And now, after 18 months, Mitchell has brought the Israelis and the Palestinians to the same point. The lesson he seems to draw from his experience in Northern Ireland is: Don't surrender to the apparent hopelessness of the situation. If you insist on preserving forward motion, good things will happen. But you can draw another, very different lesson from Mitchell's own account. The reason both sides ultimately agreed to painful concessions, he writes, was that "the vast majority of people had had enough" of funerals and violence and were desperate for peace. Although extremists remained, hard-liners on both sides had already backed off their maximalist demand: the IRA for a united Ireland, the unionists for a Protestant-controlled north. The remaining stakes, though fiercely contested, were susceptible to difference-splitting: How would an elected assembly in the North protect the rights of the Catholic minority, and under what terms would the new Northern institutions be bound to Ireland?
Another way of understanding the lesson of Northern Ireland is thus: Readiness is all. The adversaries must conclude that their maximalist demands stand in the way of a peaceful settlement. Abbas has arguably reached this point, which is why he has agreed to engage in direct talks after fruitlessly insisting on clear "terms of reference," above all an end to Israeli settlement-building and a return to pre-1967 borders. In the face of public skepticism bordering on hostility, Abbas accepted a statement by the Mideast "Quartet" that simply reaffirms an earlier commitment to direct negotiations that "lead to a settlement ... that ends the occupation which began in 1967." Hamas, which occupies a position analogous to that of the IRA, has repudiated the talks and remains formally committed to Israel's destruction. As an Israeli official puts it, "The IRA was looking at the end of the day to negotiate with the British, which you can't say of Hamas, and of Syria and Hezbollah and other parties to the conflict." Instead, the hard-liners plan to make hay from the failure of these latest talks.
But Israel's position constitutes an equal and reciprocal obstacle to peace. Israel is the occupying power in Palestine, as Britain was in Northern Ireland. But well before Mitchell came along, the British had undergone a drastic change of heart. In the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, Britain forswore any "selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland" and pledged to permit the people to determine their own fate. Successive British governments made painful concessions to bring the Troubles to an end. Israel's position of course is scarcely analogous because its very survival as a state is at risk, but neither the Netanyahu government nor the broader public has proved willing to make the concessions, above all on settlements, that would strengthen Abbas's hands vis-à-vis Hamas and his own public. Meanwhile, irreversible "facts on the ground" accumulate. Although it's often said that "everyone knows" what a peace deal would look like, the settlement policy is well on its way to turning a two-state solution into a dead letter. There are now roughly half a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank. It's virtually unimaginable that Israel will dismantle enough of their homes to allow a viable Palestinian state to exist, given how difficult it was to extricate just a few thousand Israelis from Gaza.
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