U.S.-Mideast Connection: The News Becomes Less Foreign
Americans got a shocking reminder this week that their connection to the conflict here is not just strategic but personal, even intimate.

Five Americans were among the seven people killed at Hebrew University on Wednesday by a bomb in a cafeteria.

Daniel C. Kurtzer, the American ambassador to Israel, who visited the campus on Thursday to lay a wreath in memory of the dead, was himself a graduate of the university, which depends heavily on American donors. The cafeteria is named for Frank Sinatra, a donor, and it faces Nancy Reagan Plaza, which the wounded stained with their blood.

The connection runs deep on both sides of the ethnic and religious divide here. But even though Yankees caps are seen on the heads of both Arabs and Jews here, the divisions seem to erase any effect of the American melting pot.

American officials say that about 90,000 people living in this land have American citizenship; they are said to be evenly split between Palestinians and Israelis. In the West Bank, a Palestinian who has lived in New Jersey might describe arguing at a checkpoint with an Israeli soldier from Brooklyn.

People on both sides of the conflict have been seeking visas to go to the United States during the conflict, though recently fewer Palestinians have turned up at the American Consulate in East Jerusalem — apparently because of the Israeli restrictions on Palestinians' movements through the West Bank.

In Nablus, in the West Bank, where Israeli forces brandishing American-made M-16 rifles spent another day today hunting for explosive laboratories and suspects in the casbah, many shop signs are in English. One advertises washers by Maytag, whose factory in Newton, Iowa is a favorite stop for American presidential candidates.

The Bush administration, more than other recent administrations, has tilted toward the Israeli government in its policy, in the view of Israeli and Palestinian officials. From the time he came into office, President Bush refused to meet with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and the administration has increasingly identified with the Israeli government since the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11. President Bush has demanded that Mr. Arafat be replaced as leader before substantive political negotiations resume.

But Mr. Bush is also the first president to speak explicitly of a state of "Palestine," which he has said could be established within three years. The attack on Hebrew University came just as the Bush administration was stepping up pressure on the Israeli government to ease the restrictions on Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Even some of the leaders of the militant Islamic group Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the Hebrew University bombing, were educated in the United States. Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader and structural engineer in Gaza City, dwelled in one interview on how stunningly beautiful he had found Vermont. It was there, and in Colorado, that he learned his fluent English.

Mr. Abu Shanab has argued that the United States, as the only country with sufficient power and influence, should step in and impose a peace on the warring peoples.

Hamas said its attack on the campus was in retaliation for an Israeli air raid on Gaza City last week that killed its intended target, a Hamas leader, but also 14 other people, 9 of them children. Israel used an American-made F-16 warplane for that attack.

The patterns of the American connections are different. For generations, Palestinians born in the West Bank have gone to the United States to study or to work. They have attained American citizenship, which they then passed on to their children, who as teenagers then followed their parents' path to the Bronx or Bakersfield, Calif.

Palestinian-Americans tend to return home eventually to rejoin their extended families, though more of them are fleeing the conflict, at least temporarily, for the United States.

Some Israelis also go to the United States to work or study. But American Jews in Israel tend to have been born in the United States. They come here to study for a time or to become dual citizens and to settle down — or, literally, to settle in the predominantly Palestinian West Bank or in the Gaza Strip, which they regard as their divinely promised home
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/international/middleeast/04MIDE.html