President LARRY BACOW (Tufts University): Trustees, overseers, friends, faculty, staff and most importantly, students, welcome to the 2002 Issam M. Fares lecture. I'd like to thank you all for attending what I know is going to be a memorable and extremely timely speech today by our distinguished guest, President William Jefferson Clinton.

Now it's a great pleasure, Trustees, faculty, students, friends, fellow guests, please join me in welcoming the 42nd president of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton.

Mr. WILLIAM CLINTON (Former President, United States): Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, members of the faculty and staff and the students. And Mr. President, I want to thank you and your wife for welcoming me into your home. It's kind of nice to be in a president's house again for a change. I hope you're not term limited.

I want to thank you, Professor Fawaz for making me feel welcome and Board Chair Gantzer thank you and I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to Dean Bosworth who served so ably as my ambassador to Korea--America's ambassador to Korea when I was there.

Your Excellency, Mr. Fares, thank you for your many gifts to Tufts and thank you for your remarks earlier. They persuaded me that I should somewhat alter mine and so I will in a moment.

I would like to thank, too, all the people here who have been a part of the life of America and a part of the life of this administration.

Forty percent of the undergrads at Tufts spend their junior year abroad, your most popular major is international relations, you are among the top supplier of Peace Corps volunteers. This university is contributing mightily to the welfare and security of our nation in the inter-dependent world of the 21st century and I thank you for that.

I think--I can't resist this. You know, I gave a speech at Harvard not long ago and I had a really good time and they treated me wonderfully and I'm sure I'll never be invited back if I tell this story, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'm going to tell this story.

In the year Tufts was founded, 1852, Ralph Waldo Emerson had an argument with Henry David Thoreau. Emerson said, `they teach all the branches of learning at Harvard.' To which Thoreau replied, `yes, all the branches, but none of the roots.' And I'm wondering if that was the spark that lit the light on the Hill, but I've decided to say that because today, if you want the roots of learning, they have to be grounded in the fact of our global inter-dependence.

I think it's a remarkable testament to the vision of the founders that the Fletcher School was established in 1933. Now, let me just remind you that in 1933, we were living in the aftermath of the draconian peace of Versailles that ended World War I. America then returned to economic and political isolation. We were in the midst of a depression, protectionism was rampant, trade was plunging, economies were sinking, Congress actually banned loans to countries in default on their World War I debt in the depression, when nobody could repay their debt.

And by 1993--1933, hope was poverty in Germany brought on by the raging inflation in the aftermath of World War I. And then the depression of the late 20s and early 30s had built the public resentment that brought Adolf Hitler to power and the world to the brink of ruin.

At this time, when the whole world was turning inward, unfortunately with America leading the way, Tufts was looking outward and founding the Fletcher School. So I want to say a special word of appreciation to you for that, for inviting me here today and to you, Your Excellency for your very outward-looking speech.

I have gotten a lot of gifts from this school. My former UN ambassador and energy secretary Bill Richardson, my deputy of health and human services Kevin Thurm, my deputy secretary of labor Tom Glynn, the chief of commonness at the Department of Labor Lisa Lynch, who's here today, Mike Feldman, a senior advisor to Vice President Gore, Debbie Johnston a special friend of mine who helped me get the AmeriCorp program through Congress and up and going.

I thank my friends Jonathan Tish and Allen Solomont and Ellen Walker who are here. All of whom are the products of this great school.

And Mr. Fares, let me thank you again for your generosity in supporting scholarships and programs, both in Lebanon and here.

Now, tonight I want to be brief about what American public figures usually talk about today, which is the fight against terrorism and what we're supposed to do about it. And instead, I think I would like to put this into a larger context that relates to the search for peace in the Middle East, the phenomenon of the Saudi Crown Prince Abdulla's recent statement about peace in the Middle East followed by what the Syrian president said, followed by President Bush's decision to send General Zinni back to the region on the mission of peace. At the same time, Vice President Cheney is there looking for support for renewed action against Saddam Hussein.

What does all this mean anyway? And how are you supposed to think about it and what is our country supposed to do about it? That's what I would like to talk to you about.

First of all, I think all of our friends from other countries will understand that most Americans are still reeling, six months after the fact, from the impact of September the 11th. It was a deep, human and psychic wound to America. It manifested in way that--ways that nothing else ever could, that this era of global inter-dependence has a dark a well as a bright side, that you can't tear down all the walls and collapse all the distances and spread knowledge and technology as we have and say I want all the benefits of that, but don't give me any of the vulnerabilities.

And so we felt that and the American people are kind of undergoing a sober sense of assessment now about where we are at the dawn of the 21st century world. I do not think they want to withdraw again. But they are trying to sort through for themselves how we should go forward.

And what I'd like to do is to try to put this issue of terrorism and the Middle East peace process in the larger context of the inter-dependent world in which we live and try to suggest some things that I think the United States should be doing.

I think it is important, if we are to build a positive world of peace and prosperity and opportunity for our children, that we win more fights against terror than we've won lately. But I think it's also important that we build a world that has more partners and fewer terrorists.

And to go to one of the points that you mentioned professor, I think, that even beyond that, it's important that we develop a global consciousness that enables us to deal with difference in a way that not just accepts religious and political and racial and ethnic and cultural differences, but celebrates them in the context of a larger human community. It is easy to say, but difficult to do for reasons I will say later. Well, let's just take each of these in turn.

First, terror has a long history. No civilization or country has entirely clean hands. In the late 11th century, Pope Urban II urged the Christian soldiers to march on Jerusalem to seize the Holy city. By then, the dominant Jewish presence had been gone for centuries, although there was still one Synagogue on what we call The Temple Mount. And the first thing the Christians did when they seized Jerusalem was to burn the Synagogue with 300 Jews in it. They then proceeded to kill every Muslim woman and child on The Temple Mount and the story's still being told in the region today.

So the deliberate killing of civilians for political, religious, or economic reasons has a long and dark history. The good news is that standing on its own, it has never prevailed against a nation or her people. No terrorist attack standing on its own has ever prevailed, even though many military campaigns have included terrorism, normally with mixed, unbalanced, negative results.

Terrorists can win victories in two ways. They, after all, are not primarily interested in military victories, they're trying to provoke a change in behavior by exacting a high price and terrifying people.

Mr. bin Laden, for example, has a very specific political objective that starts with getting us out of Saudi Arabia and overturning the House of Saud and goes on to Israel and beyond that, I think, to purging the imperfect Arab regimes of the Middle East who don't think like he does.

But there are two ways that they could win and that's why I want you to bear with me while I make all my points tonight. The first is, they could win. That is, we could put up a lousy defense and be unsuccessful at punishing them, or just give in. Well, that's not going to happen. Never happened before, we're not about to do it.

But there's another way they could make an advance, which is that they could provoke in us the wrong response. We could respond to the events of September the 11th in a way that fundamentally changes the character of our country and our historic mission and compromises the future of our children. And we must not do that either. And so I say to you, I think we should focus in this on the following points.

One, we should support the president and our allies in the current campaign in Afghanistan and we should continue until we have captured or destroyed the leadership of Al Quada. They are the most serious terrorist network in the world by a good long ways. I believe we will succeed in that.

I also think we must continue to strengthen our global alliances in a broader way to be effective against terrorism, including doing more to protect the whole world in controlling access to the stocks of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the constituent elements from which these can be made. I think we have to be very sensitive when we think about Saddam Hussein and I think a lot of you know that I took a lot of military actions against Saddam Hussein when he wouldn't comply with the United Nations resolutions.

You talked about the UN resolutions, Mr. Fares. I found that people tend to cite them selectively. We talk about the UN security council resolutions we like and we ignore the ones we don't. We are all rather guilty of this I think, but when it comes to the Middle East, very often the people who wave 242 and 338 at me forget all about the UN resolutions that Saddam Hussein flagrantly violates every day so that he can pursue the rebuilding of his weapons of mass destruction, which we know--at least in the case of the chemical weapon mustard gas he used on his own Kurdish population several years ago.

So I'm fully supportive of putting the squeeze on him, but I think it's important that we do it in the context of global alliances, doing things together, going forward together.

Now, that won't be enough, however, to build the world we want for our children. We have a strategy of prevent and punish on terrorism. I'm all for that, but it's not enough. If all you have is prevent and punish, you're doing nothing to make a world with fewer problems.

At the end of World War II we took a very different road than we did at the end of World War I. Thanks in no small measure to the vision of General George Marshall, who basically said--I can just see him looking in the mirror one day and saying, `OK, I'm a five-star general, I spent all my life fighting people and killing people and leading armies, and now we've got this Cold War and we've got all these nuclear weapons and I'm thinkin' what fools we were at the end of World War I to run away from the world and why don't we spend just a little bit of money to rebuild our allies and our former enemies so that we don't have a third world war and eventually we can prevail in the Cold War.'

Now, a lot of--those of you who are younger, this may seem either self-evident or mundane to you, but every person in this audience today that's 40 years of age or older, knows that we grew up in a very different world because George Marshall and Harry Truman had the vision--and I might add the bipartisan support in our country--to do the decent, right, human thing and take a little bit of money to build a world with more friends and fewer enemies and avoid the third world war and insure freedom's triumph.

Therefore, what would we do? Well, before I get to what would we do--we'd obviously spend more money on foreign assistance. There are huge obstacles to that. Today we see in America, lamentably, not much more support for foreign aid then there ever has been.

And this is something that I think Tufts ought take on because, generally, you tend to look outward in your international concerns. I think we should also look inward. That is, we need the American people to be in a place that will permit us to make good policy.

Every single survey shows--of American attitudes towards our assistance to the developing world--shows two things that are wrong. Number one, the American people believe we spend far more than we do on foreign assistance. And number two, they believe most of it's wasted. Both beliefs are factually wrong.

Now this is a university. One of the things you're supposed to do is make sure people at least have the truth. If you take a poll, any poll, they will say people believe that foreign assistance amounts to somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the budget.

A couple years ago, the University of Maryland did one that--it surprised me. I didn't think people would think it was as high as 15 percent. The fact is, it's about 1 percent of the budget, foreign assistance. And the Office of Development Assistance, the money specifically spent on providing food, medicine, disaster relief, debt relief, is even less than 1 percent.

In other words, of the 22 most developed countries in the world, America ranks 22nd, dead last, in the percentage of our budget and our national income we spend on helping build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists. Everybody else; Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, they all try harder than we do. Denmark gives 10 times the amount of assistance we do as a percentage of budget.

Now, since September the 11th there has been a world-wide call for a dramatic increase in development assistance from wealthy countries. I support this. There's going to be a conference soon in Monterrey, Mexico about the relationship between the rich and the developing countries. What will the United States do? So far, we have opposed Prime Minister Blair and the British and the EU in trying to get a commitment from the wealthy nations to double their assistance, even though it would be easier for us to do it than anybody.

For less than 20 percent of the proposed increases in defense and Homeland Defense, just the proposed increases, we could actually double our level of foreign assistance. We could do a lot of good for less than that. Now, why wouldn't we do this? Let me say I think there are a couple of reasons.

I actually had a person say to me the other night when I was making this argument. He said, `Well, I guess we could do that, I guess we could sort of bribe people not to terrorize us.' I mean, he looked at me and said, `That's what you want, isn't it? You want to buy our way to a safer world. You want to bribe people not to terrorize us. And therefore, you're in effect blaming us for what happened.'

That's nonsense. That's the biggest load of hooey I ever heard in my life. But there are people who say that. The other major argument is, that this money does no good. Now, let me just give you some examples of why that is wrong.

Let's take the economy. One of the best things that happened in my last year as president, 2000, was that we passed with overwhelming bipartisan support the millennial debt relief initiative that was generated in 1999 at the G8 meeting in Cologne, Germany by the United States and our allies. We had everybody from the Pope to Bono to Pat Robertson and Jesse Helms for this.

Usually, you know, if everybody's for something, there's something wrong with it. But in this case, there wasn't anything wrong with it. It was really good. So we relieved the debt of the 24 poorest countries of the world, if--but only if they would agree to spend all the money on education, health or economic development. Now in the first year, in the first year, Honduras went from six to nine years of mandatory schooling with their savings, a 50 percent increase. Uganda doubled primary school enrollment and reduced class size in one year, with one round of debt savings.

Now I don't know about you, but I think that's money well-spent. And we ought to do more of it. Now, I'll give you--I'll give you another example. In my last year, the Congress, again on a bipartisan basis, voted to open American markets to Vietnam, Jordan, Africa and the Caribbean. In one year, our imports from some poor African countries went up 1,000 percent and went up by two and a half times from Jordan.

Now, America continued to have a low unemployment rate and a successful economy, but we, by throwing out a lifeline and giving a little hope to countries in East Asia and the Middle East and Latin America and Africa, we went a long way to make more friends and fewer terrorists. We gave two million micro-enterprise loans a year, micro credit loans. I wish we gave 20 million. I've seen whole African villages transformed by them.

We sup-- (tape cuts off) * * *

We now know how to do this right. And the same thing applies to education and health care and the environment. The--I'll just give you--hey look, we know what works. Brazil has 97 percent of its kids in school, but there're 100 million children in poor countries who aren't in school. Why are they going to school in Brazil and they're not going to school, let's say in Pakistan where so many of these children went to Madrases where they were indoctrinated instead of educated? Because in Pakistan, they stopped supporting the public schools in the early 80s when they went out of money and America gave them airplanes instead of money for their schools.

In Brazil, in Brazil they pay the mothers and the families, the poorest 30 percent of the families, 15 bucks a month for every one of their kids that goes to school 85 percent of the time or more. So in Brazil, 97 percent of the people go to school.

We provided $300 million in my last year as president, again on a bipartisan basis with Senator Dole and Senator McGovern, to offer a meal in school to kids who would come to school to get it. That's enough to feed six million kids for a year, every day in school in a developing world. And I know the GAO thinks it's not a perfect program, we put it together in a hurry, but I'll tell you this, look at the enrollment changes in the countries that got the meals. They went way up. So we know how to do this.

Koffi Anan wants us to give him a couple billion dollars for his $10 billion program to fight AIDS and infectious diseases. Should we do it? We know how to do this. Look what happened in Uganda, in Senegal, in Brazil, in all these places where they have effective prevention programs, particularly if they could put the medicine with it. So don't let anybody tell you that we don't know how to do this.

Is it worth the money? Well, it's not inexpensive, but--it would cost us about $3 billion a year to pay our part of a massive anti-poverty economic development issue. Three months of the Afghan War.

It would cost us $2 billion a year to pay our part of Secretary General Anan's $10 billion health fund to fight AIDS and infectious diseases. Two months of the Afghan War.

It would cost about $1 1/2 billion for us to pay America's per capita share, based on GDP, of an effort to put all 100 million children in the world who aren't in school in school. About six weeks of the Afghan War.

And if you added all that up, that's still not even doubling foreign assistance. The point I'm trying to make is, it works and it's a lot cheaper than going to war. Now, listen to this. Last year, a poll conducted by the International Herald Tribune and the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press revealed that nine in 10 Americans said the number one reason people around the world dislike America is, because of our power. By contrast, among non Americans, the majority said the reason that they disliked America is because we do too little to help poorer nations and poorer people.

That fact is surprising to many Americans 'cause they, A, believe we give more than we do and, B, don't believe the programs work. They're wrong on both counts. This is a great university. You should fix that. You should dedicate yourself, not only to serving the interests of globalism and inter-dependence around the world, but making sure your fellow Americans know the truth; a democracy cannot make good policy when the people who vote don't know what the facts are.

And--and I can tell you, it's hard because I gave a lot of these speeches when I was president. But as the press will tell ya, even for the president, just 'cause your talkin' doesn't mean anyone's listening. I mean, today something else is news. But this is the future. So I want to say that.

The next point I'd like to make relates specifically to the Muslim world and particularly the Middle East. I think we've done a lousy job of getting our story out. You know, there are very few people in the Middle East who actually support what Osama bin Laden did. Very few people who believe in killing innocent children, but there are millions of people who sympathize with the idea that America is basically responsible for the misery of the region. They think we're hostile to their values and their interests. They think we could've imposed a peace on Israel if only we'd been tougher on them. And they don't know very much about America in the Arab street.

A lot of people have no idea there are six million Muslims in America who pursue their faith and succeed in America. They have no idea that the people we did battle with in the Middle East and in the Balkans, Saddam Hussein and Slobidan Milosevic, killed more Muslims than any two people in the world in the last 10 years.

They don't know, for example, that the reason we were in Somalia in 1993 and lost 18 Americans in that battle Mr. bin Laden loves to brag about--he says, `I trained Mohammad Adied's (sp) soldiers when we killed those Americans. How great it was.' He never tells you the whole truth.

You know what those Americans were doing there? They weren't nation building, they were there trying to feed starving Somalis that those people wouldn't let get food and Mr. Mohammad Adied murdered 22 of our fellow peacekeepers so the UN asked us if we'd go arrest him. You know who those peacekeepers were? They were 22 Pakistani Muslims.

A lot of people don't know, in the Middle East, that the last time we used our military power was to protect the lives of poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. They don't know this. So we've got to do a better job of getting our story out.

One of the best things President Bush did after September the 11th was go to a mosque and meet with Muslim leaders and say, `our enemy is terror, not Islam.' And then he broke the fast of Ramadan by having a dinner in the White House with Muslim leaders. This was good. This was a good thing. And, you know, when--every time I wa--every year I was in the White House, we had an official ceremony to recognize the feast of Eid-ul-Fitr. We had lots of Muslims coming to the White House to consult across a whole range of foreign and domestic issues.

And when I went abroad from Indonesia to Turkey to Senegal, I visited mosques to try to send the signal that America did not believe the world would be dominated by a culture war. That we could find common ground. But still, look at the recent poll. The Gallup Poll in the Muslim world published in USA Today last month said that the key finding is, that the United States doesn't care about them. Last month. Only 12 percent say the rest respects Arabs or Islamic values, 7 percent saw Western nations as fair in their perception of Muslims (sic) countries, 18 percent of those polled in six Muslim countries believe Arabs carried out the attack and 61 percent said they weren't responsible.

Now, we're living in a different world. And again, I ask you to think about this because while I believe policies are important--and the Middle East is real important, I'll come back to that. If--if Americans don't know the truth, we're in deep trouble. If people in Middle Eastern countries and Muslim countries, in the streets, if they don't know the truth we're in big trouble.

So again, a great global university shouldn't have any trouble figuring out what you ought to be doing when people at home and abroad are both totally wrong about the objective facts that should be shaping our relationship, our world and our future.

Now, I just got back from the Middle East a few weeks ago and I was really thrilled that the number of young, Arab leaders from Egypt to Dubayy to Saudi Arabia who got up and said, you know, it's time to end this obsession with Israel and the United States. It's time to make peace, it's time for the Palestinians to have their state and it's time for us to quit blaming other people for things that we ought to be doing for ourselves.

There is another view out there, but we've got a lot of work to do here. Now, what I would like to say is that--is with all the bad news in the Middle East, it's easy to be pessimistic. I want you to look at the hopeful signs because I'm coming to my last point here about what we should be doing.

In the last several months since September the 11th, the Crown Prince Dula--Saudi Arabia, has said repeatedly that Muslim leaders should watch the incitement and stand against terrorism and use this opportunity to re-assess whether they too have made mistakes and whether we can have a different future.

The Amon of the Holy Mosque and Mecca denounce the suicide killing of civilians as against Islamic law. Even before September the 11th, Pakistan's president Musharraf said that intolerant interpretations of Islam were the cause of most of his nation's problems. An Arab journalist recently said on Al Jazeera, the rhetoric of hatred and all the sermons in the books, we need to change this curriculum calling for extremism.

So this is all good and important, but if we expect people in the Middle East to, A, learn the facts, and, B, let go of the hatred and the incitement, then we in America must, A, make sure our people know the facts and step up to our responsibilities in the region. There are several truths about that and I want to talk about that. I think the number one thing we could do, besides defeating the Al Quada network and having the right policies for America to build more partners and fewer terrorists, the number one thing we could do to make a better world is to resolve this problem in the Middle East.That's why I spent eight years workin' on it.

Let's remember the fundamental facts. All this violence can make peace harder and make people more miserable, but it can't change the fundamental truth. Number one, there is no military solution to this conflict. Israel is not going away and the Palestinians aren't either.

Now, the second fundamental fact is that violence makes it worse from whichever side. The Israelis surely have learned that their military cannot stop suicide bombers or ultimately protect all their people. And the Palestinians should've learned that the suicide bombers don't gain an inch of territory and, in fact, the enormous sentiment of the world which was with the Palestinians at the start of the Infatadah because of how it was provoked, largely shifted with the slaughter of innocent Israeli children at the pizzeria, the discotheque, and the bat mitzvah ceremony. There's hardly anybody in the world that thinks it's a good idea to blow up a bunch of kids at a pizzeria or a bat mitzvah. Or a disco. So neither side is gaining much from this.

The third truth is the necessity of compromise. The leaders have to prepare their people for compromise. And I've preached this over there for years. You know, you can't tell people everyday in your speeches that you will never compromise, that everything's going to be just the way you want it and then expect all of a sudden one day to turn on a dime and make a deal. That was one of our problems, I think, at Taba in December of 2000, in January of 2001. We have to view compromise as a good, not a bad word, as sign of strength not weakness.

The fourth truth is that people actually want a political solution on both sides, but the violence is confusing them. A majority supports political solutions but also now supports the use of violence against their opponent. On the day, for example, that Prime Minister Sharon was elected by a landslide, a majority of Israeli voters were closer to Pri--former Prime Minister Barak's position on the peace process. But they thought there was no point in voting to re-elect Barak since if Arafat wouldn't take what he offered at Taba, there was never going to be a peace. And I must say, on my bad days, I thought the same thing because of the offer that was made. Which leads me--leads me to the fifth truth.

I do not believe that the Israelis and the Palestinians can break out of this mess alone. The United States and the EU and the Russians and others of goodwill have to help, but especially the United States. That's why I am thrilled that General Zinni is going back. We can't have a troubleshooter if he comes home every time the trouble starts. We don't have to succeed, but we have to try. And I think that if--I believe that this is a very good thing.

I also think that it is imperative in order for us to build any sort of global alliance against terror to have an effective peace process under way in the Middle East as soon as possible. And furthermore, I believe, that we can have a peace process that, as you said, sir, is consistent with the United Nations resolutions.

In 1995, we came very close to a final agreement. At that time, both sides acknowledged that there ought to be a Palestinian state in the West Bank in Gaza consistent with the UN resolution. With agreed upon modifications, the Israelis were willing to take, at that time, less than 5 percent of the West Bank for 80 percent of their settlers and to close all the rest of the settlements and bring the people home.

And furthermore, to give some compensating land to the Palestinians to make the equivalent of 100 percent as called for in the UN resolutions. They were very close on how Jerusalem should be governed. There was virtually no difference on the practical necessity of dividing the city. Really, they couldn't find the words to describe what both sides agree the city ought to work like, but they were close.

It is true that we did not invite--resolve the refugees, but this is one place where you and I might be in disagreement. What is the meaning of Right to Return, how shall it be defined? Does it mean that everybody that is a descendant of anybody who left in '48 and '67 has an absolute right to go back to the same speck of land that they left? Is that what it means? I don't think so.

Furthermore, I believe that the Palestinians and the Israelis agreed to redefine Right to Return in September of 1993 when Mr. Arafat and Prime Minister Rabin signed the agreement on the White House lawn. Why? Because the essence of the peace agreement is just the opposite of the Northern Ireland agreement.

You remember what the Northern Ireland agreement was? Majority rule, minority rights. Shared decision making, shared economic benefits. Special relationships with our sponsor countries, the UK of which we're a part, the Irish Republic of which we may be a part someday. Now the Protestants are in the majority, someday the Catholics may be. We're going to go together and hope that integration will make it all right.

What is the Middle East peace agreement? The exact opposite.

The Middle East peace agreement is we're going to have two states, a Palestinian state, for the first time in history, I might add. A Palestinian state that is not exclusively, but is overwhelmingly an Arab/Muslim state. And a state of Israel that is not exclusively, but is overwhelmingly a Jewish state. And under Israeli law, since it's a democracy, the people have to vote for it.

Now, the people of Israel were prepared to vote for the peace plan we put forward at Taba, even though they had reservations. But they will never vote for an unlimited Right To Return to the same piece of land you had in '67 or '48 because with higher birth rates, that means in 30 years, we'd have two Arab/Muslim states. An Arab Israel and an Arab Palestine. That is not going to happen. That i--that violates the whole spirit of the peace agreement that was signed on the White House lawn.

And privately, all the Palestinian negotiators say that. Now privately, all the Palestinian negotiators say that, but they're worried about looking like they're a sell-out. Well, all I can tell you is, they had a--the option and they will still have it, to have a state on the West Bank in Gaza, to have their religious and political equities in p--in Jerusalem protected, to have an enormous fund for the resettlement and compensation of the refugees, including having some go back to Israel, particularly, sir, some of those who are in the Lebanese camps whose h--h--for centuries have lived in what would still be in Northeast Israel even if the West Bank and Gaza became a Palestinian state.

The Israelis know that a lot of those people in the Lebanese camps have to come back to what would still be in Israel. But--but there will never be a peace if there is an insistence on a Right to Return to the same piece of land in such a way that raises the prospect that there will be two majority Arab/Muslim states within 30 years. That is not going to happen. And that is not what the peace agreement was about.

The peace agreement--that's what's the Irish decided to do. The Irish said, we're going to get together and manage our relationship so that when the majority shifts, everything will be all right. The Palestinians and the Israelis said, no, no. We're going to get a divorce. We're going to have a property settlement, then we're going to be friends and go into business together. That's the difference. That's what it says.

So I believe with all my heart that the peace camps on both sides are far closer to an agreement than all the bloodshed and the rhetoric in the newspapers say. I do not believe they can get there unless the United States is willing to give a letter of guarantee to whatever agreement they reach. If they need troops there as the--Israel and Egypt needed troops in 1978 when Camp David was reached and we sent them to Sainai, I think we ought to send them and not blink.

We ought to do whatever is necessary to end the most dangerous conflict in the world. It probably can't have a final settlement now, but I am convinced that they can find a way to agree to a peace process that will show some forward movement and buy another two or three years of peace. That's what we did in '97 at Wye River. It can be done again. And I am convinced that it can happen.

Now, last thing I want to say is this, fight terror. A world with more partners and fewer terrorists. Get back to work on the Middle East. If we don't feel--fail--I mean, if we don't succeed it's still OK. People won't think America doesn't care if we're trying. When you wrap all this up, it is indeed ironic you got--that we're here at a university in the most modern age in human history, when the world is bedeviled primarily by the oldest demon of human history, which is the fear of the other, people who are different.

And the biggest threat to our common security is high-tech terrorism, the marriage of modern weapons to ancient hatreds, rooted in race and religion and ethnicity and trial. Now, when all of you go all across the world, you have to deal with some fundamental ideas about the nature of truth, the value of life and the content of community. And I will just briefly say this.

The most extreme example is the terrorist who believes that they have the whole truth and have the right to kill you if you don't share it, even if, on September 11th, you were just a six-year-old kid going to work with your mother in the World Trade Center. That's the most extreme version. And that your life doesn't have value if you don't share the truth.

They also believe that communities of people must be people who think alike and act alike, the direct opposite of all of you. Let's look around this place. This is a more interesting crowd than it would have been if we'd had this meeting 30 years ago. We're much more diverse in every way. So what do we say? We say--what do we say is--we believe, those of us who come out of one of the three great monotheistic religions of the Holy Land--we say we believe our sacred texts are true, but we do not--we believe we are wise enough to have the whole truth. That's what limited, fallible humanity is about.

Life is a journey toward the truth. Other people's lives have value because we need help on this journey. And we can build a larger community that includes our religious or our racial or cultural community. We can build a larger set of communities of people who believe everybody counts, everybody deserves a chance, we all do better when we work together. Now I'm tellin' you, that's what this whole deal's about.

How do you--you think about this in your own life? How do you define the importance and meaning and value of your life? How do you define the importance and meaning and value of your clan, your family, your faith, your political alliances? Do you define them in primarily negative terms or in potential positive terms?

The Qur'an says Go--Allah put different people on the earth not that they might despise one another but that they might come to know another and learn from one another. The Torah says he who turns aside the stranger might as well turn aside from the most high god. The Christian New Testament says that Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with all your heart, and second is like unto it to love your neighbor as yourself. It's easy to say but hard to do, right?

When I was the age of the undergraduates here in my senior year, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered by their fellow Americans trying to reconcile the American people to each other. The greatest man in my lifetime, Gandhi, was murdered by a fellow Hindu because he wanted India for the Muslims and the Sikhs and the Janes and the Christians and the Jews and the--everybody. The Buddhists. Saddat was killed by his fellow Egyptians because he wanted a secular government in Israel and he was--I mean, in Egypt--and he was willing to make peace with Israel. And my friend, on one of the darkest days of my life, my friend Yitzhak Rabin was murdered, not by a PLO terrorist but by a young Israeli who thought he was a bad Jew and a bad Israeli because he wanted he Palestinian children to have their homeland and their future.

So I say this to remind all of you that at the moment of greatest promise in human history, clouded by the oldest threat in human history. This is the time when we need our great universities and our idealistic young people, and the courage of our convictions.

But I still believe, if we do the right things in the right way, the best time that humans have ever known on earth lies ahead. But we have to realize we have built the world without walls. We have now to make it a home for all the world's children.

Thank you very much. (Applause)