Swarthmore College is set to host Palestinian students from across the country as part of the inaugural conference of the Palestinian Student Society of America, a group that claims to be apolitical, but whose founder also heads the Students Against the Occupation movement at the Delaware County campus.

The conference is set to take place at the school from March 31 to April 2. The organizer received a $10,000 grant from Swarthmore's Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. Roughly 250 students are expected to attend the event.

Saed Atshan, a 21-year-old Swarthmore senior who grew up in Ramallah in the West Bank, said that the conference will focus on fostering dialogue and creating a network of resources for students of Palestinian heritage attending American colleges.

Atshan clearly drew a distinction between his group and the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which for the past five years has organized university conferences that have pushed for divestment from Israel and sought to link the Jewish state with apartheid South Africa.

"We do not have a political platform," Atshan wrote in an e-mail. "The purpose of the inaugural conference is to provide an opportunity for internal dialogue so that students collectively can decide how they would like to define the Palestinian Student Society."

Yet the Palestine Solidarity Movement - which has set aside March 30 as "National Day of Divestment Action" - is one of the links provided on the Palestinian Student Society's Web site.

The two featured speakers and workshop leaders - Columbia University professor Joseph Massad and Noura Erakat, legal counsel for the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation - are known for their staunchly anti-Israel views, according to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, president of the Zionist Organization of America's Philadelphia chapter...