly on Turkish security and territorial integrity, because of the large Kurdish minority in Eastern Turkey. The Turks, needless to say, watch Iraq very closely. Even more importantly, the war in Iraq has catalyzed Iran`s rise as a regional great power. The crushing of Ba`thi Iraq, the gate-keeper in the Arab East against Iranian expansionist influence, and the empowerment of the country`s heretofore downtrodden Shi`ite majority have transformed Iraq into the first Arab state dominated by Shi`ites. Consequently, Iraq has become a regional platform for Iranian penetration into the Arab world, the likes of which has never existed in the modern era. Simultaneously, though unconnected with Iraq, the Shi`ites in Lebanon have in recent decades become the single largest demographic group, overtaking the Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims. The expressed concern of Jordan`s King Abdullah in late 2004 over the emerging “Shi`ite crescent” of influence stretching from Tehran via Baghdad and on to Beirut was a tangible manifestation of how these developments are viewed in Arab capitals. Hence, the recent war between Israel and Hizbullah was clearly not just another round in the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, it was not an Arab-Israeli war at all, but rather a clash between Israel and Iran through its proxy, Hizbullah, in Lebanon. Syria certainly aided Hizbullah, but its role was secondary to Iran`s, while the other Sunni Arab states remained on the sidelines as passive bystanders. Some of these states — particularly those who had fought against Israel in the more distant past — actually wished for Israel to win the war more decisively February 28, 2006 Tel Aviv Notes is distributed to a select readership via fax. Comments are welcome and may be faxed to +972-3-6407924. Readers who prefer to receive Tel Aviv Notes via e-mail are invited to send their e-mail address to carmela@post.tau.ac.il than it really did. They sincerely hoped that Israel would deal a more destructive blow to the Iranian--Hizbullah—Shi`ite alliance that provided encouragement and moral support to those Islamic revolutionary forces that threatened the cohesion of a number of Arab states, not to mention the stability of their regimes. Lebanon has thus become the battlefield for the struggle over the new Middle East, which pits the Sunni Arab states, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, seeking to preserve the stability of the state order and to keep Iran at bay, against Tehran, the Arab Shi`ites and other non-state actors seeking to destabilize the region by force. In contrast to the old rules of the game whereby Israel was deemed to be a foreign force that was automatically excluded from any regional alliance, Israel now, for the first time in its history, actually belongs to one of the region’s competing camps, the Arab anti-Shi`ite bloc. Lebanon finds itself yet again at a historical juncture. Since its foundation as Greater Lebanon in 1920, the country has wrestled with its identity. In the early years of statehood, Lebanon vacillated between two main options. On the one hand, the dominance of its Christian communities and the country`s intimate bond with France pulled it in the direction of a strong relationship with the West. But after the defeat of France in June 1940, the county’s two leading communities, the Maronite Christians and the Sunni Muslims, clearly understood that in order to preserve the country’s stability and domestic cohesion, Lebanon would have to seek the protection not of France but of the Arab hinterland. With the constant proportional decline in size of the Maronite community, and the erosion of French power and influence, this question was finally settled, as Lebanon became a full-fledged Arab state and a founding member of the Arab League at the end of the Second World War. Today, however, Lebanon`s identity and place in the regional order are being debated yet again, but with a significantly different thrust. Is Lebanon still an integral part of the Sunni Muslim Arab World, as per the desire of its non- Shi‘ite communities (Sunnis, Maronites and other Christians, and the Druze), or will its Shi‘ite community drag the country into the heart of the Iranian-Shi`ite arc of influence? Needless to say, Shi‘ite political supremacy in Lebanon would serve the interests of their Iranian and Syrian allies. The Sunni Muslim Arabs and Israel, therefore, have common cause to preserve Lebanon as part and parcel of the Sunni Arab heartland, and to contain Hizbullah and the Shi`ites. More specifically, the Sunni Arab states and Israel seek to contain Hizbullah’s “state within a state” and to degrade the organization’s capacity to whittle away at the sovereignty of Lebanon on Iran’s behalf. For the meantime, at least, the government of Fouad Seniora and his Sunni, Maronite and Druze allies is holding fast, showing unexpected grit and determination. They know perfectly well what is at stake. If they learned anything from last summer`s war, it was the prohibitive cost of allowing Lebanon to be converted into an Iranian (and Syrian) outpost poised on Israel’s northern border. In these circumstances, Israel should think twice about negotiating with Syria. If such negotiations would empower Syria in any manner or form in relation to the Seniora government, Israel would be doing itself a great disservice, eroding its most important achievement of the recent war in Lebanon: the containment of Iran`s Lebanese client and the strengthening of the will-power of Seniora and his allies. Any negotiations with Syria would have to be preceded by having already insured that such erosion could not occur.
Research at TAU
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	Three computer scientists from TAU have developed an enhancement tool for retouching digital images. Called the Beauty Function, their program scans an image of your face, studies it and produces a slightly more beautiful you. The full article.

Editor: Gill Rosner1