Good Friday in the Middle East? Lessons and Limits for Peace…

Hannah McVeigh from Tyrone and is studying International Relations and Global Development

Ties between Northern Ireland and Israel and Palestine have long been apparent. Many Unionists typically align with Israel, seeing parallels in their identity, sovereignty and security. Meanwhile, many Nationalists typically sympathise with Palestine through the lens of self-determination and resistance to the occupation. Murals, flags, and street demonstrations reflect these tendencies, though neither community is monolithic in its views.

With clear parallels, could Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement offer hope for peace in one of the world’s most enduring conflicts? Many think so and it’s easy to see why.

The Good Friday Agreement was produced as a blueprint for how communities can exist together in a (relatively) peaceful society. Something many in Northern Ireland take pride in. It created a framework where different identities and political aspirations were recognised and accommodated through power-sharing, cross-border cooperation, and respect for human rights. Nevertheless, it remains imperfect, with ongoing political and social challenges. But it brought an end to decades of violence and opened a path towards reconciliation.

So when people talk about applying the “Northern Ireland model” to Israel and Palestine, they’re usually pointing to the hope that seemingly intractable conflicts can be resolved through dialogue, compromise, and mutual recognition.

The application of the so-called “Northern Ireland model” is more than just hypothetical. The Alliance for Peace in the Middle East introduced the “International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace” (IFP), which provides a robust and long-term funding plan to achieve peacebuilding in the region, and was endorsed by the UK in May 2018. This initiative was modelled off the “International Fund for Ireland” (IFI), which Jonathan Powell, the UK’s chief negotiator, called ‘the great unsung hero of the peace process’. More recently, Sir Keir Starmer has underscored the UK’s commitment to the IFP and highlighted the role third-party mediation played in facilitating dialogue and building trust in Northern Ireland.

These initiatives show promise. But because the Middle East conflict involves a far more complex web of political and social factors, applying the Northern Ireland model directly risks oversimplifying the problem and may ultimately fail to deliver lasting peace.

External guarantees played a crucial role in the Northern Ireland peace process. Trusted and largely neutral mediators such as Senator George Mitchell, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and leaders from the European Union facilitated dialogue and helped build trust between the parties. Their relative impartiality was instrumental in enabling progress.

By contrast, the Israel-Palestine conflict faces a far more fragmented landscape of international involvement. External support is divided among multiple actors with differing visions of peace, including the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and various regional and global stakeholders. This lack of a unified, widely trusted mediator complicates efforts at negotiation and undermines cohesive peacebuilding initiatives.

As a result, directly applying the Good Friday Agreement framework to Israel and Palestine risks overlooking these distinctive political realities. The fragmented nature of international support often diminishes the influence of smaller, local actors and glosses over the region’s complex and evolving dynamics.

The nature of the divisions also differs. Northern Ireland’s peace process addressed conflict rooted primarily in sectarian identities that, while deeply divided, shared many cultural and religious overlaps. This common ground made it easier to negotiate a shared future. The Good Friday Agreement, despite its flaws, recognized all identities equally, including the rights of minority groups, providing a framework where historic sectarian divides could be gradually healed and communities could coexist in relative peace.

However, the same cannot be applied to Israel and Palestine. The divides in the region are deeply entrenched. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict sees a complex intersection of religious, national and ethnic dimensions, which played a lesser role in Northern Ireland. This lack of overlap makes mutual recognition and coexistence much harder to achieve. Making the application of peace modelled on the Good Friday Agreement challenging.

Another important element to consider is the history of colonialism, power and displacement that has fuelled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland share that history of colonialism. However the history present in this region of the Middle East is much more nuanced and significantly longer than that witnessed in Northern Ireland.

During the Arab-Israeli war, known to Palestinians as the Nakba (meaning “catastrophe”), around 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee or were expelled from their homes. Even today, Israeli settlements are often built on or near these displaced Palestinian lands, a practice considered illegal under international law. This underscores how displacement and territorial control remain live issues.

The risk in directly transplanting the Northern Ireland model is that it can flatten these differences particularly the enduring colonial legacies and asymmetries of power in Israel-Palestine. Without accounting for these, peace proposals may unintentionally reinforce existing inequalities and imbalances, leaving Palestinians with little meaningful agency while powerful states impose templates from other conflicts that fail to address the realities on the ground.

The Good Friday Agreement succeeded because it offered all communities a framework where their identities, political aspirations, and grievances were acknowledged within a shared legal structure. This was achievable because both sides entered negotiations with relatively balanced recognition under the law. In Israel–Palestine, the imbalance is significantly greater and much of it remains unsolved.

For any peace process to have the same legitimacy that the Good Friday Agreement garnered, it must begin by addressing these inequalities head on. This means promoting what international law often refers to as a process of “decolonisation” ensuring the rights of Palestinians while maintaining the rights and security for all civilians in the region. By applying the Northern Ireland peace process directly risks replicating the imbalance, rather than resolving it.