Palestinian Kids - What Future?A great feature of the internet is the variety of online newspapers at your fingertips. When an event happens in a distant corner of the world I try to find whether that country has an English-language online paper and then take a look. Because of problems like pack journalism, the accounts we get in our media tend to be predictable and filtered by our perspective. It should be no surprise that you can often get a very different, and often really informative, viewpoint by going to a news outfit that's right at the source of a problem.
During the last conflict I visited Israeli and Lebanese online papers and learned a lot that never made it into western, mainstream papers. Today I found two interesting items in a Lebanese paper, the Daily Star.
One was a telling comparison of the Northern Ireland peace process and the Mideast equivalent. The reporter, Rhami Kouri, identified three factors that made the Northern Ireland initiative productive that are absent and need to be copied in resolving the Palestinian question:
"Several important points about the Northern Ireland process stand out. For one thing, it is working, and needs to be studied to grasp precisely why that is the case. It has not been fully implemented, but the region is no longer convulsed by political violence and terror. Any agreement that achieves that through negotiations deserves closer scrutiny.
"It is working primarily because of three reasons, it seems. First, it brought into the negotiating process all the key parties who were deemed to be legitimate in the eyes of their own communities, regardless of how other communities saw them. So Sinn Fein represented the IRA, regardless of the Unionists' revulsion for the IRA. The fact of being inclusive was an important element for success.
"Second, the parties recognized that they would achieve through peaceful negotiations important gains that could not be achieved through continued militancy. Diplomacy that succeeded and offered a vision of a better future spurred a greater willingness to persist on the path of peaceful negotiations, and so all sides committed to peaceful resolution of their conflict.
"Third, the external mediator - the United States - was at once persistent, patient and impartial. It did not take sides, but worked tirelessly to bridge gaps between the parties and offer mechanisms to restore confidence when it was shaken.
"None of these elements exists today in the Arab-Israeli situation, and so it is not surprising that our region of the world witnesses destructive wars while Northern Ireland joins the ranks of the world's wealthy societies. The sad irony is that as the Northern Ireland situation resumes its momentum toward a permanent settlement, its historic lessons for the Arabs and Israelis are ignored, even though many of the broad dynamics of both conflicts seem so similar.
"For example, Israel and the US refuse to deal with a Palestinian government led by Hamas, which was democratically elected. Yet in Northern Ireland the British and the US had no problem dealing with the IRA, which used terror for many years. Their decision to engage the IRA through Sinn Fein proved wise and productive, because the IRA soon got out of the terror business and decommissioned its arms. That experience suggests that focusing on the substance of the political goals that one desires from a negotiation is more important than allowing oneself to get hung up on whom one should talk to or not talk to.
"Israel and Hamas do not like or recognize each other, but they are both acting irresponsibly in continuing to avoid engaging each other in a political process that gives their people the possibility of living normal, peaceful lives.
"The same can be said of Iran and the United States. It is instructive for these and other parties in the region to ponder the Northern Ireland situation and acknowledge the importance of focusing on how to achieve desired outcomes that respond to the legitimate rights and needs of both parties to a conflict, rather than getting stalemated on false issues of honor and dishonor in engaging one's adversaries.
"Northern Ireland has much to teach us all about the business of conflict resolution - and also about acting like adults."
And that is a great deal more wisdom that you find today in our papers. When you think about these points, they're really all just common sense and it makes you wonder how this has eluded the principals to the Mideast process. Let's hope someone in Washington bothers to read Lebanon's Daily Star.
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