Hamas, the IRA, and the Politics of Radicalization in Palestine and Northern Ireland
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Colby College Digital Commons @ Colby Honors Theses Student Research 2009 The Long Game: Hamas, The IRA, and the Politics of Radicalization in Palestine and Northern Ireland Dan O'Sullivan Colby College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses Part of the Political Science Commons Colby College theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed or downloaded from this site for the purposes of research and scholarship. Reproduction or distribution for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of the author. Recommended Citation O'Sullivan, Dan, "The Long Game: Hamas, The IRA, and the Politics of Radicalization in Palestine and Northern Ireland" (2009). Honors Theses. Paper 460. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/460 This Honors Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at Digital Commons @ Colby. 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The Long Game: Hamas, The IRA, and the Politics of Radicalization in Palestine and Northern Ireland By Dan O’Sullivan Under the supervision of: Professor Guilain Denoeux Professor Walter Hatch Spring 2009 Government Department Senior Thesis Colby College Table of Contents Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities Political Grievance and Radicalization in Northern Ireland and Palestine Page One Chapter One: Vicious Cycles The Origins and Dynamics of the Northern Irish Troubles and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Page Thirty-Two Chapter Two: All Politics Is Local Popular Support, Radicalization, and the Origins of Terror In Northern Ireland and Palestine Page Sixty-Eight Chapter Three: Dead Draw Inside Hamas, the IRA and the Futility of Terror Page One Hundred and Three Chapter Four: Endgame Shifts of Consensus, the Unites States, and the Political Integration of Hamas and the IRA Page One Hundred and Forty-Six Conclusion: Through the Looking Glass Peace in Northern Ireland, Stalemate and Statelessness in Palestine: 2 Wither the Peace Process Page One Hundred and Sixty-Eight Appendices Works Consulted Biographical Encyclopedia Glossary Maps Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities Political Grievance and Radicalization in 3 Palestine and Northern Ireland “When the widow of a murdered Israeli physician – a man of peace whose practice included the treatment of Arab patients – tells us that is seems that the Palestinians are interested in killing Jews for the sake of killing Jews, Palestinians should take notice. When the parents of a Palestinian child killed while in his bed by an errant .50 caliber bullet draw similar conclusions about the respect accorded by Israelis to Palestinian lives, Israelis need to listen. When we see the shattered bodies of children we know it is time for adults to stop the violence.” -Sen. George Mitchell, “The Mitchell Report,” 2001i “It’s typical of Mexico, of the whole human race perhaps - violence in favour of an ideal and then the ideal lost but the violence just going on.” -Graham Greene “Cruelty has a human heart…” -William Blake Introduction: Best of Times, Worst of Times On January 20th, 2009, the auspicious day of Barack Obama’s formal inauguration as President of the United States, media reports surfaced of yet another high‐level appointment in the new administration. The Israeli‐Palestinian conflict – ignited anew in September 2000 and then neglected by American policymakers for seven years – was now, more than ever, in need of American attention.1 While speculation had been rampant over whether President Obama would task a high‐level envoy with the Israeli‐Palestinian brief, multiple accounts had pegged former diplomat Dennis Ross as the likely choice. Ross, a Clinton administration figure well known for his prickliness and work in the mid‐1990s on 1 In September 2000, shortly after the collapse of the Camp David peace talks and amidst the implosion of the Barak government, Likud leader Ariel Sharon made a controversial visit to East Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Sharon remains a hated figure among Palestinians for his decades of extreme violence against them, and his visit so close to the al-Aqsa Mosque in the midst of tense Arab- Israeli relations provoked riots – the start of the Second Intifada. 4 the Oslo peace process, ultimately was not given the portfolio. Nor were fellow Mideast hands Martin Indyk or Daniel Kurtzer, both former ambassadors to Israel under Clinton, given the job.2 The charred aftermath of the Gaza War demanded the resurrection of the badly maimed peace process. But unexpectedly, the most influential troika of Mideast policymakers in American politics had been denied the responsibility. The recent war in Gaza illustrated both the massive challenges and extraordinary necessity of a renewed diplomatic effort in the conflict. But Obama did not choose his high‐level envoy on Israeli‐Palestinian issues from among Ross’s ilk of process‐obsessed, “confidence‐building” professional negotiators. Instead, President Obama chose a former Senate Majority Leader and scourge of MLB steroids, George Mitchell, who, despite authoring a 2001 report on the causes of the Second Intifada, is not widely associated with the Middle East. In his official acceptance of the post on January 22nd, it was one bullet on his resume that garnered the most attention from Vice President Biden and Secretary Clinton. As President Clinton’s chief envoy for the Northern Irish peace process, Mitchell had patiently overseen the negotiations that ended the Northern Irish “Troubles,” the conflict between Irish Catholic nationalists and Protestant, pro‐British “unionists”3 that eventually enmeshed the British Army. With the Good Friday Agreement signed 2 Landler, Mark. "No Shortage of Advice on Mideast for Clinton." The New York Times. 12 Jan. 2009. 1 Feb. 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/world/middleeast/13diplo.html>. All of these figures have since written books on the failure of Oslo – though not so much on their own shortcomings. A notable exception from the shortlist was fellow diplomat Aaron David Miller, a current bête noire of President Clinton. In the same NYT piece, Miller quipped that Israeli peacemakers “ought to have term limits.” 3 Unionism refers to the political ideology held almost entirely by Northern Irish Protestants, supporting the sustained union of Great Britain and Ulster. 5 in 1998, Mitchell established an equitable and democratic political system capable of addressing the concerns of the aggrieved communities, while integrating the IRA into the legal political process. The appointment of Mitchell, and the pronounced relevance of his Irish experiences to the new role of Mideast peacemaker, marks a curious serendipity for me. Ever since my adolescence I have been fascinated by the Troubles, initially cultivating an interest in the conflict while trying to learn more about the country of my grandparents. Of initial and admittedly visceral interest to me were the cloak and dagger machinations of the IRA and its many enemies, a thoroughly unromantic, Machiavellian feud worthy of the Borgias or the Yorkists. While this dirty war is macabrely interesting, it is the awful human cost of the conflict that has sustained my interest. In college it would be the Israeli‐Palestinian struggle, another of the twentieth century’s most enduring nationalist conflicts, which would most interest me. The more I studied the endlessly complex history of the Mideast, the more I discerned the same human traumas, of statelessness, prejudice, and despair, which had wracked Northern Ireland. Throughout all my research, I found enduring parallels between both campaigns – in the revanchism and colonialism, the bigotry and the humiliation, the organized dispatching of death. And yet, in all of this research, I found only three brief journalistic pieces comparatively analyzing the Troubles and the Intifadas. This was clearly an unexplored avenue of research. The Long Game is an attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: given that the Northern Ireland peace process arguably constitutes “the most successful conclusion to movements of terrorism through nonviolent means”ii in modern 6 times, can analysis provide lessons relevant to the Mideast peace process – and its discontents? The value of a comparative study of the two conflicts stems from a remarkable similarity in the structural organization of political violence by its most influential practitioners: the IRA and Hamas. At the core, I have merely tried my best to approach a beguiling question in a fresh, dynamic way. The stultifying discourse of conflict that serves as lingua franca for the Israeli‐Palestinian issue has largely reduced strategic debate to how best the conflict can be managed – not ended. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s focus on “economic peace” and unwillingness to commit to a two‐state solution – the consensus that has governed peacemaking for decades – belies such thinking. The Clinton Administration’s cadre of Mideast negotiators operated amidst the most rapid institutionalization of Palestinian democracy in history ‐ yet remained obsessed with Israeli‐Arab “confidence‐ building” measures, doing little to legitimize the gains of Oslo. So long as Palestinians continue to view the creation of Israel as “al‐Nakba” – the catastrophe – whilst successive Israeli governments refuse to grant their aspirations any legitimacy, there can be no progress. Peace requires empathy, a substantial compromise in the context of internecine