Can the Belfast peacemaker walk on water once more – in Jerusalem?

PRESIDENT Obama hopes the Middle East peace talks set to begin later this week could reach agreement within a year.

That seems highly optimistic, but even allowing for the inevitable pauses and walkouts, if all goes well he could go into the 2012 presidential election with an enormous foreign policy achievement to his name.

The White House says it expects Israel and the Palestinians to show they are serious about a comprehensive peace. Travelling in the Middle East this week, talking to both Israelis and Palestinians, I have every sense that they are. However, there is a ‘but’ – several big ‘buts’ in fact.

The first is that people on the ground believe the US administration wants a deal more than either Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Both are still in the mode of wanting a deal in theory but on their own terms. Each side questions whether the other can really deliver. Where is the leadership, many ask of the other side?

And then there is just weariness and cynicism. This has been tried over the past three decades or more a number of times and goodwill on its own will not be enough to get through the issues that have stood in the way of agreement for all those years.

Still, the fact that talks are about to take place at all is a positive sign. After nearly two years of flailing around, bringing together Israelis and Palestinians under very difficult circumstances is something in itself.

Having got this far, though, no one – possibly even Netanyahu and Abbas themselves – knows whether they are prepared to make really tough decisions when it is put up to them.

Both leaders have been here before, after all. Many, including their own ‘sides’, wonder if these leaders can really see their true long-term interests. Netanyahu, after all, has presided over relative peace since he returned to power and is, therefore, in a strong position domestically. Abbas is at the end of his career and doesn’t, in personal political terms, need an agreement. He can simply retire at any stage.

On the other hand, many Israelis believe that if he wants a compromise, only a right-wing prime minister like Netanyahu can seal the deal. And the other way of looking at Abbas’s position is that he has nothing to lose.

From our own standpoint, it will be interesting to see if George Mitchell can do for the Middle East what he did in Northern Ireland. Admittedly more of a convenor than a person who banged heads together, he won round almost all the participants in the 1996-’98 Stormont talks with his tenacity, charm, tact and seemingly inexhaustible reserves of patience. All but a handful became convinced very quickly that he approached our ancient conflict with an open mind.

But – yes, another one – it would be foolish to pretend that Israel/Palestine is anything like as ‘easy’ as the North. If the Good Friday agreement was the equivalent of turning water into wine, Mitchell will metaphorically need to walk on water if he is to secure signatures on the bottom line of a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian pact.

Some question, of course, whether talks without the presence of Hamas around the table are worth the candle at all. Others say that, like in Belfast, having some people there would doom the talks before they begin. As Mitchell himself recorded in his book ‘Making Peace’, if the DUP had not walked out of Castle Buildings in Belfast, movement from moderate unionism would have been impossible and the whole process utterly chaotic.

Frankly, many doubt Hamas is interested in negotiations at all. A deal in the North was possible because, while religion was certainly a factor, the IRA never sought to convert Britain to Catholicism. Hamas’s stated goal, on the other hand, is an Islamic state throughout the whole of Israel as well as the West Bank and Gaza. For groups with an essentially religious, rather than political, vision, worldy agreements – or even referenda – count for nothing.

It is not as though any side is completely blameless, however: Netanyahu has a tendency to make the outcomes of a talks process into preconditions for one. Recognition of the legitimate right of the state of Israel to exist is unlikely ever to be fully accepted by the Palestinian side. As in the case of Sinn Féin and the IRA, the question is: do they accept it in practice and how hard are they really trying to subvert that reality?

Many ordinary Israelis I talked to this week dream that what was possible in Northern Ireland might be possible in their own land. For them, the fact of relative peace in Ireland is enough to keep their hopes alive. Thankfully, they know little of the disillusionment that has set in at the Stormont settlement.

What they do understand is that the security issues need to be sorted out properly. That is where Mitchell fell down in Northern Ireland. Parallel decommissioning – guns given up as talks proceeded – never happened. As we all know, manipulation of that issue resulted in the further polarisation of Northern politics.

When Senator Mitchell cobbled together a private deal setting up the Stormont Assembly on the understanding that decommissioning would follow soon afterwards, he refused to point the blame when republicans defaulted. Both the Israelis and Palestinians will need solid guarantees, not just from George Mitchell, that tacit agreements will be guaranteed by the American overseers.

That is not meant as a biting criticism of George Mitchell. He felt, understandably, he had suffered enough for Irish peace but the greatest confidence-building measure in any conflict is the implementation of agreements. All of Israel’s security concerns must be sincerely addressed by the Palestinians – and President Obama. Likewise, the Palestinians will need to feel they have a real state.

ONLY time will tell, though, whether putting all the issues on the table – as is planned this time – is a wise idea. The status of Jerusalem is not merely symbolic, for instance. Would agreement have been possible in the North if policing, the most sensitive issue in the Northern Irish case, had not been ‘parked’, left for another day?

That might sound like a proposal to run away from the tough issues but it was only when the notion of “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” was ditched that progress on the political track could be made.

At the same time, my hopeful pessimism is informed by the fact that the legal issues in our case were sorted out in 1998. The 70-year ‘war’ between North and South over territory was dealt with comprehensively by amendment of articles 2 and 3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann. In the Middle East situation, even if Abbas signs up, will that bind Iran and Syria? It seems very unlikely.

The Real IRA has, thankfully, been contained to date. The same cannot be said of the ayatollahs in Tehran. Ultimately, what might undo the talks beginning this week is that the international community has put the camel before the horse. Netanyahu is a difficult character but, as Alliance leader John Alderdice once said at Stormont, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.