Michelle O’Neill, who was just elected Northern Ireland’s First Minister, thinks that Hamas will soon enough become a reliable “partner for peace” with Israel. Is she nuts? No! She’s a standard-issue foreign policy “expert.”
O’Neill on Thursday demonstrated yet again why every attempt at a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has failed, and why any future negotiated peace is foredoomed to failure as well. Western foreign policy establishment analysts, whose perspectives O’Neill shares, pride themselves on their expansive understanding of the conflict while overlooking one of its most important aspects. Their fundamental misunderstanding of what drives the violence in the first place only ensures that their “solutions” will never work because they’re not addressing the real problem.
Fox News reported Saturday that O’Neill “stressed the importance of communication, comparing the ongoing Israel-Hamas war to ongoing peace talks within Northern Ireland.” Because, you see, in virtually all present-day foreign policy classes, the Northern Ireland conflict and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are studied together, as two examples of terrorists fighting against an “occupying power,” and she therefore assumes that the lessons of one can be applied to the other.
O’Neill was asked: “A long time ago, the [Irish Republican Army] IRA was seen as a terrorist organization. The British Government and everybody else could not ever talk to them. Do you think that Hamas, although regarded as a terror organization by many people around the world, is going to eventually have to be a partner for peace?”
O’Neill responded by demonstrating how much she knew about Northern Ireland: “Yes,” she said without any apparent hesitation, continuing: “I think you only have to look at our own example to know how important dialogue is, and that’s the only way you’re ever going to bring an end to conflict.”
Yeah, sure, that’s it, the Israelis and Palestinians aren’t talking to each other enough; that’s all that we need to fix this problem. “If republicans didn’t talk to the British government or the British government didn’t talk to the republicans, in the past in Ireland we would not be in the scenario we are in today, enjoying a peaceful and far more equal society today.”
Predictably, O’Neill wants Israel to accept a ceasefire that would allow Hamas to survive, regroup, and kill more Israeli civilians on another day: “And I really only hope that in the coming days and weeks that we can get to a point where we see a ceasefire in the first instance, that we have dialogue, and that we get to the ultimate position of having the Palestinian state recognized and a two-state solution that the international community stands for.”
The IRA entered into negotiations with the British government and became a “partner for peace,” so why can’t Hamas? And all Hamas wants is a Palestinian state free from Israeli “occupation,” right? So really there is an easy fix to the problem. Why hasn’t anybody thought of it before?
O’Neill has likely never read the Hamas Charter, which makes the organization’s outlook and goals all too clear. It says, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,” and “Palestine is an Islamic land… Since this is the case, the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.”
The entirety of Hamas’ argument against Israel is based on Islam, yet the Western foreign policy establishment, of which Michelle O’Neill is a dutiful exponent, has never even once, in well over fifty years of trying to solve this intractable conflict, demonstrated the slightest awareness of the role that Islam plays in preventing peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Related: Hamas Member Reveals That Organization’s Goal Is Not Just to Free ‘Palestine’
Hamas will never become a “partner for peace” because it objects to Israel on Islamic grounds, and Islam is not negotiable or changeable. The Qur’an succinctly states the imperative: “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191). The Palestinian Arabs weren’t actually driven out of Israel when the modern state was founded in 1948, but rather the Arab League told them to leave; nevertheless, Palestinian propagandists have insisted ever since that they were driven out, and this triggers the divinely commanded imperative to drive the Israelis out.
If Allah has commanded the Muslims to drive the Israelis out and Hamas is devoted to the service of Allah, Hamas will never become a partner for peace. There is no analogy to this in the situation of the IRA. But the foreign policy establishment has never shown any inclination to reexamine its core assumptions, and Michelle O’Neill, an ordinary leftist politician, is unlikely to come up with any original thoughts on her own.