“Belfast Is Not Here”: The Israeli Press and the Good Friday Agreement

Abstract

In April 1998, Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists in Northern Ireland signed a historic peace agreement, The Good Friday Agreement. The article examines how the news of this peace agreement was received in Israel, which was dealing with its own issues of peace agreements and peace processes. Israeli press coverage of peace in Northern Ireland ranged from the jealous to the congratulatory, from a dovish desire to find lessons for Israel/Palestine in the example of Northern Ireland to a hawkish refusal to make the comparison. Shared vocabularies of violence, religiosity, and supposedly ancient conflicts also made regular appearances. In other words, Israeli journalists and political commentators discussed the events in distant Northern Ireland in terms of their own local realities and thus highlighted the tensions and fractures of Israeli self-perceptions in the years after the Oslo Accords and before the Second Intifada.