Promoting Northern Ireland’s peacebuilding experience in Palestine–Israel: normalising the status quo

Abstract

Against the backdrop of enduring Israeli settler colonialist expansion in historic Palestine, the selective application of the Northern Ireland ‘Peace Process’ to the ‘Israel/Palestine Conflict’ ignores root causes and acts as a blunt instrument, one that sustains a deeply unjust status quo whilst eschewing decolonisation as the ultimate goal. We argue that the transposition of a Northern Irish peace model to Palestine/Israel serves to reinforce and embed the ‘conflict’ by promoting its own discourse of ‘peacebuilding’, one that is silent on the language of colonisation, which in turn marginalises the legitimacy of Palestinian anti-colonial resistance and prioritises westernised notions of ‘peace’ over international obligations to promote ‘justice’. Our argument is premised upon what is, in the main, a marginalised critique, namely that viewing the Northern Irish Peace Accord as ‘successful’ – an exemplary model suitable for application in other conflict/transitional spaces – depends on how one understands the agreement itself: as a tool to end ethnic conflict by fostering better cross-community relationships through a process of consociationalism that leads to reconciliation; or as a carefully constructed, bureaucratic means of providing a ruse of ‘peace’ whilst appeasing claims to self-determination and ignoring broader colonial history.