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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The IRA and Hamas

George Mitchell’s appointment as special envoy for Israel and Palestine has naturally prompted a flurry of comparisons between his efforts in negotiating a peace in Northern Ireland and the prospects of doing the same in his new position. Alex Massie gives the most sober and thorough assessment I have seen, and I think his skeptical […]

George Mitchell’s appointment as special envoy for Israel and Palestine has naturally prompted a flurry of comparisons between his efforts in negotiating a peace in Northern Ireland and the prospects of doing the same in his new position. Alex Massie gives the most sober and thorough assessment I have seen, and I think his skeptical view is basically correct. Massie concludes:

Perhaps a similar level of exhaustion will prevail in Palestine, too. But right now, in the immediate aftermath of the latest military engagements, that seems a dubious proposition. In Northern Ireland weary combatants recognized, however reluctantly, that they would have to live with one another. Without that awareness there would have been no peace process at all.

This is the crucial point, and it is an important one to remember in the coming months. Mitchell’s success in Northern Ireland depended on the right conditions, including the willingness of both parties to make concessions and the willingness of one side, the Unionists, to overlook the lopsided nature of the deal they were getting. Mitchell may be seen as an honest and effective negotiator, and he may know the best methods for defusing long-running conflicts, but the outcome does not depend primarily on him. The conditions he is facing are, as Mr. Massie points out, more complicated and more difficult than those he faced in Northern Ireland.

These are just a few of the additional difficulties that make Mitchell’s task much harder. First, there are more political movements involved, and there is less interest on the part of Israel and the U.S. to engage the most hard-line Palestinians. Where Sinn Fein clearly represented the extreme end of the republican camp and was included in the process at the beginning, it is highly unlikely that Hamas, which occupies approximately the same position in Palestinian politics, will ever be included in the same way. If Fatah is now to be treated as the acceptable face of Palestinian nationalism, it is likely that any deal with Fatah will have to come at the expense of Hamas, which will then have every incentive to persist in rejectionism. This means that Hamas will have to be included from the beginning. As in the Ulster case, engaging Hamas will mean empowering them in the long run. This prospect does not seem satisfying to any of the other parties at the moment, and it will become tolerable only if all of the other parties can imagine accepting a Hamas-led government as preferable to continued conflict. Engaging Hamas seems politically untenable for the administration here at home, and it is not clear how any Israeli government that comes out of the next election will be able to engage them without the significant embarrassment of backtracking on the rhetorical excesses in which both Livni and Netanyahu called for the elimination of Hamas.

Merely for talking to Hamas in another capacity, Malley was run off the Obama campaign as fast as possible, and Obama has stated that there will be no negotiations with Hamas until they take the sorts of steps that Sinn Fein and the IRA took only at the conclusion of the peace process. There is the additional factor that both Israel and the U.S. view Hamas only partly as a Palestinian political movement and tend to place more importance on its connection with Iran. By the late ’90s, the IRA did not enjoy meaningful foreign sponsorship of any kind, and it had never come to be seen by the British as a proxy for a foreign power that it believed was determined to do them harm. The differences between the IRA and Hamas are also worth considering a bit more. While sectarian in membership, the IRA never really possessed a religious character and was not bound in the minds of its leaders by anything like a religious imperative to continue fighting. To the extent that Hamas leaders are serious and uncompromising in their Islamism, and if they believe that this mandates continued conflict, they are less likely to reach the state of exhaustion that was a prerequisite to the Irish peace deal. If the Israeli government’s goal is not to end, but merely to limit and manage, the conflict while retaining effective control over the territories, it seems unlikely that Israel would be interested in negotiations with Hamas even if the latter were ready to make a deal.

P.S. Abunimah makes the point, related to the counterfactual discussion we were having earlier this month, that there was pro-republican political pressure from Washington. There is no counterpart to this pressure in the Israel-Palestine case. There is an added problem that almost everyone links Israel-Palestine to a more general Arab-Israeli settlement.

Update: Steve Clemons discusses Levy’s comparison of the two cases. Another significant problem in trying to apply an Ulster solution to Israel-Palestine is that the end state in Ulster was joint government of a province as part of the U.K. What the two-state solution requires, obviously, is the formation of a genuinely sovereign and viable Palestine, which would be equivalent to having created a Sinn Fein-ruled mini-Ulster independent of the U.K. and the Republic. Comparison with the Ulster example makes the most sense if you can imagine the territory of Israel-Palestine under control of a government that is neither Israeli nor Palestinian and which grants the inhabitants a measure of joint home rule. One of the prerequisites of a two-state solution, however, is the withdrawal of all settlers–the equivalent to this in Ulster would have been the repatriation of Protestants to majority-Protestant counties in Ulster or “back” to Scotland. That would have been infinitely more difficult politically for London to accept, and would have made any deal virtually impossible.

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