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.
As a result, 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 built 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 he was taking, and that is the measure of his
courage. Like Yitzhak Rabin 14 years later, he paid the
price of peace with his own life.
Looking at the Middle East peace process today, I wish I
could say that those two sacrifices had brought a just,
lasting and comprehensive peace to the Middle East, or
at least 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
neighbours. 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 sides -– Palestinian and Israeli -– 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, I venture to affirm, 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 United Nations 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 United Nations and by public
opinion worldwide.
The only way to settle this conflict remains the
solution envisioned by the United Nations 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 1967, 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 -- and President Bush in
his speech to the General Assembly also endorsed this
solution.
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 favour 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.
Given the events of the past two years, it was perhaps
inevitable that both peoples would come to doubt,
fundamentally, each other’s real commitment to peace.
With every passing day, such doubts become more deeply
embedded, and the task of renewing political
negotiations gets even harder.
Somehow, we have to restore hope to both peoples, by
patiently rebuilding their trust in each other. And
that is what the Quartet of interested external parties
–- the United Nations, United States, European Union and
Russian Federation -– is seeking to do, by setting out a
credible road map: a road map of synchronized steps
that can lead, within three years, from the grim
situation we are in now, to the peaceful two-State
solution that the majority on both sides desire.
This road map is
being prepared with great care. It is now very nearly
finalized.
We in the Quartet fully realize that the credibility of
this road map will depend on performance. But
performance, in turn, depends on hope. Without a clear
promise of the end result, and visible political
progress towards it, neither side is likely to summon
the will to take the risks that each must take, right
from the start, to improve the security and living
conditions of the other. That is why we say that the
process must be “hope-driven”, as well as
performance-driven.
And that, surely, is where all parties can learn from
the example of Anwar Sadat.
By all conventional wisdom, he should not have done what
he did. Going to Jerusalem, with no assurance in
advance of any concessions from the other side, seemed
to almost all Arabs at the time an act of folly, if not
outright treason.
Yet President Sadat understood the vital importance of
psychology in war and peace.
He understood that political behaviour is deeply
influenced by the mental image that each side has of the
other -– and that sometimes this image can only be
changed by an act of breathtakingly radical daring.
By a leap of imagination, Sadat understood that, while
Arabs felt oppressed by Israel’s seemingly overwhelming
strength, Israel felt threatened by the uniform
hostility of the surrounding Arab world.
More than anything, the Israeli people needed -– and
still need -– the sense of being accepted by their
neighbours, in order to find the courage to renew
negotiations in good faith, despite all the traumas of
the last two years, and to make the necessary
concessions.
In the stage the conflict has now reached, I believe
both sides are
aching for
that sense of acceptance.
Many Palestinians, seeing the devastation Israel is able
to inflict on their society, find it hard to imagine
that Israelis also live in fear, and that only by
removing that fear can they hope to reach a new and more
balanced relationship. Yet it is true.
And many Israelis believe they have already done enough
to prove their willingness to accept Palestinians as
neighbours, and allow them space in which to develop
their national life.
Unhappily, the life experience of many Palestinians has
been very different, and Israel needs to do much more to
win their trust. As long as the settlement building and
land confiscation continue, as long as a political
horizon is missing, as long as there is no real
commitment to negotiate the remaining final status
issues, Palestinians will never be convinced of Israel’s
desire for peace.
That may be hard for Israelis to believe. Yet it is
true.
The international community stands ready to help.
Indeed, we must help both Israelis and Palestinians to
break through the barrier of which Sadat spoke: “a
barrier of suspicion, a barrier of rejection; a barrier
of fear, of deception, a barrier of hallucination a
barrier of distorted interpretation of every event and
statement”.
But we can only help those who are willing to be helped.
What is needed on both sides is true leadership, such as
Anwar Sadat provided in his time. Let us pray that they
find it before it is too late.
Thank you very much.
Peace will come through courage - Outlook Online,
November 19, 2002
