LONDON (AP) — As Israelis and Palestinians eagerly await what comes after a ceasefire in Gaza’s two-year war, the experience of the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s can provide lessons for the tender process of moving from a seemingly intractable conflict to a lasting peace.
Two key figures who helped steer Northern Ireland’s peace process – former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his former chief of staff Jonathan Powell – have returned to the international spotlight because of their involvement in talks with the US and other countries over the future of Gaza.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said this week: “Based on our experience in Northern Ireland, we stand ready to play a key role in decommissioning Hamas’ weapons and capabilities.”
Around 3,600 people were killed and 50,000 injured during the “unrest”. This is three decades of violence involving Irish Republican militants who wanted to wrest Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom. After years of false starts and setbacks, a peace agreement was reached in 1998 that largely ended the conflict and led to the disarmament of the Irish Republican Army and other militant groups.
The Trump-backed plan for Gaza is far narrower and does not address the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began decades before the recent war. It also does not offer a clear path to Palestinian statehood, which Israel rejects but is internationally seen as the only way to resolve the conflict.
The plan calls for Hamas to disarm, something the militant group will not do, although it has expressed willingness to hand over some weapons to a Palestinian or Arab organization. In Northern Ireland, the IRA’s reluctance to hand over its weapons was a key point of contention that threatened to jeopardize the peace process.
Experts say there are parallels – but also major differences – between the Northern Ireland conflict and the devastating war in Gaza sparked by Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has reduced swathes of the Gaza Strip to rubble, sparked famine in some areas and killed nearly 68,000 Palestinians, according to the territory’s health ministry, which is part of the Hamas-led government and keeps detailed casualty records considered generally reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts.
“The scale of the challenge in the Middle East right now is enormous,” said Kristian Brown, a lecturer in politics at Ulster University in Belfast. “The level of bitterness, the sense of imminent threat and the level of destruction (in Northern Ireland) was not as catastrophic as in Gaza.”
“Advice Patience and Pragmatism”
The Irish Republican Army eventually agreed to “render unusable” its arsenal under a secret process overseen by an international commission. Disarmament came alongside efforts to resolve the political disputes at the center of the conflict, something more than three decades of U.S.-led peace efforts in the Middle East have failed to achieve.
Progress was leisurely: the first shipment of IRA weapons was decommissioned in 2001 and the last in 2005, seven years after the Good Friday Agreement. Several other British loyalist and Irish Republican militant groups were also disarmed as part of the process.
“The British could perhaps advise patience and pragmatism,” said Niall Ó Dochartaigh, professor of political science at the University of Galway. “The IRA leadership had to be helped in various ways to make this argument (for disarmament) within the organization.
“Ultimately, in the Irish case, decommissioning only occurred when the IRA was satisfied that there was a political agreement,” he added. And while “the contours of a compromise solution in Northern Ireland were apparent quite early on”, a similar consensus in the Middle East appears to be a long way off.
Shaky power-sharing political system
The 20-point plan for Gaza lays out a comprehensive vision, ranging from a ceasefire to peacemaking – but leaves huge gaps about how it will all be achieved. And it says nothing about the most sensitive issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians, including the status of Jerusalem, the return of Palestinian refugees, security arrangements, future borders and the numerous Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The Good Friday Agreement provided more detail on the structures that would be put in place in Northern Ireland to ensure peace, including a legislature and a government. It was the result of two years of U.S.-backed negotiations that helped build trust between arch-enemies. But peacemaking was still leisurely and fragile.
Four months after the Good Friday Agreement, IRA dissidents detonated a car bomb in the town of Omagh, killing 29 people in the deadliest single attack of the conflict.
Even today, dissidents occasionally attempt petite attacks. The power-sharing political system created under the peace agreement has collapsed several times. Amnesties mean that murderers are released and some victims receive no justice.
Nevertheless, there was largely peace. Political parties once linked to violent groups, including the IRA-allied Sinn Féin, play an essential role, with former gunmen and bombers among those now serving as lawmakers.
According to Peter McLoughlin, lecturer in politics and history at Queen’s University, Belfast, “engaging those involved in violence and putting them on the path to democracy” was crucial to the success of Northern Ireland’s peace process.
He said excluding Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, in Gaza’s future could be a problem.
“If there is one far-reaching lesson to be learned from Northern Ireland’s success, it is that an inclusive process worked – and I mean inclusive in the fullest sense of the word, all different parties, even the militants,” McLoughlin said.
“Hamas will be excluded from the political process and expected to give up its weapons,” he added. “I don’t know how feasible that is.”
Key players return
Starmer’s reference to the UK’s experience in monitoring ceasefires no doubt refers to the successes of Blair and Powell.
President Donald Trump said Blair, who was British prime minister between 1997 and 2007, was a potential member of a “peace committee” to oversee administration and reconstruction in Gaza.
Blair has extensive experience in the Middle East, having served for eight years until 2015 as Israel and the Palestinians envoy for the “Quartet” – the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
He also played a crucial role, along with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, in forming an international coalition that carried out airstrikes in 1999 to end Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
But Blair is also a highly controversial figure, having decided in 2003 to involve Britain in the US-led invasion of Iraq. Trump has acknowledged that Blair may not be “an acceptable choice for everyone” in the region.
Powell is now Starmer’s national security adviser and attended Trump’s summit in Egypt. U.S. special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff praised Powell’s “incredible commitment and tireless efforts” in reaching the deal.
Bronwen Maddox, the director of Chatham House, the U.K.-based institute for international affairs, was skeptical about drawing parallels between the two trials. She said Britain could “play a small diplomatic role” in Gaza, but probably not a decisive one.
The Northern Ireland peace agreement “was a successful and really important peace negotiation,” she said. “But it was a lot of confidence, I think.”
