When you read about a pro-Palestinian demonstration on a university campus, or some professor making anti-Israel comments, you might get the false impression that campuses generally are unfriendly places for Jews and Israel-sympathizers.

Wayne L. Firestone, director of the national Hillel Foundation Center on Israel Affairs, estimated that perhaps 5 percent of the population on most campuses are fervently anti-Zionist, while another 5 percent are pro-Israel.

The remaining 90 percent, he said, are somewhere in the middle.

In San Diego on May 5 for meetings with the local Hillel leadership, Firestone said the import of these statistics is that the Jewish community should worry less about confronting the anti-Zionists on the campuses and instead spend its time generating positive campaigns about Israel to
influence the 90 percent in the middle.

Firestone said that rather than being swayed toward one side or the other by noisy demonstrations or angry confrontations, the 90 percent in the middle tend to view such controversy with distaste for both sides.

The Hillel official said on-campus demonstrations and counter-demonstrations thereby play into the hands of the anti-Zionists, who desire to subject U.S. campuses to ³the same kind of chaos and intimidation² one encounters in the Middle East.

"When we play into that, I believe we give them a victory they don¹t deserve," Firestone said. "By extracting ourselves, by choice, from these fights that they try to pick and focusing on our own messages, our own goals and our own pro-active agenda, I think we can accomplish just a whole lot more on campus."

This thinking was the genesis of the "Israel 101" campaign in which Hillel chapters at nearly 300 universities across the nation accepted the challenge of creating programs and drives on their campuses to generate positive feelings about Israel. On many college campuses, "101" is the number given to an introductory course in a subject.

Firestone said the national Hillel offices knew that a campaign imposed on the students from above would not work. Only a campaign designed by students themselves would give them a sense of ownership. This "bottom up" rather than "top down" campaign generated an incredible variety of approaches, he said. The top 101 campaigns will be recognized when students exchange ideas at a Hillel retreat in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania in August, he
said.

While students were authorized to design their own messages about Israel, there was a policy that all campaigns should be compatible with the statement: "We support Israel's right to exist and flourish as a Jewish state within secure and recognized boundaries."

Firestone noted that formula left plenty of room for students to have differences over what those boundaries might be, or what the character of a Jewish state might be.

Among the many campaigns across the country was the "Got Israel" campaign mounted by Hillel students at UCSD this year. That campaign, which parodied the successful "Got Milk" advertising campaign on television, presented various "cool" facts about Israel— such as actress Natalie Portman was born there— in a way to attract student attention.

One of the facts students emphasized was that Israeli law is more supportive of both women's reproductive rights and gay rights than are the laws in surrounding Islamic countries.

Students made this point by passing out literature to this effect along with condoms in a package stamped with an Israeli flag design and the double-entendre message: "Israel: it's still safe to come."

Critics of the program, including letter writers to Heritage, suggested that placing an Israeli flag on the condom was a desecration of that flag. They said such an image would have caused outrage in the Jewish community if a non-Jewish group had disseminated it. Further, critics said, the message improperly associates sexual promiscuity with Israel.

Firestone told Heritage that the critics apparently don¹t realize how commonplace condoms are on university campuses. He said nearly every Hillel house across the country has a condom machine in its bathroom. Given how often students are exposed to condoms— along with the idea that they should practice "safe" sex — associating Israel with safe sex, in the minds of the
students, is not an insult but a compliment.

Other messages in the "Got Israel" campaign dealt with a variety of facts about Israel, including that you can go skiing on Mt. Hermon and that Israel is one of the world leaders in Internet technology.

The UCSD campaign is one of the standouts in the national "Israel 101" effort, Firestone said. Other standouts included a scholarly journal on Israel produced by Jewish students at Yale University that was distributed just in time for an on-campus meeting of distinguished alumni of the Yale Daily News. A lot of famous journalists, including cartoonist Garry Trudeau,
were exposed to the journal, as were fellow students and faculty, Firestone said.

At other campuses, students mailed postcards produced by national Hillel. During Black History Month, for example, students at Ohio State University sent out a postcard picturing the slain civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and bearing his quotation: "Israel is one of the greatest
outposts of democracy in the world and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy."

Pro-Israel students at Cornell and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst banged drums and rang bells in opposition to the U.S.-led war against Iraq. They also passed out postcards with this quote from assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat: "When the bells of peace ring, there will be no hands to beat the drums of war. Even if they existed, they would be soundless."

At San Francisco State University, where some vociferous anti-Israel demonstrations have occurred, students distributed strawberries and postcards bearing this quote from the late Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir: "We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel."

Firestone said it is too early to determine what impact these various campaigns are having on the 90 percent of the campus populations at whom they are aimed. However, he said, judging by his own experiences as a Jewish student activist in the 1970s, they may have lasting impact on the Jewish students who formulated the campaigns

When he was a student at the University of Miami (Florida), he became very involved in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry. He authored Trial and Error, a play about the life of refusenik Yuli Edelstein that was produced at a number of college campuses. (Edelstein today is a member of Israel's Knesset.)

As he looks back on his college years, Firestone says he has forgotten much of the material he studied for his academic courses, and likewise has little memory of his professors. On the other hand, he remembers practically every detail of his involvement in the Soviet Jewry cause. It may be why, at a later portion in his life, he became a Jewish communal worker.

Firestone suggested that, depending on how involved they become in the "Israel 101" campaign, university students today may be similarly embarking on a lifelong involvement with Israel.