Mel McDermott lives in Dublin. He has been a teacher for most of his adult life as well as a student of history with a special interest in the Middle East.
He is a close observer of parallels and contrasts between the conflicts in Northern Ireland and in Israel/Palestine. He is active in hasbara work and in the struggle to combat dishonest media coverage and delegitimisation of Israel in Ireland.A few years ago, around the time of Hamas’ violent takeover of the Gaza Strip, many voices were heard in Ireland, as well as outside it, claiming to draw lessons from the Northern Ireland peace process that were felt to be relevant to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Politicians in the Republic, who include some of the most hostile to Israel among European parliamentarians, were only too happy to dispense advice to the Israelis – along the lines of “We talked to the IRA to end the conflict, so you must talk to Hamas if you want to end yours”, such negotiation being without preconditions. The argument was usually clinched by the glib phrase “To make peace, you talk to your enemies, not your friends”.
It was always suspect advice. Leave aside the fact that the primary motivation of Sinn Fein-IRA is political and that of Hamas is religious (though, of course, the religious dimension of Islam cannot be separated from the political). For the first, the goal, mistaken or not, was the political unification of the island of Ireland outside the United Kingdom regardless of the wishes of the British majority in Northern Ireland. For the second, as the Hamas Charter of 1988 makes clear, the goal is the recovery of land once under Islamic rule: all of historic Palestine including Israel is the waqf (Islamic trust territory) that cannot be allowed to be alienated from Islamic rule ‘until the Day of Resurrection’.
Leave aside also the very different balances of forces in the two conflicts. In the NI case, Sinn Fein-IRA terrorism enjoyed neither majority support among nationalists in Ireland nor the support of any neighbouring state (though it did have safe houses in the Republic and covert help from friends in the US) and was fighting an uphill struggle against the British and Irish security forces, which had essentially fought it to a standstill by the early 1990s. Hamas, on the other hand, has some reason to feel the wind at its back, what with arms supplies and training from Iran, the moral support of the Middle East Arab masses and the international campaign of delegitimisation of Israel.
Aside from wrong starting assumptions, the true weakness of the ‘talk to Hamas without preconditions’ advice was that it rewrote history by misrepresenting what happened between the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. For Sinn Fein-IRA to enter negotiations, the ceasefire was not enough. To join in talks with the constitutional parties and the two governments, Sinn Fein was required to sign up to the six ‘Mitchell Principles’(named after US Senator George Mitchell, sent as mediator by President Clinton). The chief of these committed all parties to renunciation of violence and to the use of exclusively democratic means to advance their goals. In other words, your enemies had to stop trying to kill you before you agreed to talk to them.
After two years, the talks resulted in the Good Friday settlement that still holds. According to its terms, Sinn Fein-IRA agreed to accept the present status of NI as part of the UK as long as there is a pro-union majority there, in return for its being allowed to take part in a power-sharing devolved administration in NI; the Republic voted overwhelmingly by referendum to remove its constitutional claim to NI, and the British promised to abide by the result of any future majority vote in NI to leave the union; residents of NI can opt for British or Irish citizenship.
In short, all sides operated within a familiar Western context in which recognition of politico-military realities, including war-weariness on all sides, generates movement towards negotiation, compromise and, ultimately, some kind of settlement. When have any of those factors been in evidence among the anti-Israel forces in the Middle East?
The Mitchell Principles were, in fact, rather similar to the three conditions which Israel, with the agreement of the Quartet (US, UN, EU and Russia) has set for engaging Hamas in talks. (Whether, since SF-IRA was not asked to recognize explicitly NI’s right to exist, Israel should insist on explicit recognition by Hamas in the event that it renounced violence fully, is an argument – an academic one, surely — for another day.)
But here’s a lesson from the NI peace process that nobody is keen to pass on to Israel’s leaders. It is the fact that, even after you get the settlement, rejectionist elements among the terrorists will continue with violence and do their best to disrupt the agreement. The worst death toll in a single atrocity in 30 years of conflict in NI came in August 1998, four months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, when the Real IRA, made up of dissident former IRA members, killed 31 people at Omagh with a car bomb. The same group has recently murdered Catholic/nationalist members of the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (set up under Good Friday) and threatened to kill more, the aim being to intimidate their co-religionists from joining, thus bolstering their own claim that the PSNI is a sectarian force.
This pattern should be familiar to all who remember the eruptions of Fatah and Hamas terrorism after the Oslo Accords and the recent proliferation of groups in Gaza willing to continue rocketing southern Israel in defiance of the will of Hamas when that group calls one of its periodic lulls.
This is not a matter simply of terrorists falling out; it is about the persistence of the ideology that motivates them. Recently, in the Republic, a new political party, Eirígí (Gaelic for ‘Arise’), founded in 2006 by former SF-IRA members, has been busy recruiting among young people and has been given a lot of air time to expound its views on the forthcoming visits to Ireland of Queen Elizabeth and President Obama and on the killing of bin Laden. Defining its objective as an all-Ireland ‘Socialist Republic’, it aligns itself with the Real IRA rejection of Good Friday and rehashes the old republican tropes of ‘British imperialist occupation of the six counties’ and the demand for a ‘British withdrawal’.
Eirígí’s political traction so far shouldn’t be over-rated: in the recent NI local elections none of its candidates were elected, though one received over 1,400 votes in a Belfast ward. Yet, with youth and vigour on its side and a talent for agit-prop on the streets, it has obvious potential to attract support from those too young to remember much about the peace process.
It has been an eerie feeling to hear the return of this pre-Good Friday rhetoric as if the Agreement had never happened, and to hear it go unchallenged by naïve talk show presenters as if it were just another contribution to debate. The Agreement that was supposed to have laid the conflict to rest and resolved all outstanding matters between Britain and Ireland now seems to recede into the fog of history and becomes just one of a number of competing ‘narratives’.
Is this the future of an Israel-Palestinian peace deal, assuming one can ever be achieved? A decade after the agreement, and a generation is on the rise that doesn’t remember the long process and painful compromises needed to reach it and is ripe for indoctrination and incitement by hate-filled ideologues from the past – there you have the materials for a new round of conflict. Does the information revolution and its encouragement of ever-shorter attention spans facilitate this? Think of how little kudos Israel gets now from critics for its withdrawal from Gaza less than six years ago – it might never have happened.
I’ve met Israelis who imagine, understandably, that a good ploy to win Irish friends is to emphasise a common anti-British narrative based on the parallel independence struggles of the Irish and Israelis. I try to tell them there is no percentage in that line, since the inheritors of the violent nationalist tradition are also the most virulently anti-Israel. For them, the Palestinians have taken over the MOPE (Most Oppressed People Ever) slot once held by the NI Catholics/nationalists.
The Eirígí phenomenon has some novel features. It was already noticeable that the ranks of Palestine Solidarity campaigners were augmented by members of Sinn Fein, especially from the youth wing, who seemed very well organised for talk show phone-ins, texting programmes etc. With the Good Friday settlement in place, and unable to vent their spleen on the unionist/loyalist opposition or on the security forces with the same venom as previously, these people found an ideal alternative outlet in the Israel/Palestine issue.
Eirígí have taken this further by practically merging agitation on the NI and Israel/Palestinian issues, thus enabling it to boast a membership equally ignorant of Irish and Middle East history. Its street demonstrations have included a mock-trial and guillotine execution of Queen Elizabeth in Dublin city centre – on charges that included the 19th century famine and participation in the 2004 siege of Falluja – and demands for the release of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist Ahmad Sa’adat and the convicted Hamas terrorist Jamal Abu al-Haija, both on hunger strike in an Israeli jail. Its website helpfully sets this in the context of the 30th anniversary of the deaths of 10 IRA prisoners on hunger strike in NI at the height of the IRA’s war. The IRA’s pioneering use of victimhood as a propaganda weapon in a campaign of violence has found its emulators in the Middle East.
Falsifying history, the website adds ‘We in Ireland understand only too well the seriousness of the situation when you have no option but to use your body as a weapon’. In fact, all the concessions won by SF-IRA in 1998 were already on offer in the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974 reached between the British and Irish governments (the nationalist politician Seamus Mallon famously called the Good Friday Agreement ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’). But at that stage violence seemed a more promising path to its ultimate goal. That remind you of anything in the 63 years of Israel/Palestinian conflict?