Ambassador's Corner
WEEKLY MESSAGE FROM AMBASSADOR JOHN BRUTON
March 13, 2008
Holding peace a hostage
Last weekend my wife and I went to the Church Street Theatre here in Washington,
DC, to see the play The Hostage by Brendan Behan, the Dublin playwright
who died in 1964. Brendan Behan was an IRA man who was imprisoned in Britain for an
attempt to blow up the Liverpool docks.
The play is about a fictional 19-year-old British soldier, Leslie Williams,
kidnapped in Armagh and brought to Dublin by the IRA, as a hostage to deter the
planned executions of convicted IRA men in Belfast. Once the news comes through
that the execution has gone ahead, the young man’s hours are numbered.
Despite Brendan Behan’s own politics, this play is no one-sided rant about
British evil and Irish virtue. Instead, it emphasizes the contrast between the
humanity, humour and gaiety of the residents of the Dublin house in which the
young soldier was being held and the soullessness of the eye-for-an-eye struggle
in which they are, increasingly unwillingly, involved.
Brendan Behan was immensely popular in America during his lifetime. He was a
wild
man, a man whose love of alcohol enhanced his popular appeal. He once
described himself as a “drinker with a writing problem.”
But the topics he addressed in this play were serious. I offer few very personal
reflections on those topics, and their relevance to today. The IRA men, and
their sympathizers, who held the hostage were entirely wrong, but they were also
human beings in a situation not entirely of their own making and reacting to it
from a rhetoric of victimhood and struggle that was the politically acceptable
version of patriotism of their time and place (Ireland in the late 1950s).
But suffering endured today will be remembered a hundred years from now. In
Brendan Behan’s play one of the characters justified the holding of the hostage
by the sufferings Irish people had experienced in a famine in 1847, 110 years before!
Can we draw any lessons for the crises of the twenty-first century from the long
struggle over allegiance and sovereignty in Ireland, with which the play deals?
This struggle lasted almost four hundred years, and was eventually brought to a
happy conclusion only last year.
Every conflict of this kind is different, although the human psychology involved
will have much in common. But peace only becomes possible if a leader begins to
understand his enemy’s perspective. This is a desperately hard thing to do.
For example, a struggle for allegiance and sovereignty in the
Holy Land has been
going on since it was separated from the Ottoman Empire ninety years ago. In
historical terms, that’s not long at all.
What will the Holy Land look like ninety years from now?
Is a long-term future peace being held hostage by the military and political
needs of the present?
I have read some interesting material on this subject in the past week, some of
which may offer hope.
The final phase of the peace process in
Ireland started with a ceasefire, in
August 1994, just before I became Taoiseach.
Ceasefires are no more than that; they do not guarantee peace.
The United States, Israel and the European Union will not talk to Hamas until it
meets explicit conditions which it has not met. How then can a ceasefire in this
disastrous conflict now under way be brought about?
This issue was explored in an editorial entitled “Let’s Make a Deal” in
The
Jewish Daily Forward last week. It said:
“There’s one option, however, that’s gotten barely any media attention and
deserves a closer look. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president and
head of Fatah, offered this past week to broker a ceasefire between Israel and
Hamas. If he were successful, he could hardly be called a sellout, if only
because he will have brought an end to Israeli incursions. In fact, a deal
delivered by Abbas would boost his stature among Palestinians and put Hamas in
his debt. It’s hard to imagine a better way of shoring up Palestinian moderates
than to allow them a leader.
“Not least, Abbas offers the only realistic hope for ending the rocket fire.
Hamas has offered to silence them in return for a ceasefire. But Israel hasn’t
wanted to deal with Hamas, and so the rockets have kept coming.”
This suggestion may or may not be the best approach. But we must all realize
that
the sufferings in Gaza and Israel are not just a problem of tomorrow or the
day after.
Memories are long in the Middle East, just as they were in Ireland. Whatever the
military effectiveness of the measures being taken to deter the murderous and
reprehensible rocket fire directed at Israel from Gaza by Hamas, one must also
take note both of the effect of the rocket attacks on ordinary Israelis but
equally on the potentially disastrous effect of Israel’s retaliatory measures on
the minds of people in Gaza with whom Israel must eventually make peace, if
Israel itself is to be secure.
A wide range of international NGOs published a report last week on this subject
entitled The Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion. It is worth reading and it
can be accessed at
www.alternativenews.org/news/english/the-gaza-strip-a-humanitarian-implosion-20080309.html .
The report claims that movement in and out of Gaza is all but impossible and
supplies of food and water, sewage treatment and basic healthcare can no longer
be taken for granted. It also alleges that 95% of Gaza’s industrial operations
are suspended because they cannot access inputs for production nor can they
export what they produce. It claims that in June 2005, there were 3,900
factories in Gaza employing 35,000 people. One-and-a-half years later, in
December 2007, there were just 195 left employing only 1,700. It also claims
that hospitals cannot generate electricity to keep lifesaving equipment working
or to generate oxygen, while 40-50 million litres of sewage continues to pour
into the sea daily.
The report argues that Israel, as the occupying power, is ultimately responsible
for ensuring the welfare of the Palestinian population in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT), including the 1.5 million Palestinians who live
in the Gaza Strip because Israel retains effective control of the Gaza Strip, by
virtue of the full control it exercises over the Gaza Strip’s land border, its
air space and territorial waters. Israel takes a different view on this, and has
said so.
None of which is contained in the Report absolves Hamas of the slightest part of
its grave responsibility for the rockets it fires at Israel. But it may explain
why its conduct is not repudiated by Gazans or publicly, as quickly as it should
be.
A siege creates a siege mentality. That is a sad reality of human psychology.
A viable two-state solution – Israel, and a yet to be created Palestinian state,
coexisting peacefully in a very small territory where each will always be
vulnerable to the other – must be our objective, but such a two-state solution
will require people on both sides to put aside their pain and begin to trust
other people they have, perhaps with good reason, never trusted before.
The longer the suffering goes on, the longer the healing will take.
Perhaps, as the editorial in The Jewish Daily Forward puts it:
“It’s time to try something that might work.”
I believe that the Annapolis process, launched by the United States, provides
the right context in which this urgent matter can be tackled. I commend the
effort Secretary Rice is making in this matter. I have had the chance of
discussing this with Senator Joseph Lieberman [on left in left photo] and Senator George Voinovich
[on right in right photo] this
week, both of whom have a deep interest in it.
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Please send me your
comments about this or any of my weekly messages or other EU matters. I
look forward to hearing from you!
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