UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today that any effort to stop growing violence between Islamic and Western societies must include an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Mr Annan spoke after receiving a report from a high-level group of experts on ways to alleviate Muslim-Western clashes and misunderstandings.
"We may wish to think of the Arab-Israeli conflict as just one regional conflict amongst many," said Mr Annan, who leaves his post at the end of the year. "It is not. No other conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge among people far removed from the battlefield."
Mr Annan said he would work along with his successor, Ban Ki-moon, to help implement the recommendations of the report, which called for renewed efforts toward the goal of establishing "two fully sovereign and independent states coexisting side by side in peace and security."
He said: "As long as the Palestinians live under occupation, exposed to daily frustration and humiliation, and as long as Israelis are blown up in buses and in dance halls, so long will passions everywhere be inflamed."
The report, drafted in the past year by a group of 20 prominent men and women, including former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami and South African Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, called for an urgent international conference "to reinvigorate the Middle East peace process".
AP