Israel Can Learn from 'The Troubles'Ellis Weintraub, in Real Clear World: Upon the arrival of Sinn Fein President and Northern Ireland 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...
Perhaps Israel's cynicism with regard 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... Murals found on buildings in Belfast's Catholic neighborhoods depict Arab 'freedom fighters' in a common struggle... 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... 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...
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... 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...
The rhetoric of Ian Paisley and Mark Steyn vastly simplified the Northern Irish and Arab-Israeli conflicts. They are not Manicheist struggles between good and evil, liberty and tyranny, nor are they caroonish battles between progress and darkness. Rather, they are both messy and complex clashes over territory, sovereignty, and identity... Israel should 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.
