Peace elusive in Ireland and the Middle East

St. Patrick’s Day! Green beer. “Kiss Me I’m Irish” buttons. Anyone who takes their Irishness seriously, as I do, stays home. And thinks perhaps of Irish history and politics. Because I have worked on both the Northern Ireland and Middle East conflicts, I contemplate some of the parallels, and differences, between the two situations.

It was no accident that, at the height of the Second Intifada, Palestinian flags flew in Northern Ireland’s Catholic Nationalist districts, and Israeli flags in Protestant Loyalist areas. Nationalists identified with a dispossessed and occupied people, Loyalists with Israeli settlers seen as under terrorist attack. In both situations, too, there has been on each side a strong sense of being, as the Israeli historian Benny Morris has said, “righteous victims” of either illegitimate “occupiers” or “terrorists.”

In their self-righteousness, neither side has shrunk from violence against the other. Atrocities on both sides and allegations (and often the reality) of torture and abuse by the authorities have characterized the urban warfare which has occurred in both places.

There are differences. Embarrassed by the extremes to which the provincial government went to keep Loyalist dominance, the British long ago instituted direct rule from Westminster for Northern Ireland. “A Protestant State for a Protestant People” proved incompatible with true democracy – as might well a Jewish state or any other polity in which one ethnic or religious group is, to use Orwell’s famous phrase, “more equal than others.”

In 1999, with President Bill Clinton’s good offices, a Good Friday agreement was reached. It provided for the restoration of provincial self-government based on power sharing between the two communities. It also brought Sinn Fein, which many see as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, into the political system, much against the will of hard-line Loyalists. Their intransigence, as well as provocations by the IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries, have thwarted full implementation of the agreement so far, but the Six Counties are closer to peace now than they were seven years ago.

In the Middle East, there has been no third party able or willing to push a comparable settlement. In the past, the United States has put Israeli security and interests first, to the virtual exclusion of all else. It is true that President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have recently made statements which indicate that they understand that more must be done to accommodate Palestinian needs and interests, but it is not clear that either Israel or our government is yet ready for concessions on a scale perceived as adequate by the Palestinian side, and thus conducive to a lasting peace. Complete Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories, the release of all Palestinian prisoners (like releases in Northern Ireland), and recognition of a right of return to former homes in Israel: All are key to real peace, and all seem beyond what the Israeli-American side will discuss.

Moreover, Israel and its supporters may have to swallow hard and allow Hamas and other groups it now labels “terrorist” into the political process, just as Sinn Fein was brought in from the cold. Certainly Israel’s perennial calls for the “dismantling of terrorist infrastructure” by a government of as dubious popularity as that of Mahmoud Abbas are unrealistic. The Paisleyites in Northern Ireland make similar demands, with about as much sense of reality.

Here some incidents and personages from Irish and other recent history have relevance. In 1920, Britain offered limited Irish independence, but stipulated that all efforts to create a united Irish Republic by force had to be suppressed. The new Free State Government complied. The result was a bitter civil war – the kind of war Palestine could face if it acted on Israeli demands for forcible dismantling of resistance groups.

Using British arms, the Free Staters won the war, agreed to the legitimation of Northern Ireland – and lost public support. Eamon DeValera, leader of the Irish Republican resistance to the 1920 treaty, emerged from prison to lead all but Six Counties out of the British commonwealth. He did so over time, through constitutional if often devious means. “Dev” could not have done this without Britain’s tacit readiness to allow him room to maneuver.

Will Mahmoud Abbas be for Palestine a DeValera – a canny negotiator, successful in creating a workable Palestinian state? Or will he be like the Free Staters or, worse, Vidkun Quisling, the Nazis’ Norwegian puppet during World War II? Will Israelis and their American backers see the good sense of meeting Palestinian demands to the greatest extent possible, rather than imposing a victor’s peace on Abbas, thus making him appear as a Quisling to many Palestinians? Is there waiting, perhaps as is Marwan Barghouti in a jail cell, a younger, more charismatic leader who will lead the Palestinian people farther along the road to nationhood and freedom than Abbas can? We do not yet know.

Finally, both Americans and Israelis should ponder words of the Irish poet and patriot Padraic Pearse. In 1914, two years before the British committed the great mistake of making martyrs of him and other leaders of the unsuccessful Easter Rising which galvanized Irish opinion behind the struggle for independence, Pearse prophesied that “Ireland unfree will never be at peace.”

“Never” is a very long time, but Irish history has yet to prove Pearse wrong. Our political leaders, always tempted by domestic politics to align themselves with Israel, need to understand that Palestine unfree, impoverished and with its sense of grievance intact will continue to be a danger to Israel, and to an America which supports her uncritically.

Ed McCarthy, of Buxton, a retired Pentagon official, is co-founder of Maine Peace and Justice in Israel and Palestine, and has written on both the Middle East and Northern Ireland conflicts. His e-mail address is ecmccar@attglobal.net