Sadat's vision of Mideast remains timely

Kofi Annan, Secretary General, United Nations, Maryland, U.S.

In just one week's time, we shall reach the 25th anniversary of President Anwar Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, in 1977.

Seldom has a political move deserved so richly to be called "historic".

It caught the imagination of the world. It transformed the political landscape of the Middle East. And it defined Anwar Sadat as a historical figure.

President Sadat showed courage, decisiveness and extraordinary political insight when he did what until then had seemed unthinkable for any Arab leader: he went to Jerusalem and declared, directly to the Israeli parliament and people, that "we welcome you among us with full security and safety".

His visit represented an extraordinary leap of faith and imagination. He understood that the Arabs could not recover the land that Israel had occupied unless, in return, they offered full and genuine peace.

And he had the intelligence and imagination to make a gesture that sparked a response in the hearts of the Israeli people. He was able to convince them that they really could enjoy peace with Egypt if -- but only if -- they gave up their occupation of Egyptian land. As he said, "there is no peace that could be build on the occupation of the land of others."

And thus his gesture started a process leading to a peace treaty between the two countries based on normal relations and full Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory. In other words, land for peace.

Alas, Sadat's journey also led, or at least contributed, to his untimely death. He himself must have known the risk, and that is the measure of his courage. Like Yitzhak Rabin 14 years later, he paid the price of peace with his own life.

I wish I could say that those two sacrifices had brought a just, lasting and comprehensive peace to the Middle East, or that the leaders of today had shown a similar level of courage, vision and statesmanship. Sadly, I cannot. As we speak, Israelis and Palestinians are still locked in bitter conflict.

Nor is there yet peace between Israel and its northern neighbors. The truce on that front remains fragile and precarious.

An atmosphere of gloom and defeatism has descended on the region. There is the same "utter suspicion and absolute lack of confidence" between the two sides, of which Sadat spoke in the Knesset. How right he was to warn that "in the absence of a just solution of the Palestinian problem, never will there be that durable and just peace upon which the entire world insists"!

On both the Palestinian and Israeli side only those who believe their enemy can be defeated by force and violence show a grim confidence in the ultimate success of their chosen path.

Yet on both sides, that confidence is surely misplaced. No matter what price they are forced to pay, Israelis will not abandon the State they have built.

Nor indeed would the United Nations ever allow one of its member states to be destroyed by external force. It was to prevent such things from happening that the UN was founded, and 12 years ago, in Kuwait, it showed itself capable of rising to the challenge.

But it should also be clear by now that Palestinians will never reconcile themselves to the continued occupation and expropriation of their land, nor renounce their claim to statehood and national independence.

They are just as firmly attached to their land as Israelis are to theirs, and just as strong in their national aspirations. They too have a right to their own state, supported by the UN and by public opinion worldwide.

The only way to settle this conflict remains the solution envisioned by the UN Security Council, and indeed by Anwar Sadat in that historic speech to the Knesset 25 years ago: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side within secure and recognized borders.

And while the precise location of those borders is to be negotiated between the parties, surely no one doubts that they must be based, as Sadat said, on "ending the occupation of the Arab territories occupied in 1967".

In that very year, shortly after Israel occupied the remaining parts of mandatory Palestine, along with Egyptian Sinai and Syrian Golan, the Security Council emphasized the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war, and affirmed that just and lasting peace in the Middle East must be based on Israeli withdrawal from "territories occupied in the recent conflict", as well as the right of every state in the area "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force".

That is the principle of "land for peace" -- and that resolution, number 242, has long been accepted by all parties as the basis of a peaceful settlement.

Such a settlement is envisaged in the Saudi peace initiative, endorsed by the Arab States at their summit last March -- and it remains the preferred solution of both Israelis and Palestinians. On this point, all opinion polls concur.

The majority of Palestinians accept the continued existence of Israel, and are ready to live alongside it in their own State. And the majority of Israelis accept that peace requires the establishment of a Palestinian State in nearly all of the territory occupied in 1967.

What is missing, on each side, is trust in the other -- and without that trust, the hope of peace becomes hard to sustain. Israelis, bludgeoned by repeated terrorist attacks which take a horrible toll of civilian life, have lost faith in the Palestinian will to peace.

They ask themselves if the partner they thought they had found in the Oslo accords really exists. They wonder if the Palestinian intention is really, after all, to drive them into the sea. Their doubts are fed by the words, as well as the deeds, of Palestinian extremists, and by the joy that sometimes erupts in the Palestinian streets after a particularly bloody terrorist outrage.

This leads to increasing public support for the draconian security measures that have pushed more than a million Palestinians below the poverty line; and the majority of Israelis who favor trading land for peace are reluctant, with no peace in sight, to confront the powerful minority who wish to keep the occupied land for ever.

Yet tragically those same draconian measures, combined with the continued and intensifying process of Israeli settlement in the occupied territory, have the effect of pushing the prospect of peace and lasting security further and further away.

Palestinians, on their side, have lost faith in the Israeli will to peace. They point to the unacceptable policy of assassinations of militants -- some of them carried out in densely populated areas and causing large-scale civilian casualties. They note that Israel piles precondition on precondition for a return to the negotiating table, and destroys the governing institutions of the Palestinian Authority even while calling for their reform.

Confined by roadblocks to their towns and villages, and much of the time by curfews in their homes, the Palestinians watch hilltop after hilltop covered by new Israeli buildings, and valley after valley criss-crossed by roads reserved for Israeli settlers.

In some places, Palestinian farmers have even been shot dead by extremist settlers intent on robbing them of their olive harvest. As one Israeli journalist has put it, this sends a message that "it's not a war on terror in the territories but a campaign to deepen the poverty and hunger of the Palestinian population", and so to drive them off their land.

There are Palestinians who have courageously raised their voices against the wicked and counterproductive tactics of terror and suicide bombing. But in the present atmosphere they find it hard to make themselves heard.

This is the author's Anwar Sadat Memorial Lecture presented at the University of Maryland on Thursday.