Israel should have been Northern Ireland, say liberal Israelis

When studying for his PhD in Queen’s University Belfast, Israeli sociologist Ron Dudai lived in a string of sublets across the city. This included a flat in east Belfast where an Israeli flag hung on an electricity pole on the street outside.

Previously, the now Jerusalem-based academic had lived in London. “I remember feeling almost immediately at home in Belfast, something I never felt there. People were really friendly,” he says.

“The shared conflict heritage made the place familiar, I understood instinctively the ‘grammar’ of a conflict city, if not the details – the invisible yet concrete dividing lines between neighbourhoods, the etiquette of things not to talk about with strangers.”

Today, Dudai, a liberal Israeli whose children are educated in Jerusalem’s only school where Jews and Palestinian children learn side by side, finds himself asked by other Israelis about the lessons Israel can draw from Northern Ireland.

Many Israeli and Palestinian liberals look back regretfully to the 1990s to the days when the Oslo Accords offered hope to end their conflict, to the ending of apartheid in South Africa and, later, to the Belfast Agreement.

However falteringly, two attempts at peace have made progress: “This could have been us already, should have been us already. And one thing which is helpful is that Ireland is not a miracle, is not a utopia in any way,” says the Ben Gurion University academic.

“People saw Nelson Mandela as a saint, but no one thought Martin McGuinness or Ian Paisley were saints. No one ever thought that, but they made progress and that is the kind of progress that should have been made here, too,” Dudai adds.

Since 2007, and especially since the October 7th Hamas massacres, Northern Ireland has become “a real source of inspiration to many in Israeli liberal civil society”, he tells The Irish Times.

For nearly 20 years, dozens of delegations from Israel – some of them Jewish Israelis, some joint Israeli-Palestinian groups – have travelled to Northern Ireland to learn about the peace process and the efforts that brought it about.

In 2022, then Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett and his foreign minister Yair Lapid planned to send ministers, including themselves, to Belfast to learn about negotiation and conflict management that could keep their coalition together.

The coalition fell before the trip could be made.

“It must be in the hundreds now who have come: civil society and human rights groups, peace activists, but also teachers, school principals, town planners, religious figures. It’s relentless,” Dudai says.

The experiences gained by the delegations are instructive. In the first few days, many in the groups will see the persistent signs of divisions in Belfast – the so-called peace walls, the pavement markings, the graffiti, and wonder why they have been brought there.

“They say, ‘why did you bring us here? There’s no peace here. Look at these people. They hate each other’. And I’m saying, ‘Hang on, hang on, that’s the point’. And you see how people learn over a few days,” Dudai says.

“The fact that it’s still complicated, that you can see hatred between some people, that you can still see the signs of the conflict, or the way in which the legacy of the past has not been dealt with, that’s the important thing.”

The Belfast Agreement, and he emphasises this again and again, offers hope to liberal Israelis and Palestinians of a better future not because of its perfections, but because of its imperfections.

“It makes it a more realistic ambition to have an affinity with a place because it doesn’t shame you. So, you’re not saying, ‘Oh, God, these guys are so much better than me.’ We can see they messed up, but we could imagine ourselves living in a place,” he says.

For decades, debate in Israel has ebbed and flowed on the so-called two-state solution where an independent Palestine made up of Gaza and the West Bank would live side by side with Israel.

Liberals no longer believe such an option can work, if it ever had the chance of doing so, says Dudai. “It’s still in the margins, but you have more and more intellectuals and activists who are saying that partition will not be feasible.”

Instead, a one-state solution is required, and here again the Belfast Agreement provides the model – notwithstanding the decades of collapses and restorations of the institutions that have taken place at Stormont since.

“Most people here in Israel today would say, basically, ‘Are you mad?’ But the counter response is, ‘Hey, look at Northern Ireland. They’ve been fighting for 800 years there’,” he goes on.

The power sharing clauses, policing reform, the restraints on majority rule in the Irish agreement, no matter how flawed in their outworkings, offer “a source of inspiration, a source of hope, but also a kind of blueprint”.

The similarities have often struck him, especially the problems surrounding the policing of Palestinian towns inside Israel proper, with militarised policing ineffective because it has few roots in the society policed.

“It’s really similar to how areas of west Belfast or south Armagh would have been in the 80s, in the 90s, with the combination of militarised policing and the problem of under policing,” he adds.

Visits from Israel to Northern Ireland stopped after October 7th, but then nearly everything else in Israel stopped, too. “For the first few months, people were in a state of shock. No one talked about anything, nothing.”

Now, however, the seeds of renewal among Israeli liberals are emerging, albeit tentatively. “I was invited to give a couple of talks on Northern Ireland as early as December. They wanted to do evenings titled How Conflicts End,” Dudai says.

“In the last week I was asked to do a prep day for a delegation that will be going in October, and I know another has just been there. “People need hope now, more than anything.”

Pointing to a grassroots group of Jewish and Palestinian women called Women Waging Peace, Dudai says: “They have a slogan, ‘It happened in Northern Ireland, it can happen here’.”

• Sep 21

13 of the funniest and most brutal comebacks that went viral this week