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Ed Curran: We shudder at horror of Gaza, but it could once have been us

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Ed Curran

Ed Curran

Ed Curran

By Ed Curran

Two news stories of the past week remind us of how Northern Ireland came close to the brink of outright civil war.



Firstly, we learnt from Irish government papers of 1978, released under the 30-year rule, that Dublin feared as many as 250,000 Catholics in Northern Ireland faced a ‘doomsday’ scenario at that time.

Secondly, starkly and tragically, we see on our television screens the horror of Gaza. There but for the grace of a belated settlement here on Good Friday 1998 might be all of us. As we know to our cost, violence begets violence to the point where war-mongers and the innocent alike are slaughtered. The former Prime Minister Tony Blair is drawing no doubt on his long memory of Northern Ireland as he and others try to salvage peace in the Middle East. Somewhere along the line, we were saved from our very own Gaza experience.

We, citizens of Northern Ireland, may look with incredulity at what the Israelis are doing to Gaza and what Hamas are doing to the Israelis. Yet, we are not worlds apart. For Hamas, read the worst excesses of the Irish Republican movement. Remember Bloody Friday, La Mon House, Enniskillen, police officers blown to pieces by bombs under their cars, and those civilians whose bodies are still missing decades after they were murdered. For the Israelis, read the psyche of the British/unionist state; Bloody Sunday, Internment, The Falls Road Curfew, a shoot to kill policy. Worse still, the response of hard-line violent Ulster loyalist groups waging their own grimly indiscriminate war.

What we are witnessing in the Middle East is simply an extension of where we once were. We are witnessing the full Armageddon horror of where we might have ended, had not common sense prevailed and brought us to where we are today.

Three words from our days of conflict are written indelibly inside my mind. ROOT THEM OUT. If I heard those words once I heard them a thousand times spoken even by moderate people. Let us remind ourselves what those three words were intended to convey to security forces.

‘Root them out’ is a call to go into the Hamas territory. Go into the Bogside and Creggan. Go into west Belfast. Go into south Armagh. Go into wherever there was a large Catholic/ nationalist community, ostensibly harbouring the IRA, and root them out.

I suspect many of us, no matter how liberal-minded we like to think we are, did at one time or other have a touch of the root them out syndrome. After all, is there not a breaking point in most, if not all of us, a threshold of terror, which drives us eventually into some stratosphere of irrationality? That appears to be where many Israelis are now.

I remember the Belfast News Letter editorials during the Troubles would rail against the latest IRA atrocity with the immortal words “something must be done.” I’m not sure if that were a euphemism for ‘root them out’ but it certainly sent out a message on behalf of unionists that a tougher security strategy was needed.

There were times when it was difficult for any rational being not to concur that “something must be done.” But, with the benefit of hindsight, we can be eternally grateful now that the ‘root them out’ message was not rolled out then as it is today on the Gaza strip. OK, it is stretching incredulity to suggest that British war planes would ever have bombed the Falls Road or Crossmaglen, in the aftermath of a wave of IRA atrocities. But firing rockets into distant Israeli communities, as Hamas has been doing, seems puny to me compared to the excesses of terrorists in Northern Ireland not so long ago.

I once asked Robert Fisk, whose journalistic career has been in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, if he saw a special distinguishing mark between the two conflicts. He said the big difference between here and there was that this was essentially a working-class civil war, whereas in the Middle East it encompassed rich and poor alike, the intelligentsia and business communities on both sides. That was borne out for me recently when I read that Hamas numbers 500 PhDs among its leadership.

Where we part company, thankfully, with the Israelis and Hamas, is in the fact that so many of us on both sides of the religious and political divide in Northern Ireland, in Britain and in the Republic, did not side with terrorism. We may have held strong unionist or nationalist convictions but we believed bloodshed would not further either side and would cause only more community heartbreak and division.

Unfortunately, the Israelis and Hamas do not seem to have reached that point, if they ever will. The Israelis need to learn from our experience in Northern Ireland that the strategy of ‘root them out’ does not work. Where it was employed here on even a minor scale, it served only to make matters worse and acted as a recruiting agent for the terrorists.

Can anyone be in any doubt that this is what is happening today in the Middle East? The Israelis, unlike the vast majority of people on both sides in Northern Ireland, during our 30 year war, seem to have lost the plot. They have allowed themselves to be goaded by Hamas into acting more bluntly and appallingly than even the terrorists.

If Mr Blair is echoing the lessons of Northern Ireland in his role as a Middle East peace envoy, then his message to Tel Aviv on this occasion should be simple. ‘Root them out’ will not work. Bombing and invading Gaza is nothing short of madness.

Belfast Telegraph

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