Britannia Radio

Just Journalism Newsletter 17 September 2010 Donating to Just Journalism Just Journalism is a not-for-profit organization and relies entirely upon the generosity of our supporters. If you wish to make a donation, please contactdonate@justjournalism.com for more information. New in Slate: 'Hamas Isn't the IRA' Just Journalism Executive Director Michael Weiss has published the following article in Slate, rejecting the use of Northern Ireland as an analogy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The original article can be accessed here. With the resumption of Arab-Israeli direct talks comes the regurgitation of a minority view that these talks are destined to fail because Hamas is excluded. The first salvo in this ongoing campaign came from Palestinian-American blogger Ali Abunimah, an advocate of the one-state solution, who expounded upon the need for recognizing Hamas in the New York Times. Peter Beinart made the same case in a broader Daily Beast column about Obama's failed foreign policy. What both had in common, apart from thinking rather generously of a totalitarian and anti-Semitic Islamist party, is use of the Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland as a convenient analogy for the Middle East peace process. Didn't the British government eventually sit down with Sinn Fein, the IRA's "political wing," after decades of murderous mayhem in Belfast and Tube, pub, and other bombings on the mainland? And can't the same lessons learned from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which inaugurated the end of the Troubles, be applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict? There are many obvious reasons why this analogy fails. The IRA never employed suicide bombers or called for the wholesale destruction of Great Britain. Nor was it the client of a theocratic state intent on becoming a nuclear power. It was also thoroughly integrated with Sinn Fein and could therefore act with greater strategic cohesion than the fragmented Hamas, whose political and paramilitary leadership is spread throughout Gaza, the West Bank, and Damascus, Syria. But, most important, the analogy misconstrues the history of the Northern Ireland peace process and the ultimate aim of the Good Friday Agreement, which was, chiefly, to undermine the terrorists, not to legitimize them. Abunimah and Beinart both refer to Hamas' 2006 election victory, although neither acknowledges that the group has twice refused to hold new national elections this year, fearing a likely walloping at the polls. Moreover, Hamas has loudly denounced each and every framework for Arab-Israeli negotiations from the Clinton-brokered Oslo Accords of 1993, which created Palestinian democracy in the first place, to the Bush administration's 2002 roadmap for peace. It's worth measuring all this against the way "inclusive dialogue" with the IRA really proceeded. The earliest instance of talks between the British government and the IRA occurred during a temporary truce in 1972, with no preconditions set by the former. The IRA took this as a sign of the British government's wobbliness, and top operatives, including IRA leader Martin McGuinness and future Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams (who was then in British custody), were flown to London by the Royal Air Force, where they simply stated their demands for full British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. The truce subsequently broke down, leading to the "Bloody Friday" attacks of July 21, 1972, in which 22 bombs ravaged Belfast within 75 minutes, killing nine people and injuring 130 more. "Talking to terrorists" had plainly failed in such an anything-goes context, and 1972 marked the single deadliest year of the Troubles. To continue reading, click here. For more information about Just Journalism, or to contact us, please visit www.justjournalism.com