Profiting from Peace?

On so many occasions since the atrocities of 7th Oct and Israel’s genocidal response in Gaza, I have argued that our Good Friday Agreement peace process offered an example from which Israel could learn. I argued that we in the unionist community, with our experience of suffering terrorism, were best placed to talk to the Israelis; I argued that we should be demonstrating that talking to elected politicians, despite their previous links to terrorist organisations, allowed us to end decades of violence through political processes, rather than extreme violence.

I argued that we should try to help Israel see that, no matter how difficult such a process would seem to the victims of terrorism, the long-term benefits were worth the pain and the risks. We in the unionist community have seen how an imperfect peace process can bring benefits to all; what we have now is not perfect, but unlike in Israel, we no longer murder each other’s children.

I made this argument in phone calls to BBC Nolan, on Talkback, to James O’Brien on LBC, in letters to the Newsletter and Irish News and also on Slugger. I argued that we unionists should be persuading the Israelis that there was an alternative to their approach, that carpet-bombing of Gaza was likely to fail. On so many occasions, unionist politicians and some BBC journalists pushed back and argued that N. Ireland was unique, that our process could not be used as a template for solving other terrorist problems.

Some DUP politicians went even further, accepting an Israeli paid trip to Jerusalem where they declared support for that country while the civilians of Gaza were being massacred and all the time refusing to use the example of our peace process as a possible path towards a solution.

Now today, Conor Coyle in the Irish News, reports that the DUP’s Emma-Little-Pengelly with Jeffrey Donaldson and his brother Kingsley, set up a ‘peace building’ company called the Causeway Initiative; this was awarded contracts by the British government worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to support international peacebuilding efforts “drawing on the experience of the Northern Ireland peace process”.

When those DUP politicians were supporting Israel with their visit; were they aware that senior DUP politicians believed the lessons of our peace process were transferrable? When in recent weeks they were outraged by a Palestine peace march past Scarva, did they know that senior politicians in their party had profited from such contracts.

The UN recently concluded that Israeli forces were systematically targeting Palestinian children and we continue to see appalling attacks on Palestinian children, with seven children killed by Israeli forces in the past week. There is no solution in sight.

Leaving aside the irony of Jeffrey Donaldson leaving the UUP because he rejected the GFA process and then going on to profit from teaching others about it, is it not shocking that the DUP and other unionists still refuse to use our peace process as an example to Israel of how talking to elected politicians, even if they have previous links to terrorism, can lead to peace?

References:

https://sluggerotoole.com/2023/12/19/potential-solutions-to-the-israeli-palestine-conflict/

https://sluggerotoole.com/2024/04/15/why-unionists-tend-to-support-israel/

https://sluggerotoole.com/2026/06/08/from-the-other-side-of-the-canal-sham-fight-in-scarva/

Newsletter letters page 11th Jun 2025