The Jerusalem Post Tuesday, August 3, 1999

By BERNARD WASSERSTEIN

A few years ago, when I was teaching at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, I received a phone call from a member of the university administration.Would I like to have visiting professor Natan Sharansky come and talk to my class? I agreed readily.Sharansky came and spoke and fascinated my students. They were surprised and impressed by the directness, the unpretentiousness of the man: he did not speak in the slogans of a professional Soviet dissident nor in the pat-phrases of the Zionist propagandist but rather in his own distinctive voice and with an idiosyncratic view of the world. Over the next few weeks, we became used to the sight of Sharansky, his cap at a jaunty angle, biking round the campus.We all liked him so much we had him back the following year as a visiting professor. About 10 days ago, I read Sharansky' s first major public statement as interior minister and was once again iimpressed. He announced that he was going to end the policy, pursued by his predecessors, of promoting by bureaucratic devices the so-called "quiet transfer" of Arab residents out of Jerusalem. Over the past few years thousands of Arabs, accused of having "transplanted the center of their lives outside of Jerusalem" have found their Jerusalem residency permits revoked by the Interior Ministry. Sharansky announced that, while the policy might have been technically in accordance with the law, "sometimes the time comes to check whether the law is contributing to the goal it is intended to serve. It should be recognized that the situation in East Jerusalem is a special situation."

The very next day, an official in Sharansky's ministry dispatched a letter to Dr Musa Budeiri, a member of the faculty of al-Quds University and a resident of east Jerusalem, informing him that his residency permit had been revoked and that he was henceforth regarded as a " tourist" in the country.He was given a visa, valid for four weeks, and told that he would have to leave by August 22. When he inquired as to the reasons for this decision, it was explained that he had "spent too long abroad." In recent years he has, in fact, been a visiting scholar at a number ofuniversities overseas, among them Princeton, Cambridge, and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. It was while he was a visiting professor at the last institution that Budeiri too came to Brandeis and spoke to my class. Interestingly, the students were struck by a similar combination of qualities that they had noticed in Sharansky - intellectual originality, no-nonsense forthrightness, refusal to put up with prepared-food propaganda slogans from any source. Now the one visiting professor has expelled the other from the city of his birth - and all because he has done too much professorial visiting.

No charge of any kind has been laid against Budeiri. He is a scholar, not a political activist. He is not one of the hundreds of former terrorists who now walk freely around the country - perhaps if he were, this would not have happened to him. His family have lived in Jerusalem for hundreds of years, under Ottoman, British and Jordanian rule; they furnished many notable figures in the religious, intellectual and public life of the city.

If a Budeiri can be expelled, then what is to stop the entire Arab population of Jerusalem being turned, in due course, into "tourists" in their birthplace? I do not know how I would feel if this happened to me. But I assume minister Sharansky knows, since he himself was expelled from his native country. How we all rejoiced when he walked across the Glienicke Bridge from Potsdam to west Berlin! It seems an age ago but Sharansky has tried to remain true to the values that inspired him -and the world - as a Zionist activist and, at the same time, a campaigner for human rights in the Soviet Union.He has long proclaimed, and rightly, that human rights are indivisible, that they are an indispensable basis, throughout the Middle East, for peace in the region.Now, after campaigning under the banner of Nash Kontrol in the last election, he has an opportunity to realize some of his goals. The Budeiri case is the first test of the new policy that he announced 10 days ago. Actually, I am confident that Sharansky will make the right decision. Not out of rachmones, (compassion) not because a number of influential voices have already expressed dismay at the decision, not because it is politically expedient, but because of the crying injustice of the thing. In fact, I am so confident that I shall report in thisspace in one month's time how ex-visiting-professor Sharansky has discharged his responsibilities in the case of ex-visiting-professor Budeiri.