The Middle East peace train this week delivers Arab and Israeli leaders to Annapolis, Maryland, but I’ve headed in the opposite direction to Tel Aviv, Israel. I’m here to retrace the footsteps of a journey towards peace from exactly thirty years ago, which continues to both encourage and taunt its modern successors.

On Nov. 19, 1977, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat broke rank with fellow Arabs and took Israelis by surprise by flying to Israel to tell its parliament, the Knesset, that he wanted peace. Egypt and Israel had spent the previous 30 years fighting four wars but Sadat had hinted how far he would go to prevent a fifth war in a parliamentary speech in Cairo on November 9, 1977.
"I am ready to travel to the ends of the earth if this will in any way protect any Egyptian boy, soldier or officer from being killed or wounded,” Sadat said. "I say that I am ready for sure to go to the ends of this earth. I am ready to go to their country, even to the Knesset itself, and talk with them."

Shortly after that, then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin invited Sadat to Jerusalem. The visit led to the first peace treaty between an Arab state and Israel – in 1979 – but it also left Sadat a marked man. His peace deal with Israel was on the list of grievances of the Islamic militant soldiers who assassinated him during a military parade on Oct. 6, 1981, which ironically enough marked the anniversary of the start of the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel.

One thing Sadat’s peace journey has in common with this week’s talks is the state of Maryland, which is home to Annapolis. After Sadat’s visit to Israel, Egyptian and Israeli negotiators were nudged towards their peace deal in Camp David, also in Maryland, under the mentoring of U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

Sadat was not a democratically elected leader and he didn’t consult with his people before getting on that plane to Israel. The same can be said of most of the Arab leaders heading to Annapolis this week, with the exception of Mahmoud Abbas who was voted into office as president of the Palestinians. That said, even he must contend with the fact that he controls only the West Bank, since rival Hamas took over the Gaza Strip this summer.

Other than that, there are few other similarities. Who at Annapolis can be said to be as bold, outrageous even, as Sadat? His peace deal with Israel got Egypt kicked out of the Arab League and he was accused of destroying Arab unity. But some of those same Arab countries that raged at Egypt – such as Syria and Saudi Arabia – will be there at Annapolis trying to do what Sadat did in the 1970s.

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Whenever the Arab League gets together for it bi-annual meetings, journalists in Cairo – where the pan-Arab body is based – joke they can write the final communiqué themselves as they wait for the officials to come out of their meetings and talk to the media. Seven years might have passed since the last major Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but the same things are always said at these summits so we might as well have played the Cairo press packs’ game of inking the final statement ourselves.

Being in the region – I was in Cairo at the beginning of November and I’m writing this from Tel Aviv – it’s easy to see why Annapolis produced nothing new: both Arab and Israeli politics have failed to produce anything new for years now.

I was a correspondent for Reuters News Agency in Jerusalem in 1998. I came back this week for the first time in nine years so that I could speak at a Tel Aviv University conference marking the 30th anniversary of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s surprise visit to Israel, which I wrote about in my last column. To this day, I am still in trouble with Egyptian State Security for living in Israel.

Surveying the Israeli political scene since my return, it was as if the major players have spent the past nine years engaged in a bizarre game of musical chairs. The same names are still on the scene – they’re just sitting in different chairs.

On the Palestinian political scene, resist the temptation to confuse combustibility with change or new ideas. Just as they were back in the 1990s, Fatah and Hamas are still fighting it out - only more overtly now. New and alternative voices are pushed aside, discouraged and marginalized.

In Egypt, it’s just the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood on the political stage at the moment, and it looks like our republic will give birth to dynastic politics that will install the president’s son into the presidency. It’s no wonder that with the same man ruling for the past twenty-six years, Egypt – long considered the leader of the Arab world – has run out of ideas.

And so on and so forth.

Old and stale ideas are natural outcomes of old and stale politicians. Just because President Bush – fourteen months away from the end of his presidency - has suddenly realized he’s done nothing substantial to push along peace, that doesn’t mean that his invitations to the White House this week alone are sufficient.

On the political level in the Middle East, I am resolutely pessimistic. Annapolis didn’t change that.

Where it did help, though, was to provide a poignant backdrop for the Tel Aviv University conference on Nov. 28 and 29. As Dr. Mira Tzoreff, an Egypt expert at The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, was planning the conference this summer, President Bush gave her quite a gift by saying he’d host the Annapolis talks sometime in November.

So as we meet for the conference to discuss Israeli-Egyptian relations thirty years after that historic visit, there are lessons to be learned from the Camp David peace treaty that are useful for all peace talks.

The young Egyptians I interviewed for my conference presentation embodied those lessons. They were all born after Sadat’s visit. In other words, for their entire lives, Egypt has been at peace with Israel. And yet although those young people disagreed on support for Sadat’s peace initiative, they all shared a negative attitude towards Israel. Unless Israel made peace with the Palestinians and ended its occupation, they said, they would never accept it.

Hostility towards Israel can also be traced to the Egyptian regime’s continued scapegoating of Israel over the years – made easier by Israel’s continued settlement expansion and its heavy-handed attacks on Lebanon last summer.

Thirty years after making peace, Israeli journalists who visit Egypt are often snubbed and Egyptians refuse to visit Israel altogether.

Even so, Dr. Tzoreff insists she will never lose her optimism. It takes nerves of steel to be an Israeli academic organizing a conference to mark the 30th anniversary of an Egyptian leader’s visit. The Egyptian ambassador didn’t take part in the opening night’s proceedings, sending his number two instead. I am the only Egyptian invited who agreed to come. I know there aren’t any Egyptian academics who organized similar conferences to which they invited Israelis. And yet those young Egyptians who were uniformly negative in their attitudes towards Israel were still curious to hear how Israelis viewed them and reacted to their comments at the Tel Aviv University conference.

Many co-existence efforts go unnoticed, but it is these “non-political” actors who are coming up with the new ideas. The leaders at Annapolis have run out of them.