Even before the freshly acquitted Gwyneth Paltrow gave us what we are obliged to call the Slalom Witch Trial, she had already made an enduring gift to the language. For a quarter century, we have spoken of Sliding Doors moments, in homage to the otherwise slight Paltrow romcom in which a single, small action has life-altering consequences – opening up two very different futures.
People use the phrase to refer to forks in the road of their personal lives, but it also applies to the bloodiest kind of international politics. I look at the contrasting journeys taken by Northern Ireland and by Israel in the last 25 years and conclude that one got on the right train and the other missed it – with consequences that get only more tragic.
