Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Jonathan Freedland: Amid the horror and doom of Gaza, the IRA precedent offers hope, The

Guardian, Jan. 14, 2009

The Northern Ireland example is instructive. Through dialogue even the most implacable of enemies can make peace

The smart money in the Middle East is always on pessimism. Events can be relied on to get worse and worse. But perennial gloom has a flaw. Its unstated assumption is that the war between Israelis and Palestinians is somehow unique – that it is the only conflict in the history of the world that cannot be solved or even ended.

Yet even as the horror continues in Gaza, it’s worth recalling that people were once just as fatalistic about battles now long settled. Whether it was apartheid in South Africa or the 30-year bloodshed in Northern Ireland, there were plenty of dark days when the blood seemed as if it would never stop.

Which is why the mention of Northern Ireland, once a byword for strife, is now an invocation of hope. If republicans and unionists – who once wished each other dead – can sit in government together, then surely Israelis and Palestinians are not fated to fight for ever.

That message is in the air just now, with both the Irish prime minister and Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams urging the warring parties of the Middle East to learn their lesson and begin “dialogue”. Meanwhile, Tony Blair has been citing his own Northern Ireland experience as a useful precedent. Is he right? And if he is, what exactly are the lessons?

It’s a statement of the obvious that the two conflicts are not the same: none ever are. The wildest elements of the IRA were never committed, even rhetorically, to the destruction of Great Britain. Yet Hamas’s charter does call for the eradication of the state of Israel. (Those close to the organisation insist the document has in effect lapsed.)

Moreover, whatever brutalities were meted out by the British forces in Northern Ireland, they never pounded Belfast from the air using fighter jets. There was state collusion in killings, but the British army did not bomb entire buildings in the Falls Road because it suspected an IRA cell lurked within.

Nevertheless, there are important similarities. The two sides were fighting over the future of a small piece of territory. The unionist majority often complained that it stood alone, uncomprehended by the rest of the world. Demographics mattered, the notion that one group might soon outnumber the other. And religion was never far below the surface.