Over the next 12 months, Ireland could play a useful role in the Middle East peace process, writes Deaglán de Bréadún
Few people in Ireland will feel comfortable about partition as a solution to a long-standing conflict. But partition, or the division of what was once British-administered Palestine into two states, is what's on offer in the Middle East peace process today.
The Irish experience suggests that partition is at best an interim measure which eventually starts to break down. But the "road map" devised by the "Quartet" of the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia, speaks of "a permanent two-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Whether it can be a permanent answer or not, it is clearly the only game in town. Given the level of violence and the antipathy and mistrust on both sides, a bi-national state where Jews and Palestinians live together in peace and harmony, as proposed by theorists like Martin Buber and Noam Chomsky, seems like a utopian pipedream.
The UN originally proposed a partition solution in 1947 but the Palestinians and their Arab brothers and sisters rejected it. After the ensuing war, the Palestinians were left with considerably less than the UN had offered. The so-called "Six-Day War" of 1967 saw Israeli forces taking over the rest of Palestine as an occupying power. The trend of events seems to vindicate the comment by the noted Israeli diplomat and politician, Abba Eban, that the Palestinians "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity".
Now the US, perhaps seeking to restore credibility in the Arab world and elsewhere after an unpopular Iraqi war, has placed its considerable prestige and influence behind the road map.
In terms of its timetable, this is an ambitious document. After all the violence, the devastating suicide bombings and massive Israel counter-attacks in civilian areas in Gaza particularly, can there really be "a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005"? Whether right or wrong, the Iraq invasion at least showed that, when President Bush sets his mind to something, he gets there. There is a no-nonsense, even peremptory tone in the language about "a performance-based and goal-driven road map, with clear phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks aiming at progress through reciprocal steps by the two parties".
This is the kind of language Bush might have used on his Harvard MBA course. The aims are as simple to express as they are difficult to achieve: the Palestinian leadership will crush terrorism and build a genuine democracy while Israel will "do what is necessary for a democratic Palestinian state to be established", i.e., withdraw to its 1967 borders.
As an EU member, Ireland has bought into the road map and, by coincidence, will have a prominent, if temporary, role at a critical time in the process on behalf of the other member-states: first as a member of the EU "Troika" with foreign policy chief Javier Solana and the Italian EU presidency from July to December and later, as President of the EU from January to June, 2004.
The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, will be the EU representative in the Quartet for the first six months of next year and he needs to know what he's about. In that spirit, he set off last Tuesday on a six-day fact-finding mission to the Middle East, starting with Egypt and progressing through Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
He was accompanied by a team of senior officials from his Department, including the secretary-general, Dermot Gallagher; political director, David Cooney, and the head of the Middle East section, Anthony Mannix. The group was met at various points by Irish diplomats working in the region, including the Ambassador to Egypt, Richard O'Brien; Ambassador to Israel, Patrick Hennessy and the Irish Representative to the Palestinian Authority, Dr Niall Holohan.
The visit became controversial before it even started. The EU has a policy of meeting the President of the Palestinian Authority during such visits, whereas the Israeli Government shuns foreign dignitaries who insist on meeting Yasser Arafat.
The Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, flouted EU policy when he met the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and ignored Arafat on a recent trip, but Cowen toed the European line. Ireland would, in any case, be seen as one of the more Palestinian-friendly states in the EU.
This was not the first time the Minister visited Arafat under stormy circumstances. He was en route to a meeting in Gaza with the Palestinian President on September 11th, 2001, when a terrible thunderbolt struck. News came in by mobile phone and car radio of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Initial reports even suggested that a Palestinian faction might be responsible. What to do?
The Cowen cavalcade pulled in on the side of the road and, in what must have been one of the most difficult decisions of his political career, he decided to proceed with the meeting, but confining discussion to the need for co-operation in the fight against terrorism.
Nearly two years later Arafat, at one time Israel's partner in peace, has been spurned by his former interlocutors who instead launched fierce attacks on his headquarters at Moukata, reducing them almost to ruins, while keeping him under virtual house arrest.
The Israeli chief of staff recently revealed what was long suspected, that he and his colleagues seriously considered killing the elected Palestinian President on several occasions.
If Cowen insisted on meeting Arafat amid the nightmare uncertainties of September 11th, he certainly wasn't going to "wimp out" this time. An editorial in the right-leaning Jerusalem Post accused him of paying "slavish homage" to the Palestinian chief but conceded that, if Tony Blair came to town and insisted on meeting Arafat, Israel's leaders might well abandon their boycott.
From my inquiries afterwards, it seems the Arafat meeting was a perfunctory encounter but it had symbolic value because Ireland and other EU members believe no peace deal can be successful without his imprimatur. The President may be past his peak, but he still carries great weight on what is known as the Palestinian "Street".
A more important meeting, in practical terms, took place with Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, the new Palestinian Prime Minister. The fact that both the Israelis and Americans want to deal with Abbas and not Arafat has given rise to suspicions that he is some kind of seven stone political weakling. Not so, according to members of the Irish delegation, who were greatly impressed by his air of quiet purpose and no-nonsense realism.
I heard later that some of Cowen's officials got briefly stuck in the lift at the Prime Minister's offices in Ramallah but it did not detract from their enthusiasm afterwards. During the 45-minute session, Abbas briefed them on his efforts to broker a ceasefire with the militants in Hamas, and also highlighted the need to release some 8,000-9,000 Palestinians said to be held in Israeli jails as a result of the conflict. Abbas reportedly stressed that freeing them would give a boost to the peace process.
It had a very familiar ring for several members of the delegation, who were centrally involved in the negotiations leading up to the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday in 1998. Indeed, throughout his visit, Cowen brought up lessons that had been learnt in the Irish peace process which might have some relevance to the Middle East.
Such lessons would include: 1) Don't let negotiations be derailed by "the politics of the last atrocity", thereby giving extremists a veto over the process; 2) Bring the hardliners in from the margins, as was done with republicans and loyalists in the North; 3) Take an imaginative and generous approach to concessions, rather than a grudging and minimalist attitude: this can also give you the initiative in political terms.
Willy-nilly and by pure accident, Ireland will soon be in the thick of things in the Middle East peace process. The idea for the Road Map originally came from Denmark, proving that small countries can, if they wish, play a useful role in prodding and prompting the big battalions into action, particularly the US.
One senses that the Palestinians, in particular, may look to the Irish for counsel and solidarity from time to time during what promises to be a very difficult and challenging period. This State will have a chance to live up to the very generous tribute paid by the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Maher, who said after his meeting with Cowen in Cairo last Wednesday: "Ireland may be a small country, but it is big with its tradition of doing the right thing at the right moment".
Deaglán de Bréadúis the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times