Pursuit of peace too great a prize to be sullied by gay bar murder gangs

YOU’RE lost in music. The drink’s going down – just fine. You’re with your friends. You’re having a good time. On the edges, some people are doing drugs. More fool them. Escapism. But, hey, you’re in a club. It’s the weekend. The lights are flashing. People look happy. Over there, some guy has got his arm around somebody. So it’s a gay bar. Half-close your eyes and no one would know. One more? Why not? Monday is far away. Time to dance. Life is beautiful.

The next second, glasses are flying. Everyone runs, hits the ground. Screams. Gunmen have walked in, masks and all. The barrels glisten and then pshh, pshh, pshh – the bullets are everywhere. More screams. They’re gone. Silence. Blood. Sirens.

That was May 9, 1997. The guy dead on the floor was 24. Darren was his name. It was Belfast. Nice people ... but these things happen there.

Did I mention it was a gay bar? Who cares? He was a policeman, right? Royal Ulster Constabulary. SS RUC. Prod, you know. He took his chances. He knew the risks. Gay and police – bonus! Dead all the same. 24 years old. Darren. Father passed away. Brother killed in the Balkans the year before. His mother? Inconsolable.

And now it’s happened again. Last weekend. In Israel. Gay youth club. Gunman walks in, high on hate. Two dead this time, 26 and 16.

The difference is, it’s nothing to do with “the situation”. No Palestinians to blame this time. It was Jew against Jew. Still just as dead, mind you. Plenty more injured.

Northern Ireland and Israel: lots of similarities, lots of differences. No one ever was put before a court for Darren’s murder. No one but the guys who did it know the real motive. I should have been there when he died but I was running late. I was jumping into a cab to meet up with him when the Irish News rang with the news. Could I have stopped it? Probably not. Could I have held his hand? Probably.

Will someone be banged up for Saturday night’s murders? Who knows? Let’s hope so. At least the politicians are saying the right things. Not like 11 years ago in Belfast. Some went through the motions. Others couldn’t bring themselves to condemn. Yes, he was gay and 24 and somebody’s son but we don’t condemn cop-killers. You do understand these things?

2009, and Israeli society has been horrified. Jews killing Jews is always hard to understand, the more so when it’s indiscriminate. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced dismay: “We are a democratic and tolerant country and we must respect every person as he is.”

Nitzan Horowitz, Israel’s only openly gay parliamentarian, was more defiant: “If anybody thinks we’ll sit down and take this quietly, they are wrong.”

The mayor of Tel Aviv struck a similar tone: “We will fight for everyone’s right to live their life as they see fit.”

Most eloquent of all was Israeli president, Shimon Peres: “The entire country must unite in condemning this heinous act. The shocking murder in Tel Aviv is the kind of murder that an enlightened and cultured people cannot accept.”

Remember those words because just hours after the murders, while teams of policemen were scouring Tel Aviv for the attacker, up the road in the eastern part of Jerusalem a force of several hundred officers was busy evicting two Palestinian families from their homes.

“They blew up the doors with small charges, walked in and dragged us out like sacks,” said Nasser Gawi. “We are 38 people in the family. Now the skies are our blanket and the earth is our bed.”

Those two events, just hours and miles apart, throw into sharp relief the two Israels. On the one hand, Israeli society is as revolted and perplexed by the two murders in Tel Aviv as any decent European society would be.

Was it the act of a lone lunatic, or was it symptomatic of a wider malaise, they agonise? (It’s worth noting, of course, that the killing spree couldn’t have happened anywhere else in the Middle East because there aren’t any gay youth centres in any Arab countries, let alone any openly gay parliamentarians to condemn such attacks. And apart from in Lebanon there aren’t even any parliamentarians in the true, democratic sense of the term, come to think of it).

On the other hand, you might ask what kind of “enlightened and cultured people”, to use Peres’s phrase, is it that needs a bulldozer to crack a nut; that feels the need to deploy hundreds of policemen to the task of evicting two Arab families from an Arab neighbourhood?

That’s Israel for you. From its own point of view, it is deeply unwise to allow property cases dating back to before the state’s foundation in 1948 to be reopened. Worse, it has set itself on a political collision course with the Obama administration.

The US president has made himself something of a pin-up in the Arab world recently. His message is uncompromising: Jewish settlements in the West Bank must stop. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been equally tough. There are no exceptions. They just have to stop. Those evictions in east Jerusalem – technically not part of the West Bank – only feed perceptions of Israel as petty and aggressive.

One day there will most likely be a fair deal done about the settlements around Jerusalem. As regards the ideological settlers deep inside the West Bank, or provocatively situated in the middle of Palestinian population centres, almost all mainstream Israelis are agreed their outposts will be uprooted the minute there is a peace agreement.

So why is Obama making such an issue out of settlements? A few hundred or so Israeli housing units are not the key to the future of the Muslim world.

BUT any peace process needs its confidence-building measures. The US needed to buy some Arab political capital. And Obama can point to progress: begrudgingly perhaps, Benjamin Netanyahu is back on the same page as everyone else, talking about a Palestinian state in some shape or form. Corresponding Arab moves are proving elusive.

For the first six months of his presidency, Obama cast himself as psychotherapist to the Arab world. The region’s political culture is steeped in paranoia and prone to blame Israel for everything. Obama entered with empathy into this delusional world.

Is he a fool? Hardly. Rather, by establishing a therapeutic bond between himself and the Arab world, Obama is now in a position to cajole.

A couple of days ago, his special envoy to the region and hero of our own peace process, George Mitchell, in an interview with The New York Times, pointedly reminded the Arabs that Washington is looking for movement all round.

Trying to resolve its own contradictions, Israel isn’t looking too pretty this week. But if he moves to a compromise on settlements, gets down to business with Syria and ultimately confronts Iran, Barack Obama will sound less and less like a therapist and more and more like a president. There might be life in the oldest peace process yet.

Going the extra mile for peace and political agreement is the really cultured and enlightened thing to do. Even if there’ll still be gunmen in clubs on Saturday nights.