The Other Two State Solution

Is Ireland's violent 400-year history of resistance and war analogous to Israel and Palestine. No it's not. The stories are very different. Forget it. Also, yes.

Years ago, I was attending an international development conference here in New York and sat down to lunch at a big round table in the ballroom of a midtown hotel. It was a casual open seating box lunch kind of deal, and I nodded collegially to other attendees as they also grabbed spots to eat. A tall older guy with a thick gray beard and wire rim glasses, wearing a well cut suit without a tie, sat down next to me, opened his sandwich, and introduced himself.

“I’m Gerry,” he said, shaking my hand.

The penny dropped. It was Gerry Adams.

It was a quick ad hoc conference lunch, and we exchanged only the kind of limited small talk you generally do at these things, remarking on a keynote speech or breakout panel. Adams was polite, but exceedingly taciturn. And I didn’t push it. He was Gerry Adams, and I was me. I’ll chat with anyone about anything, and often do, but my strength in these situations is listening. No one really likes an interrogation. So I didn’t learn the secrets of Irish nationalism or the inside story of the Good Friday Agreement. But as an empathetic observer trained to pay attention in the days when reporters needed this skill, I did get a brief sense of Adams as serious, tough, perhaps ruthless, quite possibly wounded in the soul, and deeply intelligent.

I was reminded of that meeting a few times over these last two weeks, as the world tried to make sense of the brutal mass murders by Hamas in southern Israel, the gruesome details of which we are still learning more of every day, and the aftermath of that action began to unfold with military action in Gaza. There were many voices who sought to put the Palestinian nationalist struggle into the context of other multi-generational sectarian battles over religion and turf, so the centuries of battles over control of Ireland were in heavy rotation.

And I thought of meeting Adams, and the harrowing reporting in Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, the bleak and revealing 2019 book by Patrick Keefe (a Christmas gift from my son). It’s a detective story about the abduction of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 20 children, who vanished after masked men grabbed her in Belfast. The tale is a tragedy for the McConville family, but her murder by the Irish Republican Army (for being an informer for the British, a charge that came with scanty evidence at best) serves to tell the wider story of the Troubles, when sectarian brutality ravaged Northern Ireland. And it uncovers the complicity of those who would eventually, with the help of George Mitchell and Bill Clinton, lay down their terrorist arms for an agreement that still holds 25 years later. The book makes a strong case against Adams and his cohorts, as he portrays an evolution from armed militants to politicians. Yet Keefe also asks a central question:

Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?

No one comes across well in Keefe’s account - as indeed, few did in that particular struggle. Yet, there’s a narrative arc that can be very tempting to apply to Israel and Palestine. After all, as David Graham noted in his review in The Atlantic:

Adams was uniquely positioned to make peace when the moment arrived. Widely known as a leader of the Provos, he had the credibility to make political compromises; because he repudiated that past, he had entree into politics. That combination allowed him to join the list of imperfect leaders who have brokered momentous peace agreements. Say Nothing succeeds because it presents an extensive ledger of evidence against Adams, without reducing him to flat caricature. Keefe shows how important Adams’s pragmatism was to creating the fragile, and now threatened, peace in North Ireland, but doesn’t downplay his moral bankruptcy. Keefe recalls that there was once speculation that Adams might win the Nobel Peace Prize. Though he didn’t, Adams would have been at home alongside winners such as Yasser Arafat, F. W. de Klerk, and Henry Kissinger, who were able to strike deals not in spite of but because of their deep flaws.

But to me, it’s important to remember the outcome. The IRA lost! Terrorism didn’t bring Britain to the peace table - the exhaustion of the populace with endless and meaningless violence (by Catholics and Protestants) did, as did significant economic and civil rights incentives. Many IRA and RUC killers aged out. Supplies and money were tight (I well remember the fundraisers in the upstairs Kingsbridge bars in the 80s, when I was a Bronx reporter). The liberation movement ran out of gas just at the time when Whitehall also wanted to dial back its own exhausting military commitment - the Clinton Administration served as the fulcrum for the Agreement, because both sides trusted the referee. The Republic of Ireland had its own political agenda, and Sinn Fein as a legitimate political party fit into the legislative road map.

And folks, the border is still there - hopefully remaining mostly unguarded in the wake of Britain’s ridiculous Brexit own goal. Former IRA hunger striker Gerard Hodgins summed it up to the BBC a decade ago:

We lost. It’s a crazy situation where you set out to be revolutionaries to overthrow the state and ended up being caretakers of the state . . . 3,000 plus dead is a hell of a price to pay to become part of the state you were supposedly trying to overthrow. You could have become a part of that state a long, long time ago.

Will there ever be a free and fully united Ireland? This has been in contention - often armed and vicious - since Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland in 1649. A Jewish homeland has been in contention since the latter part of the 19th century, and really since the breakup of the Ottoman empire after World War One. If these are analogous situations, there may be a long way to go. 

To that point, I do think there is one major overlap and one major difference. The overlap is something simple: no one is going anyplace. Not the Protestants, not the Catholics, not the British Government, not the United States, not the Palestinian people and certainly not Israel. I’m not fond of the ridiculous “from the river to the sea” chant so prevalent in anti-Israel rallies; this essentially calls for the eradication of Israel. This will not happen, just as there will always be an England. Everybody is stuck with everybody else. Just like in the Six Counties.

Frankly, the major difference is scale and ferocity. As brutal as the Troubles were (with a total death of around 3,000 people over many years), the Irish republican struggle doesn’t come close to the brutality of Hamas alone - leave aside Hezbollah and other terrorist groups. There is nothing in the history of Ireland from the 1916 revolt to the present to rival - in any way - the massive death squads sent on a mission to hunt down Jews. To torture them, rape, them, dismember them, burn them. And to take a couple of hundreds back over the border. This was a classic pogrom on a mass scale, with murders being committed based Jewish ethnicity. Then too, the British government of the 60s and 70s and 80s - bad as it was - did not shell entire Catholic neighborhoods to rubble, nor did it cut off and purposely deny food and water to the Catholics of Belfast and Derry.

Also, the IRA attacks, the RUC’s terrorism, and the British response never threatened to touch off a regional conflict and a possible world war - bad as all the players were.

So, yes - I think we should shy away from these neat little comparisons. They really don’t fit all that well. Nor does the South African struggle either. Different case entirely - and by the way, “Apartheid” was unique in that part of the world and should be used only to describe that conflict and policy. It is not the same.

There’s a good 2014 essay by Eamonn MacDonagh in The Tower, a pro-Israel academic journal, that I think makes an excellent point about viewing Palestine through and IRA lens:

Final victory, when and if it comes, might be difficult for some to recognize. It may involve attempts to spare the dignity of the enemy that will enrage or perplex people on the other side. In Northern Ireland, there are still many Loyalists who cannot stomach the sight of Nationalist leader Martin McGuinness shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth II and talking about how much he admires her. They think he should be either dead or imprisoned. But his embrace of the British establishment is the clearest sign of their victory.

Normalization is a worthy goal. Functioning civil society, stronger institutions, mutual economic interest, and political compromise - these are all crucial.

A few years ago, I walked through the grounds of Dublin Castle and saw where the British executed the leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising. I walked through the Post Office and put my fingers in the bullet holes. And yes, I did feel the nip of history. I’m an Irish Catholic kid from Yonkers. And yes, I’ve sung Republican songs in Irish bars. I once wrote a (terrible) punk rock song called Hunger Strikers about Bobby Sands. And yes, I felt that siren call of history a bit when I met Gerry Adams. And when I talked to Dublin cab drivers about their love for Bill Clinton and George Mitchell. And when I re-read Ivy Day in the Committee Room yet again.

Yet I don’t feel there are immediate, tactical lessons that suggest a path in the deadly war in Israel and Palestine.

There are, however, two states on the island of Eire. Hold onto that.