A delegation of the University’s Middle East scholars met on 5 July with the Crown Prince of Jordan at the royal palace in Amman. The Prince accepted an invitation to visit the University at an appropriate occasion. The purpose of the Haifa academics’ trip was to present Prince Hassan with a book based on a conference that had begun in Amman and then moved to Haifa. The recently published volume contains forewords written by the Crown Prince and by Member of Knesset and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Entitled The Jordanian-Palestinian-Israeli Triangle--Smoothing the Path to Peace, the book was edited by two University of Haifa faculty members, Prof. Joseph Ginat of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Dr. Onn Winckler of the Department of Middle East History.

The book itself contains 16 of the papers originally delivered at the unusual conference, which took place on both sides of the Jordan River in December 1995. In addition to Jordan and Israel, conference participants came from the United States, Europe, and the Palestinian Authority.

The book was sponsored by the Center for National Human Resources Development in Amman, the Jewish-Arab Center and the Gustav Heinemann Institute of Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Haifa, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Bertha von Suttner Research Program of Germany, and the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation of the University of California. It was published by Sussex Academic Press of Great Britain and the United States.

Representing the University in the delegation were the Rector, Prof. Gad Gilbar, an expert in Middle East demographics who had an essay in the book; Dr. Ibrahim Geries, head of the University’s Jewish-Arab Center; Prof. Joseph Ginat, head of the Center at the time of the conference and a former adviser on Arab affairs to the late Moshe Dayan and to President Ezer Weizman when he was a Cabinet minister; and Dr. Onn Winckler.

Among other topics, the University faculty members and Prince Hassan discussed the possibilities of continued cooperation in scholarly activity in a number of fields. Participants described the meeting as extremely cordial.