DURHAM, N.C. – Anti-Israel groups across the nation descended this weekend on a nervous Duke University. The school was playing host to a conference whose organizers repeatedly called for the destruction of the Jewish state and refused to condemn Palestinian Arab suicide bombings.

With teams of armed campus police stationed around campus, hundreds of anti-Israel activists and a smaller number of Duke students filled campus buildings to hear Arab speakers accuse the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing and attend workshops on how to counter Israeli propaganda in America.

Yesterday evening, about 60 members of the group marched to the main quad on the west campus and then stood with their backs facing a couple of dozen Jewish protesters, who were led by a New York rabbi, Avi Weiss, from the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx. As Rabbi Weiss chanted “Condemn terrorism,” the anti-Israel activists shouted, “Divest from apartheid Israel.”

Duke’s decision in August to allow the Palestine Solidarity Movement to use the school for its annual conference has polarized this sprawling campus, more accustomed to fervor over Blue Devils basketball than political strife.

By permitting a conference that implicitly condones terrorism, Duke’s newly installed president, Richard Brodhead, said he was reaffirming the school’s commitment to academic freedom.

Duke officials, who said they wished organizers had chosen a different campus for their meeting, said the event was properly registered by a Duke student group called Hiwar.

Opponents of the event, including some but not all Jewish students on campus, said Duke was granting legitimacy to a group that supports terrorist violence against all Israelis: soldiers, settlers in occupied territories, and civilians inside the Green Line.

Tense officials of the school have been working overtime for weeks defending the school’s decision, as concern over the event has dominated local news coverage and attracted some national attention.

Duke’s president said he “deplores” violence in the Middle East and said the school will not support any plan to divest from companies doing business with Israel.

Though Duke feared the worst this weekend, spending more than $50,000 on security, the atmosphere on campus was largely calm.

The school had a scare yesterday morning, when an anonymous caller threatened to bomb the student center where the conference was meeting. The building was evacuated for about an hour and no bomb was found. Police are investigating the call.

Fewer people came to the conference or protested it than officials had anticipated, however.

The campus’s largest Jewish organization, the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, urged Jewish students not to confront directly the visiting activists, and it arranged sober lectures about the Middle East conflict at the center, a half-mile away.

“If you don’t have the ability to have a discussion, what is the point of standing out there and being confrontational?” said the executive director of the Freeman Center, Jonathan Gerstl.

The conference marked one of the largest gatherings of anti-Israel student leaders in America. For organizers, it served as an annual forum for discussing how to promote anti-Israel activism on American college campuses, particularly divestiture campaigns modeled after ones in the 1980s against apartheid in South Africa. Divestiture campaigns against Israel have so far gained negligible support among American university administrations, but some backing from professors and students.

The refrain heard from a variety of participants was that Israel is a racist, apartheid state, whose human-rights violations tower above those of all other countries. Most spoke of a “one-state solution” for the conflict, and many said the violence would not end until all Palestinian refugees are allowed to return to Israel and Israel no longer is a Jewish state. Few said they hoped for peace.

The event was organized by the three-year-old Palestine Solidarity Movement, which consists of several anti-Israel groups based primarily on American campuses. Previously, the group has met at Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley. The former University of South Florida professor who is under federal indictment as a leader of the Islamic Jihad terrorist group, Sami al-Arian, attended the Michigan conference in 2002, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

As one of its guiding principles, the Palestine Solidarity Movement states: “As a solidarity movement, it is not our place to dictate the strategies or tactics adopted by the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation.” A spokesman for the group, Rann Bar-On, said condemning terrorism is an “empty statement” that “wouldn’t change anything.”

It is that refusal to condemn terrorism that has driven much of the outrage from Jewish students, who make up about 10% of Duke’s student body. Leading up to the weekend, Jewish students staged rallies and held an “antiterrorism” concert on campus, which was endorsed by a number of Duke Muslim groups. Students even arranged for a bombed-out Jerusalem bus, ruined in a January suicide bombing, to be placed in front of Duke Chapel for two days last week.

Palestine Solidarity Movement shares much of the same membership of the International Solidarity Movement, a group co-founded by a well-known activist, Adam Shapiro, and accused by Israel of having links to an Islamic terrorist from Britain who blew up an Israeli cafe, Mike’s Place, on April 30, 2003. The group says it opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through nonviolent measures only. It gained international attention last year when one of its members, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer destroying homes of accused terrorists.

One speaker at the conference, Nasser Abufarha, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, said Saturday he supported Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, saying they “establish life in Palestine.” Mr. Abufarha said in an interview he does not condemn suicide bombings and blamed the American press for associating the groups with violence.

Another speaker, Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor of genetics at Yale University and a founder of a group that demands the “right of return” for Palestinians, called Zionism “a disease,” and said the origin of the violence in the Middle East is “the idea that the land belongs to the Jewish people.”

Though most in the room were sympathetic to the cause, a couple of people who asked questions to panelists rebuked them for not denouncing terrorism. That provoked jeers and laughter from the audience.

Leaders of the event vehemently denied being anti-Semitic and pointed to the participation of a number of Jewish groups, including Jews Against the Occupation in New York City and Jews for a Just Peace in North Carolina, as proof.

It was Jews Against the Occupation that led a Saturday talk, “Anatomy of the Organized Zionist Community in the United States,” that provided a timeline of American Zionist expansion, beginning with the expulsion of Jews from Spain and ending with the death of Corrie and the invasion of Iraq.

At a basketball gym where the conference set up base, activists sold T-shirts with a map of Israel stamped with the word “Palestine.” Every participant received a map of Israel that read, “Palestine 1948,” and which described Israel’s founding as the “largest planned ethnic cleansing in modern history.”

On Friday night, a legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, Diana Buttu, told about 300 gatherers that Israel was “attempting to rid itself of Palestinians” and said Israel’s West Bank security fence is “not being built for security purposes.” Asked about corruption in Yasser Arafat’s government, she said, “The real issue isn’t corruption. It’s occupation. We’ve had international bodies looking into corruption for several years now.”

Later that night, a self-described “hip-hop theater” performer, Mark Gonzales, shouted a five-minute, pounding monologue that described Jesus as Palestinian.

“If you want to get into it, Jesus was the Palestinian, ‘cuz where he was born, Bethlehem, is in Palestine, where he was raised, Nazareth, is in Palestine, and where he was tried, East Jerusalem, is in Palestine. Two thousand years after his birth, modern Romans are once again killing Palestinian prophets, only now they crucify them on checkpoints instead of crosses,” Mr. Gonzales said. He teaches reading and writing to juvenile inmates at a Los Angeles prison.

“After all is said and done, it turned out that this has been a catalyst for a lot of discussion,” John Burness, a spokesman and senior vice president for Duke, said Saturday. “Students are given a chance to make up their minds.”

“I don’t think there is a dialogue,” said Duke sophomore Brad Harris, who did not attend the conference. “If you’re standing in the middle, it’s hard to glean an unbiased view of the issue.”

Earlier in the week, the director of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes, who is a columnist for The New York Sun, addressed Duke students in a speech that urged a tougher stance against Palestinian Arabs who support terrorism and reject Israel’s right to exist.

Most of the people who showed up this weekend came from outside Duke University, and many of those Duke students who did attend events were affiliated with left-wing and anti-Israel groups. Asked about the turnout, one organizer said many Duke students were “drinking beer and watching basketball” instead of attending the event.

Some participants in the conference quietly rejected the leadership’s tolerant view of Palestinian Arab terrorism. “As a Muslim,” Jordan Robinson, a sophomore at Ohio University, said, “I don’t believe in suicide.”