During his lecture Tuesday night at the Center for International Studies, Arie Eliav, former secretary general of the Labour Party in Israel, explained that peace in the Middle East will only come through Israeli willingness to accept the "land for peace" plan and to talk "people to people" with the Palestinians and Arabs.

In front of an audience of 25 people, Eliav reviewed the process of the peace talks in the Middle East since the Six-Day War in 1967 and his role in the development of these peace talks, emphasizing that the peace process has yet to come to an end.

After the 1967 war, Eliav was one of a small minority within the Labour Party, then led by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, to believe it was time "to start meeting with the Palestinians and talking to them, people to people, even if they are our bitterest enemies."

"We both say that we have historical, national and religious rights to the whole of [the land]," Eliav said. "You can half the territory. It's not like it's King Solomon's baby."

Eliav, who was then in the top echelon of the Israeli government, ruined his political career by conceding that the Palestinians did have rights to the land. "As soon as I said that the Palestinians have right to the land, I became a dove," he said, "and it cost me my political career."

After he expressed this opinion by writing many books in the early 1970s, he entered a coalition with General Mati Peled and a few other Israelis from the military, the intellectual community and Knesset, the Israeli parliament, to begin political talks with the Palestinians.

In 1976, this group met with Palestinians such as Issam Sartawi, an assistant to PLO chairman Yassir Arafat, and by 1979, Eliav and Sartawi jointly received the Bruno Kreisky Peace Prize for initiating civil communication between the Israelis and Palestinians.

On Tuesday, Eliav showed the audience an overhead of Sartawi and himself shaking hands at the ceremony for that award, and then sadly remarked, "that handshake cost Sartawi his life," as Sartawi was assassinated in 1984 for his participation in the 1976 public discourse with Israelis.

In the last few years, Eliav has been working to ameliorate relations between Israeli and Palestinian territories and Arab nations by what he calls the "people-to-people approach." For example, he explained, his work in the rural development of the Nitzana community in Negev, Israel is aimed toward better relations with Egypt.

Eliav has started a youth village in Nitzana where "young Israelis live and learn one mile from the Egyptian border." Eliav said he and the students are building a path-extending from Nitzana to the Egyptian border-of 100 large columns, each engraved with the word "peace" in a different ancient or modern language.

Eliav concluded his talk with the prediction that "the future of the Middle East is somewhere between the path of war and the path of peace," and he expressed hope that the columns and other efforts would persuade "the younger generation to take the path of peace."

The lecture was the third of the Rudnick Lectureship series that deals with issues in the Middle East. These lectures are organized by the Office of Vice Provost for Academic and International Affairs and the Center for International Studies, and Tuesday's speech was co-sponsored by the North Carolina-Israel Partnership.