The Northern Ireland Fairy Tale
Tldr: there's no useful comparison between the Northern Ireland conflict and the Israel-Palestine one
I wrote the text below nine years ago and I think it holds up pretty well. Given the events of the last few days I think comparisons between the two conflicts are even less useful than they were then. Beyond correcting some typos I haven’t edited it so some of the links may not work and a couple of the people mentioned have gone to their rewards.
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In recent years in debates about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be resolved it has become common to hear reference made to how the apparently similar struggle in Northern Ireland was concluded and the suggestion is frequently made that if only the actors in the conflict in the Middle East could be persuaded to implement its lessons then all could quickly be made well there. The fairy tale goes something like this, “A bloody, decades-oldow sectarian conflict - with roots going back centuries – was brought to an end when the British government finally realized that violence was never going to defeat the Provisional IRA, got over its foolish reluctance to talk to terrorists and entered into meaningful negotiations with it. Concessions, painful concessions, were made by all parties and nobody got exactly what they wanted. Nevertheless, a historic compromise was achieved which finally brought an end to the violence. Now if that was possible in Northern Ireland surely it must be possible in the case of the Israel-Palestine too. If only the government of Israel would follow the noble example of its British counterpart and enter into meaningful negotiations with Hamas then surely a just solution to the conflict would soon be produced”.
So just substitute the Israeli government for the British one, Hamas for the Provisional IRA and, perhaps, Israelis living beyond the Green line for the Northern Ireland Loyalists and it’s clear what everyone has to do. In return for a ceasefire called by Hamas, Israel would enter into meaningful negotiations with it, that is to say make substantial concessions (otherwise the talks wouldn’t be “meaningful”). Hamas would be required to offer some assurances about refraining from attempts to commit mass murder of civilians and so a resolution of the conflict would be achieved, not satisfactory to either side but sufficient to allow a long-term end to the violence and to permit ordinary people on both sides of the conflict to get on with their lives unhindered by the threat of terrorism and intermittent warfare.
This is an attractive story and it’s not surprising that both the losers (the Provisional IRA) and winners (the British government) in the Northern Ireland conflict like to repeat it. In the case of the former, it draws a cloak of modesty around the shameful fact that they spent a quarter of a century killing people in order to destroy a state they now cheerfully participate in the administration and governing of, in the case of the latter because it allows them to bask in a glow of statesmanlike modesty and because gloating over a victory is unseemly and risks reminding the defeated party of its real status.
Nor is it surprising that it is a story that people innocent of any knowledge or Ireland or its history such as some Israeli leftists are fond of repeating. More worrying is the recent appearance of an article and book by Jonathan Powell - Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff and a man who played an honorable part in putting an end to the IRA - in which he repeats a slightly more sophisticated version of the story, rendered more credible by his role as a key actor in the negotiations. Powell even extends the Northern Ireland analogy to the extent of suggesting that it ought to be possible to negotiate with organizations like al-Qaeda. What can have motivated to promote such views can only be guessed but given the credibility his former role in government grants to them perhaps it’s time to look at what the Northern Ireland conflict was really about, how it was in fact brought to an end and to see whether there is anything that Israel can learn from the experience.
Where did the Provisional IRA come from, what were its aims and to what extent were they achieved?
The partition of Ireland in 1922 into an independent state and six counties which remained within the United Kingdom has always been seen as a grave historical injustice by many people in Ireland. Some, a minority and after the Irish Civil War a tiny minority, have always been willing to use violence to right what they saw as a grave wrong. A few still are. Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom but with its own autonomous parliament and administration, was a political entity custom-made for its Protestant majority (Loyalists) and they didn’t hesitate to use this status to systematically discriminate against the Catholic (Nationalist) minority, which they saw as disloyal to the state and as adherents to primitive religious beliefs. There were occasional outbreaks of IRA violence against the regime but they were ineffective and failed to gain support from the Nationalist people.
Things changed dramatically towards the end of 1960s. A new generation of Nationalists which had grown up with the benefits of the post-war British welfare state was ever more unwilling to accept its status as second-class citizens. The ferment on university campuses throughout Europe and the United States and the example of protests against the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement in the United States all had their effect. Protests by the Nationalist minority broke out, initially focused on the issue of unfair allocation of public housing. They were met by savage repression by the overwhelmingly Protestant security forces of the Northern Ireland state. The previously moribund IRA was resuscitated by the new situation. Some saw it as the only force willing to defend Nationalist communities from rampaging Loyalist mobs, aided and abetted by the forces of the state. The historically fissiparous nature of armed Irish nationalist organizations didn’t take long to assert itself under the pressure of events and at the end of 1969 the IRA split into two parts. For reasons that need not concern us here the faction that went to war most enthusiastically and effectively against the British state in Northern Ireland became known as the Provisional IRA, or just “the Provos”. The Provos regarded their ruling body, known as the Army Council, as the sole legitimate government of the whole island of Ireland and the aim of their campaign can be reduced to just two words, “Brits Out!”
It’s important not to forget the simplicity and nature of this aim. Though the struggle for civil rights in Northern Ireland provided the breeding ground for the birth of the Provos they didn’t fight for equal rights for Catholics, an end to discrimination in the housing and labor markets or for a fair system of voting. That’s what they would like people to believe now and it’s a belief that many purveyors of the Northern Ireland hold close to their hearts. They fought to force the British state to abandon Northern Ireland and nothing else. Anyone who doubts this should listen to the first two minutes of this speech made in 1986 by Martin McGuinness - once Chief of Staff of the IRA and now Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. Though Sinn Féin (the political wing of the Provos), whose annual conference he was addressing, was then on the cusp of a move towards electoral politics he makes it clear that the priority remained armed struggle against British rule in Ireland.
So what was it the Provos eventually settled for? The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, on which the present settlement in Northern Ireland is based and which the Provos signed up to, acknowledges that [Constitutional Issues 1, (iii)]
...while a substantial section of the people in Northern Ireland share the legitimate wish of a majority of the people of the island of Ireland for a united Ireland, the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union and, accordingly, that Northern Ireland's status as part of the United Kingdom reflects and relies upon that wish; and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people.
There is no question whatsoever of any shared sovereignty, Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom and now that the Provos have acknowledged that it is right and proper that it should do so. After a decades long campaign of killing and destruction to remove it from British sovereignty, it doesn’t seem to be any exaggeration to suggest that they have transformed themselves into guardians of British rule in Northern Ireland. This is especially so when one considers that the ultimate guarantee that the constellation of small but violent Nationalist groups that continue to reject the Good Friday Agreement will never gain political relevance is Sinn Féin’s continuing grip on the Nationalist heartlands of Northern Ireland.
Of course, there are other articles in the agreement that talk about all the parties to it (including the British government) being happy to change the constitutional status of Northern Ireland in the future if it is the wish of the majority of the people there to do so but the chances of that happening anytime sooner than the very distant future are somewhere between extremely slim and zero. Loyalists are still a very comfortable majority of the population of Northern Ireland and if a referendum were to be held on the subject it may well be doubted whether all of the Catholic population would vote to abandon British rule.
Mention should also be made of the various cross-border and inter-governmental talking shops set up by the agreement, a mention and nothing more because they don't do anything to erode British sovereignty over Northern Ireland, any more than they limit the sovereignty of Ireland over its own territory. And one final and often neglected point, the agreement led to Ireland abandoning its constitutional claim to the island's six north-eastern counties; while the British government simply acknowledged what had long been self-evident, that it would not and could not continue to rule Northern Ireland against the wishes of a majority of its people, the Irish government gave up the claim that Ireland was one and indivisible, a claim that was expressed in Article 2 of the National Constitution of 1938,
The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.
Thus the Good Friday Agreement led to the legitimacy of the partition of Ireland being recognized both by the legitimate and democratic government of Ireland and the Provisional Republican movement in exchange for guarantees on human rights and a reformed autonomous parliament in Northern Ireland that had been on offer from the British for at least two decades previously and with the added sweetener of a promise not to stand in the way of Northern Ireland leaving the UK should a majority of its people wish it.
As former IRA member Gerard Hodgins recently put it,
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.
The only concrete concession the Provos got for their historic volte-face was the release on parole of their members serving sentences for terrorism and other crimes.
What possessed the Provos to do all this? A complex range of factors, some of which will be examined in more detail later but for the moment here are some of them: (i) exhaustion with the war; the arrogant young gunslingers of the early 1970s hadn’t got the same appetite for the privations of armed struggle by the beginning of the 1990s and many were either dead or imprisoned or had had the hunger for further fighting beaten out of them by their interrogators at the Castlereagh detention center, (ii) the growing effectiveness of the various intelligence agencies of the British state greatly reduced the combat effectiveness of the IRA and may have helped the British government to nudge it towards electoral politics and (iii) the realization by the Adams-McGuiness leadership of the Provisional Republican movement that while armed struggle was a dead end a lot of people in Northern Ireland would be willing to vote for a Sinn Féin political party which was no longer just the legal mouthpiece for the IRA.
In order to better grasp what has happened in Northern Ireland since 1998 readers more familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might wish to imagine a future in which Mohammed Deif (if he is still alive) and Marwan Barghouti are prominent political leaders of the Judea and Samaria Autonomous Region of Israel, that they now stand politely when Hatikvah is played, condemn political violence in all its forms, speak the language of human rights and equality of esteem and claim that their new role is simply a continuation of the struggle for Palestinian national rights by other means. Even more amazingly, the bulk of their followers believe them and vote for them. An unlikely scenario indeed, unlikely because of the chasm separating Hamas from the Provisional Republican movement in terms of political culture, methods and aims, a chasm which we will now examine in greater detail.
Why the Provos were not like Hamas
Irish nationalism has always been somewhat ideologically underdeveloped; while there has always been great clarity about what, or rather who we wanted to be free from, the British, comparatively little thought was ever given to what we wanted to be free for. In other words, it has never been easy to detect exactly what kind of future country Irish nationalists were struggling to achieve and the Provos were no exception in this regard. Indeed their very birth as an independent movement sprang, in part, from impatience with their erstwhile colleagues in what came to be known as the Official IRA who they saw as too interested in Marxist ideology and how it might relate to the situation in Northern Ireland and insufficiently concerned with taking the fight to the British state. In spite of their lack of interest in ideology, some things can be said with certainty about the worldview of the Provisional Republic Movement.
The Loyalist people of Northern Ireland are overwhelmingly descended from colonists from Scotland, sent by the British state in the 17th century with the specific purpose of making Ireland British. This was a project, known as the Plantation of Ulster, was eventually meant to encompass the whole island of Ireland but only took root in its north-eastern corner. The colonists - all of them Protestants - were settled on land seized from the indigenous Catholic population. In spite of this the Provisionals never called for the uprooting of Protestant “settlements” in Northern Ireland and never called for Catholics to be given back the land the “settlers” took from them. Provo ideology, such as it was, held that the Loyalists were suffering from a kind of false consciousness imposed on them by the British government; once that government had been forced out of Northern Ireland they would come to their senses and realize that their best interests lay in accepting their role, with full rights, in a new, all Ireland state. Indeed up the mid-1980s it was official Sinn Féin policy - as expressed in the Éire Nua [New Ireland] policy paper – that the refounded Irish state would include an autonomous parliament for its northernmost nine counties.
Of course this view of the Loyalist people of Northern Ireland was based on fantasy and at best it might be described as patronizing. However it contains no element of winding the clock back to some sort of pre-Plantation Shangri La when Ireland was free from foreigners who professed the wrong religion, and there is no suggestion that the Loyalists belong anywhere other than where they are.
Not only did the ideology of the Provisional Republican Movement not call for the removal of Protestant “settlers”, it was also not fundamentally motivated by religion, in spite of the fact that the movement was made up entirely of Catholics. If modern Irish nationalism has a founding father he was Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant, like many of the other leaders of the Society of United Irishmen the organization which, influenced by the American and French revolutions, led the failed 1798 rebellion against British rule. An idea of his thinking can be gleaned from this famous quote,
To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country—these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissentions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman, in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter—these were my means. To unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter under the common name of Irishmen in order break the connection with England, the never failing source of all our political evils, that was my aim.
The central ritual of the annual calendar of commemorations which characterizes Irish nationalism of all stripes remains the visit to Wolfe Tone’s grave.
While the Provisionals sought inspiration from the example of Wolfe Tone and others in Irish history who looked towards building a national identity that would rise above religious divisions, they also betrayed that legacy with a number of foul sectarian massacres. This disjunction between real world actions and adherence to, in certain respects, laudable ideals mattered. If a group or a nation commits itself to high ideals and then proceeds to do things that go directly against that stance they can be called on it and if they are called on it often enough then it tends to make a difference. This gap between words and actions undoubtedly played a part in the chipping away of support for nationalist violence in Northern Ireland. The ideology of Hamas, on the other hand, is based on racial hatred and the supremacy of one religion over all others. Those with doubts on this point would be well advised to check out the organization’s founding Covenant. You can call them a lot of things but not hypocrites.
Finally, the Provisionals never embraced a cult of death and nor did they develop a self-sustaining and self-justifying culture of “resistance”. With regard to the former, while many of them ended up dying for their cause their objective was always to make others die for theirs. It’s as impossible to imagine a member of the IRA saying “Yes” to an order that he should detonate a bomb strapped to his body as it is to imagine any IRA leader having issued such an instruction. The seven members of the Provisional IRA who died on hunger strike in prison in 1981 do not constitute an exception to this; they were engaged in a battle of wills with the British government over the conditions of their confinement and would have happily stopped starving themselves at any time had the British administration ceded to their demands. With regard to the latter, the Provisionals’ leaders were always pragmatic in their approach to their war; they continually sought to improve the effectiveness of their armed activities but when it became clear that the space for violence that was politically acceptable to their supporters was becoming too small to be sustainable they didn’t take long to abandon the use of force and embrace democratic politics. Killing their enemies was never an end in itself for the Provos.
Dirty Hands: Getting The Provos Into Serious Talks
The fairy tale version of how the Northern Ireland conflict was brought to an end tends to focus on the period that started with the various maneuvers that led to the first IRA ceasefire in 1994 and finished with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. When the techniques used by the British to grind down and weaken the Provos to the point where they were willing to enter into talks that would lead them to abandoning the central aim of their campaign are considered, it is not difficult to understand why.
It is a grave error to see the Provos as having come to the negotiating table from a position of strength. They did not. They only became seriously interested in negotiations when their capacity for violence had been greatly reduced by a 20 year counter-insurgency campaign that included mass internment without trial, juryless courts, interrogation techniques amounting to torture and the deniable, targeted assassination of nationalist activists and lawyers such as Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, who were thought to be too sympathetic to Provos and whose professional skills were making it difficult to convict them in court. At the time of writing the British government’s refusal to come clean about the techniques used to beat – in many cases literally – the Provos continues to pose a threat to the viability of the autonomous government in Northern Ireland.
Another key element of the British war against the Provos was the “Ulsterization” policy introduced in the mid-1970s. This gave the front-line role in security duties to the RUC (the Northern Ireland police) and the UDR (a British Army regiment recruited in Northern Ireland). British army units from outside the province were only deployed in areas, such as South Armagh, where it was too dangerous for these forces to set foot unescorted. The introduction of this policy had the effect of gradually making it more and more difficult for the IRA to kill members of the British security forces who were not RUC or UDR members and such killings always had much less resonance with British public opinion than casualties inflicted on military units from the rest of the UK. The Provos were thus reduced to what in many cases amounted to no more than a murder campaign against their Protestant neighbours who happened to be part- or full-time members of the security forces or who were thought to be collaborating with them in some way.
There is also good reason to believe that Britain’s intelligence services penetrated the Provos with ever greater success as the years went by. The so-called supergrass system is probably only the tip of the iceberg in this regard. Not only did this give the British the opportunity to frustrate attacks by the Provos (as well as to permit some, in order to maintain the credibility of their sources, another grave moral compromise on the part of the British state) it probably also gave them deep insights into the thinking of its leaders and it does not seem unduly speculative to think that the British may have had a role in keeping the Adams-McGuinness leadership in power within the Provisional Republican movement, once it became clear that they were looking to change its direction away from violence and towards politics.
Less objectionable measures were also used to defeat the insurgency. Starting in the mid-1970s serious efforts were made to dismantle the formal and informal system of discrimination Nationalists and state spending was kept at a higher level than in the rest of the UK. Thus the swamps of rage and resentment at decades of sectarian discrimination which had provided the context for the birth of the Provisional Republican movement were gradually drained.
Returning to the fairy tale version of how the conflict ended, this very brief summary of how the British fought the Provos should make it clear that fighting and negotiating are not polar opposites. Rather they are part of a continuum of options available to the actors in an armed conflict who seek to impose their will on each other.
This brings us to another central pillar of the fairy tale: that in the early 1990s the British underwent some kind of change of heart and decided finally, after years of refusing, to negotiate with the Provos. This is quite false. Back channel and more open communications between the Provos and the British government took place throughout virtually the whole period of the conflict. The 1972 IRA ceasefire, for example, led to a delegation of its leaders being flown to London for talks with the British government. These negotiations failed because the IRA leaders insisted on setting a date for British withdrawal. When the British refused the talks collapsed but they remained confident that they could be forced to leave Northern Ireland anyway because the British public wouldn't be able to stomach the cost in blood and money of maintaining the union.
The British public and the British state turned out to have more patience and greater stomach for the fight than the IRA leaders - some of them very young at the time, McGuinness was 22 and Adams 24 - imagined. A generation later they had a wearier and more realistic view of their capacity to bend the will of the British state by force and, perhaps it would not be unfair to speculate, the armed struggle no longer seemed as exciting and fulfilling as it once had.
Lessons from Northern Ireland for Israel?
Given the nature and extent of the differences between the Provisional Republican movement and Hamas, vain would be any attempt to draw anything as crude as direct lessons for Israel from Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, it may not be out of place to conclude with some general observations about the Northern Ireland conflict and how it ended and leave readers to judge what relevance they may have to the situation in which Israel finds itself:
The Northern Ireland conflict has its roots in the 1640s. The modern struggle to build a state for the Jewish people only began in the 1880s. We may hope that resistance to the sovereignty of the Jews in their ancient homeland will weaken significantly in our lifetimes but it may well continue, perhaps for centuries.
Final victory, when and if it comes, might be difficult for some to recognize. It is likely to involve measures that spare the dignity of the enemy and enrage or perplex people on our own side. In Northern Ireland, there are still many Loyalists who can’t stomach the sight of Martin McGuinness shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth and saying how much he admires her. They think he should either be dead or serving a long prison sentence, but his embrace of the British establishment is the clearest sign of their victory.
Carefully measured doses of violence are an unavoidable part of the struggle,and so is firm resistance to calls to let the armed forces “solve” the problem once and for all in a blaze of righteous violence. Margaret Thatcher doesn’t get enough credit for resisting howls from the right to let the security forces off the leash in the wake of the Warrenpoint Ambush in 1979 and the nearly successful attempt on her own life in 1984, two of the high points of the IRA campaign. The emotional satisfaction on those bloody days went all to the Provos but they made no overall difference to the outcome of the struggle.
Sectarian discrimination in Northern Ireland provided the conditions for the birth of the Provisional IRA but they were not the root cause of the conflict. That said, the wearing down of support for violence in the Nationalist community was greatly facilitated by the pouring of public spending into Northern Ireland and the gradual, halting but unstoppable elimination of discrimination against Catholics. It’s not impossible to interest people with jobs, houses and a future in a campaign of nationalist violence but there is reason to think that it’s more difficult to do so.
Channels of negotiation were almost always kept open between the British and the Provos. There were even some failed attempts at serious negotiations but talks on matters of substance only made real progress when the Provos had started to lose stomach for the fight.
The British government tolerated and at various times connived with extremist Loyalist groups like the UDA and UFF. Its security forces sometimes collaborated with them to murder Nationalists. However, it also jailed members of those groups by the hundred and who was using who in their relationship was never in doubt.
At times the British must have been sorely tempted to launch retaliatory or hot pursuit raids into the Republic of Ireland but - apart from two grave exceptions - they restrained themselves and preferred imperfect but ever-improving (from the middle of the 1970s on at any rate) cooperation with the Irish government in the fight against the Provos.
The huge number of people of Irish birth and descent resident in parts of the United Kingdom other than Northern Ireland were largely (though not exclusively) left unmolested by the British authorities throughout the conflict.
And even now, the conflict isn’t completely over. The autonomous government of Northern Ireland yet again teeters on the brink of collapse and dissident Republican groups continue to be active, though their strength and political relevance is not a fraction of that of the Provisional IRA in its pomp.
One thing seems certain; the Northern Ireland fairy story offers no useful guidance to any party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To the Israelis it offers only the illusion that spontaneously made concessions (that’s what “meaningful talks” is code for in the fairy tale) to their enemies will bring them something better than their contempt and demands for yet more. At the same time, it fails to take the demands of the Palestinian national movement seriously - particularly that part of it represented by Hamas - and it treats the Palestinians at best as politically immature and at worst as colourful Orientals, incapable of meaning what they actually say. Let us hear no more of the Northern Ireland fairy tale.