Israel Can Learn from 'The Troubles'
Upon the arrival of Sinn Fein President and Northern Irish Republican leader Gerry Adams into the Middle East, Israeli officials will give him the cold shoulder - "We expect all dignitaries who come here to make it clear that they will not dignify Hamas with a meeting," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.
On Adams's previous 2006 trip, he met with Hamas officials, and during his stay he advocated dialogue between the group and Israel, even without the precondition of Hamas's recognition of the Jewish state. Israel should not set as a prerequisite for official engagement a refusal to see Hamas officials.
As a foreign observer, and one bringing with him a breadth of knowledge from a lifetime of dealing with the complexities of Northern Ireland's ethnic and religious conflict, Adams has every right, and indeed he should meet with Hamas; likewise, official Israel should not shun him for so doing.
Perhaps Israel's establishment should take a cue from President Barack Obama on the ability of communication to effectively probe the intentions of hostile parties. President Obama's message of amity and goodwill to the Iranian people on Nowrūz, the Persian New Year, pointed to a profound strategy shift from the animosity of the Bush years towards one of a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. The overture's quick dismissal by Iran's supreme clerical leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wherein he listed America's ongoing crimes against Iran before crowds chanting "death to America," illustrated well the violent and adversarial nature of the Iranian regime. Thus President Obama seized the moral high ground, and his act will enable him to corral foreign leaders to America's side as he tackles Iran's nuclear program.
When Adams meets Hamas, then he will do Israel's unwilling dirty work of talking with the terrorist organization. Hamas will express the organization's grievances and positions to Adams, and he in turn could convey them back to Israel. Israel, though, will ignore him, much as the Israeli establishment snubbed him when he visited in 2006 following the war in Lebanon. As in 2006, the Israeli powers that be do not wish to give any credence or legitimacy to Hamas by convening with Adams following his Hamas rendezvous. However, this decision portrays Israeli authorities - when unwilling to meet with even an international third party conduit between themselves and Hamas - as unnecessarily intransigent.
Israel has every right to look upon those that meet with the violent organization Hamas with skepticism, but rebuffing them will serve no purpose. Perhaps Israel's cynicism with regards to Adams comes from the long and often antagonistic relationship between Israel and Irish Republicanism. During the dark days of the Troubles of Northern Ireland, Irish Republicans identified with the far-off struggle of the Palestinians, and some went so far as to train with the PLO in Lebanon. Murals found on buildings in Belfast's Catholic neighborhoods depict Arab "freedom fighters" in a common struggle with Irish Republican Army combatants. Many Northern Irish Catholics perceive Israel in a similar fashion to that of the Protestant community, an aggressive colonial movement usurping land from an indigenous population.
Israel's rhetoric, oddly enough, can match the idioms and language-style of Northern Ireland's Protestants. In the past two centuries, Ulster's Protestants have proclaimed their province as a beacon of Protestant liberty and freedom amidst backwaters of Papal tyranny and superstition found on the rest of the island. As the crises of Irish home rule and Irish independence unfolded at the beginning of the 20th century, Ulster Protestants refused to submit to the prospect of "Rome rule," and so they engineered Ulster's exemption from the Irish Free State.
With the advent of the Troubles in the 1960's, Ulster Protestants continued to pride themselves on their distinct Protestant liberal values and traditions, as opposed to the Catholic community's subservience to the whims of Rome; their principles, they proclaimed, traced back to the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when William of Orange defeated the Papal stooge James II, thereby ensuring England's freedom from Papal absolutism. In their view, this Protestant culture helped forge American and British democracy and modern notions of a free society. Throughout his lengthy career, the Protestant leader Ian Paisley called for maintaining the union with Great Britain and the preservation of his community's liberal religious traditions. At the height of the Troubles, Paisley would go so far as to call the Pope the anti-Christ.
Israel and its unwavering supporters have long proclaimed the country's separation from the rest of the Middle East, an enlightened democracy surrounded by Oriental barbarism and irrational hatred. From Zionism's early days, Theodore Herzl envisioned a progressive liberal republic upon which the Oriental Middle East could model itself. During the recent war in Gaza, pro-Israel commentators wrote of Israel as a product of the Judeo-Christian culture that fostered the Enlightenment, while they regarded Israel's Hamas opponents as implacably fanatical and possessing an unreasonable medieval cultural ethos. Among the pro-Israel pundits, Mark Steyn argued that Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis revealed itself in Israel's fight against Gaza.
Yet the rhetoric of Ian Paisley and Mark Steyn vastly simplifies the Northern Irish and Arab-Israeli conflicts. They are not Manicheist struggles between good and evil, liberty and tyranny, nor are they cartoonish battles between progress and darkness. Rather, they are both messy and complex clashes over territory, sovereignty, and identity. The IRA does not represent a return to the dark ages or the formation of a dictatorship of priests - instead the often violent organization stands for Northern Ireland's disenfranchised Catholic community and for a severance of the union with Great Britain. Hamas, likewise, does not embody an evil incarnate that will stop at nothing until it destroys Western civilization, but rather it embodies one particularly vicious element of Palestinian rejectionist nationalism.
In the past fifteen years, Ian Paisley has shown a turnaround from his utter disregard for Ulster's Catholic leadership and the province's Republican sentiments, a position that characterized so much of his career. Beginning with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Paisley joined a power sharing government with Sinn Fein politicians and former IRA members. Following the recent violence of early March, wherein two British Army soldiers and a policeman were shot dead by Republican dissidents, Paisley spoke admiringly of a priest in Antrim named Father Tony Devlin, who with Protestant clergymen led their congregations in a peace and remembrance demonstration. Paisley called Father Devlin's impromptu address near the place where the soldiers were killed one of the greatest speeches he had ever heard from any man of the cloth.
After railing against Catholics for so long, Paisley realized that he would have to accommodate to the complexities of Northern Irish politics, and should he continue to divide the Northern Irish conflict into a pure struggle of good against evil, then his community would face unending conflict. Israelis officials could learn something from Paisley - they should talk with even bitter foes like Hamas. Doing so could allow Israel to seize the moral high ground, and force Hamas to modify its behavior. Israel should also cease discouraging third parties from engaging with Hamas in ways that might clarify the movement's view and test its behavior, and Israel could start by meeting with Adams.
