Former US President Bill Clinton is fondly remembered on these shores for his tireless work in getting the Northern Ireland peace process off the ground. But at times, even Clinton grew weary of the endless stream of seemingly minor quarrels which attended the process. He once compared the two sides to “a couple of drunks walking out of a bar for the last time. When they reach the swing doors they turn right around and go back in and say 'I just can't quite get there'.”
If that's what he thought of the protagonists on either side of the Northern Ireland conflict, one shudders to think how he might describe those involved in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Clinton had even more cause to rue the intransigence evidenced by both sides in the Middle East. As President, he tried on two separate occasions to broker a deal between the two sides. In Oslo in 1993, he got Israel to agree to cede land to the Palestinians.
In 2000, the last year of his Presidency, he attempted to mediate a “final settlement” of all outstanding issues between the Israelis, which would have involved the Israelis giving the Palestinians the vast majority of both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as Eastern Jerusalem as the capital of the new state. It was the most promising prospect of a deal since the conflict began. But it fell through. The then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat felt the Palestinians hadn't gott enough.
Which is why the only thing that both Palestinian and Israeli analysts can agree on at present is that the peace process sponsored by current US President George Bush is doomed to failure.
It’s late in the day – but he’s right to try. Unlike the Troubles, the Middle East conflict has spilled into neighbouring countries, causing massive instability in a strategically vital area - the oil producing Middle East. As tensions rise, so does the price of oil, which is helping to drive the US economy into recession. So Bush wants to talk things up by boldly predicting a deal before he leaves office.
There is also the matter of his political legacy. The Iraq war didn’t stop Bush’s re-election in 2004, but it helped to destroy his second term in office. An Israeli-Palestinian accord would put a brighter gloss on things.
Daniel Levy, an Israeli negotiator during the 2000 peace talks, says that the issues are relatively clear cut. Ultimately, what is required is that the Israelis offer land for peace. According to Levy, the Palestinians would be prepared to accept a deal which gave them a state which included the territory which Israel occupied in 1967.
The problem is that there are still some serious emotive issues left unresolved by the apparently simple ‘two-state’ solution. While Tel Aviv is the political capital of Israel, many Israelis are spiritually and emotionally attached to Jerusalem. It is home to their holiest site, the Temple of the Mount and to the Wailing Wall, and the thought of any part of it being owned by the Palestinians is almost unbearable.
But Jerusalem is also home to one of the holiest sites in Islam - the Dome of the Rock. The majority of people in Eastern Jerusalem are Palestinians who maintain that, under international law, Jerusalem is occupied territory. They want it as part of any future Palestinian state.
The Palestinians also demand a “right of return” to Israel for their refugees. This would essentially doom Israel as a Jewish state, as Palestinians living in other Arab countries vastly outnumber the number Jews in Israel.
There is some willingness to cede territory on the Israeli side. But part of the original deal under which the Palestinians were allowed to administer both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under the Oslo accord was that the Palestinians would recognise Israel and promote peaceful co-existence. This has not happened. Instead, various Palestinian paramilitary groups have launched a series of attacks on Israeli civilian and military targets.
This is the main reason why Hamas, though it rules the Gaza Strip, a key part of any future Palestinian state, is not included in any discussions. Hamas does not recognise the right of Israel to exist.
So those who would promote negotiations are left frustrated. The contours of what an agreed settlement would look like are plain for all sides to see. Those elements were all present and correct in 2000. Yet some Palestianians couldn’t accept that Israel must exist and they returned to violence.
Certainly that is how Clinton, no slouch in the peace promoting business, saw matters. In his memoirs, he recalls Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat praising him for being “a great man.” Clinton responded, "I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you made me one." At the time, most European leaders concurred with his assessment.
People have compared the conflict to that in the North of Ireland, and there are some points of similarity. There is the seeming intractability of the dispute. For many years peace in the North seemed like a zero sum game; for one side to win, the other side had to lose, and neither side was prepared to lose.
Another similarity is that both sides could recite a litany of atrocities carried out by the other. The Palestinians point to the massacre at their refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, in Lebanon. The Israelis speak of the suicide bombers who killed thousands of civilians after 2000, and the continual campaign of terror spread by Palestinian “freedom fighters” around the world.
Perhaps the most relevant similarity, however, lay in the roots of both conflicts. Both struggles were, at bottom, the result of the expropriation of land. After Israel was born in the flames of conflict over half a century ago, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced off their land by Israelis who took the territory for their own. The expropriation of land in Ulster may have happened hundreds of years ago, but it explains why many Irish people feel more of a natural sympathy with the Palestinians than with the Israelis, who they see as an occupying force.
Yet more significant than the similarities is the one big difference between the two conflicts; even the most extreme Republican never denied either the right of the United Kingdom to exist or the right of Unionists to live in the North. Palestinian extremists by contrast, backed by a number of Arab states, still have as one of their core demands the destruction of the state of Israel.
This, and the fact that previous negotiations have resulted in an escalation of violence, has made the Israelis understandably sceptical of negotiating in good faith. It is a good bet that the current round of talks are a result of pressure from the US, rather than being motivated by a genuine sense of possibility on the part of either party to the dispute.
Beneath his veneer of optimism, President Bush must know that the chances for a deal are minuscule. There is an appetite for peace, and a grudging acceptance by ordinary citizens on both sides of the need to accept a two-state solution. But that appetite doesn't appear to be strong enough yet to overcome the decades of mistrust and the legacy of hate left by so much bloodshed. For the moment, it seems, the Middle East peace process is all process and no peace.
That doesn't mean that the search for peace shouldn't go on. It took a series of apparent failed negotiations, such as the Sunningdale Agreement in the 1970s and New Ireland Forum in the 1980s, before peace could be achieved in the North. But we will be in the post-Bush before we see real progress in the Middle East. In the wake of the Iraq war, the United States must establish itself as a broker that all sides will do business with. This will come down to two things. The new American administration must be strong enough to face down the powerful Jewish-American lobby that often hinders the US from taking a clear-eyed view of Israeli excesses – for example when the Israelis persist in establishing new settlements in the Occupied Territories. And American dollars will be a essential for economic reconstruction in the new Palestinian state. Without the accompanying promise of prosperity, the Palestinians will have little energy or motivation to come out for peace.