Stephen Goss: Palestine is not Northern Ireland | Conservative Home

Dr Stephen Goss is an historian, policy and research manager, and a Conservative councillor in Reading.

As you make your way into west Belfast from the city centre, towards the top of Divis Street is what is known as the International Wall. Here various shades of Irish Republicanism spread their propaganda via murals depicting the international causes with which they identify, claiming shared experience.

Several of the sections (and I’m willing to wager even more than usual now) depict their solidarity with Palestine, and denounce Israel as an ‘Apartheid state’. The IRA’s coöperation with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) is well known. Walk around the corner onto Northumberland Avenue, and you pass through the twin sets of gates with the no man’s land in between that constitutes this stretch of the Peace Line.

Having now entered Protestant West Belfast, the same wall now proudly displays unionist murals – with a particularly large section showing support for Israel. This panel pays homage to Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, an Irish Protestant who not only led the West Belfast Regiment of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), but during the First World War was commander of the British Army’s Jewish Legion. After the War he was a prominent Zionist, is known as the godfather of the Israel Defence Force, and apparently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s elder brother was named after him. At Patterson’s request, he is buried in Israel in the same cemetery as men he led in the Legion. 

Over approximately 130 yards of Belfast brickwork, the world’s most intractable conflict is refracted through the lens of Northern Ireland’s own divisions. Despite this tendency, we must be careful not to mistake resonance for equivalence – and the current Government should not be lulled into thinking the Northern Ireland model will work in the Holy Land. 

In 1998, what was felt to be impossible was achieved. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement ended three decades of bloodshed in Northern Ireland, through painstaking diplomacy, political courage, and the willingness of former enemies to recognise each other’s legitimacy. The images of Unionist and Nationalist leaders agreeing to share power are etched into history. Yet, the achievement has become something of a diplomatic legend. Whenever Britain faces an intractable conflict abroad, there is a temptation to reach for the ‘Belfast model’ as a ready-made solution. 

The Colombian peace process, where the government and FARC reached an agreement in 2016, is a notable case that consciously drew inspiration from Northern Ireland. The IRA also maintained a working relationship with FARC for several years.  Juan Manuel Santos, a future President of Colombia and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, co-authored a book with Tony Blair, underscoring the ideological and structural influence of the Agreement as a template for Colombia, and peace deals in similar conflicts.  

However, the model is not universally transferable. Successful peace often requires the insurgent side to reach a point where political engagement becomes more promising than armed struggle. In Northern Ireland, by the mid-1990s the IRA was losing. This made it and its political wing more inclined towards compromise. While the Agreement provides a compelling symbol of reconciliation and power-sharing, its effectiveness in different settings depends on whether the structural dynamics – namely a weakened insurgency and readiness to pursue political solutions – are replicated.  

In 2011 Netanyahu allowed Piers Morgan to interview him. Morgan praised Tony Blair’s book on how “he finally won peace in Northern Ireland” and drew a direct comparison between the Troubles and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Netanyahu very quickly refuted the asinine analogy. 

Worryingly, Sir Keir Starmer’s government now seems to be establishing policy on the same premise. As early as last December, it was reported that the Prime Minister was pushing what diplomatic weight he could muster to establish an “International Fund for Israeli-Palestinian Peace”. This was explicitly modelled on the International Fund for Ireland that supported reconciliation projects for more than a decade before the Agreement.

Sir Keir spent four years as human rights advisor to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, which supervises the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI); no doubt giving him a sense of personal insight and experience. Who is the Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser – the man shaping Britain’s policy towards the situation in the Middle East? Sir Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and the lead negotiator of the Northern Ireland peace process. Blair was the Special Envoy on the Middle East for eight years – and look at the region today.  

The problem is that the conditions that made the Good Friday Agreement possible simply do not exist in Israel–Palestine. By the time serious talks began in Belfast, the IRA had declared a ceasefire. Violence was diminishing, and there was a broad recognition that the armed struggle had run its course.

In Gaza, violence is ongoing, Hamas remains committed to Israel’s destruction, and what there is of a Palestinian Authority is divided and politically weak. In Northern Ireland, both sides accepted that the other’s aspirations were legitimate — Unionists could accept Nationalists’ goal of Irish unity, and Nationalists could acknowledge Unionists’ desire to remain in the UK. That parity of esteem is absent in the Middle East. As Netanyahu pointed out to Morgan:  

“The IRA never wanted London. They never wanted to destroy Britain and take over it… they had no territorial claim over the British isle. They wanted what they wanted in Northern Ireland. In the case of the Palestinian society, Hamas openly declares that it wants to wipe out not the heads of the Israeli government, but every Israeli. Wipe away the Jewish state. They openly say so.”

This is why Powell and Starmer’s push to recognise a Palestinian state is fundamentally flawed as a strategy. The Agreement was carefully sequenced: only after ceasefires were declared and held did the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning begin its work. By August 2001, the IRA had agreed to a method for putting weapons “completely and verifiably beyond use”, and in 2005 it finished decommissioning its arsenal. Prisoners were released only if their organisations maintained a complete ceasefire. There were various breakdowns, with Stormont collapsed several times over implementation.

In Northern Ireland, every concession was a reward for proven commitment, not a down-payment in the hope that progress might follow. Sir Keir’s plan inverts that logic. Recognising a Palestinian state before violence ceases, while hostages remain in captivity and one party still calls for the other’s destruction, risks rewarding terrorism rather than marginalising it. 

It is easy to see why the Northern Ireland analogy is so attractive. It offers hope: that even the most entrenched conflicts can yield to dialogue, compromise, and international support. If there is a lesson worth exporting from Belfast, it is not that recognition should come first. It is that peace depends on sequencing and reciprocity.

Each step in Northern Ireland was conditional, verified, and built on previous commitments. Above all, recognition of constitutional aspirations was the culmination of the process, not its opening gambit. If Britain now chooses to recognise a Palestinian state while Hamas persists and openly rejects the right of Israel to exist, it will not be emulating the achievement of 1998. It will substitute the proven discipline of the Northern Irish example — ceasefire first, concessions second — with the very reverse order that has doomed countless peace processes before.