There is no peace in the Middle East because there is no effective peace process. This isn’t because the Palestinians and Israelis do not know how to make peace. They do. The Good Friday agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland a quarter of a century ago, provided a clear guide. They have to do what the negotiating teams, of which I was a part, did in Northern Ireland.
The problem is Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his ally, the United States of America, who have failed to apply the lessons of Northern Ireland to Middle East peacemaking.
To fully understand the tragedy this represents, it’s necessary to go back in time to the negotiations that achieved the Good Friday agreement in 1997. At the time I was working, together with two other Northern Ireland-based academics, Fred Boal and Tom Hadden, developing a range of public polls to gauge opinion about how to achieve peace.
