About 1,000 people went through 150 chanting and sign-waving protesters, metal detectors, back pack searches and University police to see one speaker Wednesday evening.

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a member of the presidentially-appointed board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, was brought to Foellinger Auditorium by IllinIPAC (Illinois-Israel Public Affairs Committee), as well as other groups, to speak on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

His organization specifically requested the heavy security presence, said Monika Pandya, Foellinger Auditorium manager.

Dean of Students William Riley said the security for the event "was more than would be typical for a speaker here at Foellinger."

Pipes opened his speech referring to the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements negotiated between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed on Sept. 13, 1993, and said they had failed.

He said the failure of the Oslo Peace Accords, and the second Intifada began because Israeli leadership made two mistakes.

"The first Israeli mistake was to believe that the Palestinians had given up the dream of destroying Israel," he said.

Soon after the beginning of the speech, a couple protesters ducked in the auditorium and shouted "Free Palestine!"

Pipes ignored the outburst and continued, saying the Israelis made concessions generously in the assumption that the Palestinians had given up the ambition of making Israel extinct. He said this assumption was wrong. Attempts to win peace by giving the Palestinians aid and money have also failed, he said.

Pipes said Israel wrongly figured that "with a nice apartment and a late-model car, Palestinians will be too busy with other activities to worry about Israel."

The second mistake Israel made was to assume that when the Palestinian leadership reached a peace agreement, the Palestinian people would follow it.

"In all of the cases with Israelis signing an agreement with their neighbors ... we find the reaction of the population ... was one of anger," Pipes said.

He said that to this end, the Palestinian leadership noted that Israel withdrew its troops from Lebanon after sustaining heavy casualties from guerillas.

"(The Palestinians said to themselves) 'if we hit them like Lebanon they'll leave the West Bank,''' he said.

Pipes criticized U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that, for decades, America "premised its policy on the assumption that the Palestinians have accepted Israel" and turned toward secondary issues such as water control instead.

He recommended U.S. aid to Palestinian refugees be ended.

"The current situation is tragic for all involved," he said.

He called the Palestinians a "skilled and dignified people" who are prevented from living peacefully by the "wretched regime of Yassir Arafat, because they're intent on destroying Israel."

Kenneth Cuno, director of the program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, was present at the lecture, and said curiosity drew him to the lecture. He said he felt Pipes had missed a few things in his speech.

"In order to make his point, he left out an awful lot," Cuno said, referring to a statement in Pipes' speech that the Palestinians wanted to destroy Israel and thus should be dealt with on those terms.

Cuno said opinion polls in both Palestinian territories and in Israel showed that many people on both sides wanted peace, not the destruction of the other side.

"He's a polemicist, an extremist, and he's going to leave out some stuff to say the moon is made of green cheese," he said.

Pipes said while he did have data showing that about 20 percent of Palestinians wanted peace with Israel, he chose not to state it, saying that he had generally summarized it in his speech.

After ending his formal speech, Pipes criticized The Daily Illini for printing opinion columns and editorials coming out against his views.

"No student newspaper has treated me in such a biased and one-sided fashion as the DI," Pipes said.

— Jeremy Pelzer contributed to this report.