WORLD VIEW: New Year's Resolution No 1: I will not engage in comparative arithmetic when it comes to people's lives. What does it contribute to the sum of human understanding to point out that about 800 Palestinians have died violently in the last 15 months, compared with more than 200 Israelis?
Every one of them is a universal tragedy. In the words of John Donne, "Any man's death diminishes me." Pointing out that the casualty rate is four times higher for the Palestinians implies that we should be supporting one side against the other. It diverts attention from the fact that we should be looking for ways to encourage a solution to the conflict so that all the killing stops and people can get on with their lives.
This is not, in Chamberlain's phrase, "a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing". There is considerable commerce between Ireland and Israel, especially in computer components. Our beef trade with Israel's neighbour, Egypt, is a subject close to the heart of Irish politicians and farmers alike. Thousands of Irish soldiers have hands-on experience of the region from their days in south Lebanon and some of them paid the ultimate price for peace and the ideals of the United Nations.
The conflict is primarily the business of those directly invol- ved, but it is our business also as citizens of Ireland and of the world. The alleged failings of US policy in the region were used as an excuse for the attack on the World Trade Centre which changed all our lives. We should be looking closely at US policy and at the policies of Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and the European Union.
First of all, there is our own Irish foreign policy. While there has been substantial criticism of the Irish performance on the UN Security Council, especially in relation to the Afghan war, the record on the Middle East is, on balance, a fairly honourable one.
Even Israelis, who are not easy to please, admit privately that the Irish stance has been broadly impartial. Ireland backs the entitlement of the Palestinian people to their own independent state and the right of Israel to live in peace and security within internationally recognised borders.
There is probably a leaning, at the level of emotion, towards the Palestinians, whose conditions of life would evoke the sympathy of any sentient Irish person. On the morning of September 11th, when the world was still young and innocent, I observed the visit of Foreign Minister Brian Cowen to a girls' school in a Palestinian refugee camp close to Bethlehem. It would melt a heart of stone to see the children in their neat attire attending classes in a building where the windows were piled with sandbags and the walls perforated with machine-gun bullets.
I was proud of Ireland that day. It would have been so much more convenient to go through the motions of an official visit, meeting the usual Israeli dignitaries, without making a gesture to the suffering masses, the ordinary people enduring the privations of a terrible situation.
That is not to say that Ireland, whether the Government or citizens, is oblivious to the sufferings of the Israeli people. The dreadful bombings in civilian areas, with consequent losses of young life, awaken disturbing memories of similar tragedies at Omagh, Dublin's Talbot Street, Enniskillen and elsewhere.
Is there anything we can offer these people, on both sides? After all, and let us not be too reticent about it, the people of this island have at last cobbled together some sort of functioning solution to the running sore of the Northern Ireland Troubles.
As bad as it has been, nobody is pretending that the violence in the North can compare with the Middle East. But the two situations have some basic similarities:
Factional hatred based on religion and nationality.
Extremists on both sides seeking to dictate the agenda.
Resentment over past displacement from land and territory on one side, matched by deep-rooted insecurity on the other.
Reliance on the gun, the bomb and the missile, rather than rational argument and constructive dialogue.
Eradicating factional hatred is a long-term process but a beginning could be made by toning down the rhetoric on both sides. Israel needs to show more respect for Yasser Arafat, both physically and verbally, as the father of his people and president-in-waiting. The rhetoric of the Palestinian street needs to be muted fairly drastically and Arafat himself could set an example by forswearing the loaded and emotive term "fascist" to describe Israeli policy, as he did at last year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Israel and the Palestinian territories have a plentiful supply of terrorists and "securocrats". The Northern Ireland example showed that refusing to give up or relent on the political agenda is the only way to keep these dark forces from seizing the agenda.
Northern Ireland was lucky in that the so-called "colonisation" took place hundreds of years ago. For Palestinians, the loss of ancestral homes and land is a wound still red and raw. But restoring the pre-1948 status quo is not a realistic or acceptable option. Perhaps a symbolic gesture could be crafted to ease some of the pain. Down the corridor of the years, after a long period of peace, who knows what might be worked out?
The one thing the Northern peace process showed was that a cessation of violence was a prerequisite for successful negotiation. Whether Palestinian violence begets hardline Israeli security policies or the other way round, it is certain that, unless there is a reduction in tension, the whole place could eventually go up in flames.
The US relationship to the Middle East is similar to the role of Britain in Northern Ireland. The position of Egypt in the conflict is not unlike that of our own Government in relation to the North.
The US is the key and, as a longtime friend and even blood-relation, Ireland is in a position to exert some extremely modest but not insignificant influence. There is continual debate in the US about Middle East policy, and Ireland could make a small but not ineffective contribution, especially at the UN. The US is not a monolith and the controversy as to whether Irish people are pro- or anti-American gets us nowhere. It's not a case of "Whose side are you on?" but "Whose side of America are you on?"