What Northern Ireland can teach us about Israel-Palestine

Imagine if Jerusalem had an Israeli mayor from the Likud party and a Palestinian deputy mayor from Fatah. It’s not so far-fetched — the equivalent is already in place in Belfast.

By Liel Maghen and Eran Tsidkyahu

Walking around Belfast’s various neighborhoods can remind one of the situation in Jerusalem. It’s not just the wall that divides residents of the same city — it’s also the graffiti of Israeli flags on one side of the street and statements in support of Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti on the other. As a group of Jerusalemites, we couldn’t help but compare the reality in our home city to that in Belfast, and the situation in our country to what’s going on in Northern Ireland.

But in contrast to Jerusalem, where the conflict is far from over, Northern Ireland is deeply engaged in a reconciliation process that began at the end of the ‘90s. So we sought to try and learn from Northern Ireland’s recent history how to put a stop to the cycle of violence in Jerusalem.

We visited Belfast as part of a group of Israeli and Palestinian Jerusalemites who work on Jewish-Arab political and cultural issues. Our trip was a collaboration between the joint Israeli-Palestinian NGO IPCRI and the Irish Embassy, and involved studying, over several days, how a national conflict expresses itself in shared urban spaces.

Our trip revealed to us the complexity of the British-Irish conflict. The Palestinians in our group naturally identified with the Catholic struggle for independence from the U.K. and for the unification of historic Ireland, along with the quest for equality in the face of historic discrimination by the Protestant British hegemony. The Israelis, meanwhile, found themselves likened to that same Protestant hegemony, thought of as a foreign power occupying the local population.

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