“The legal framework is already in place,” he declared, “all that is needed is the political will.”
At Netanyahu’s side was a powerful parliamentarian at least as well known in the UK as Bibi is in Israel. Nobel prize winner Lord Trimble was appointed First Minister of Northern Ireland after the Good Friday peace accords. David Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party was opposed to the Irish Republican Army’s campaign for a united Ireland free of British rule and came to prominence by joining the fiery Protestant leader Ian Paisley in an “Orange Order” march through Republican strongholds in County Armagh. Trimble spoke forcefully in support of the jurists’ initiative and urged lobby groups to bring pressure on their governments to take action against Ahmadinejad.
As the co-chairmen answered questions I found the scene quite warming. Jerusalem and Ulster sitting side by side. I thought of the many times I had heard parallels drawn between the Irish troubles and those in Israel. A struggle between two religious groups, the common element of British rule, car bombs and targeted killings and, yes, the eternal dispute over historical claims to the land. Even the loathsome Ken Livingstone feted IRA leaders just as he now embraces Jihadist clerics as London’s mayor.
So much in common but so very different. Because for all those coincidences between the conflicts, it is a fact that never during the centuries-old struggle was any part of Ireland ever threatened with total annihilation. Until that fundamental distinction is fully appreciated, we will continue to suffer the fools who believe that the square peg of Irish peace can be hammered into the round and bottomless hole of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Trimble the Ulsterman is a realist and also a member of the Henry “Scoop” Jackson Society. The late U.S. congressman was a fierce opponent of détente with the repressive Soviet regime and advocated the maintenance by the world’s leading democracies of strong military capabilities with the means and will to protect freedom wherever it was under threat. I found this quote by Trimble’s biographer in a publication of Dore Gold’s own Jerusalem Institute for Public Affairs:
“However, the British government does not put Palestinian terrorism or Northern Irish terrorism into that category. The British state is well-nigh unique in advertising, quite openly, that it does not really mind if it is dismembered. To ensure the IRA’s abandonment of violence, the British will maintain the pace of concessions, at least for as long as the Unionists are prepared to tolerate them. In recent years, PLO flags and large wall murals of Arafat can be seen in Catholic-Republican neighborhoods, while Unionist-Protestant zones are covered with Israeli flags. In fact, Northern Ireland is one of the very few parts of Europe where there is a very wide measure of popular support in the majority community for the State of Israel.”
An unlikely affinity, but an important alliance in the war against Islamic terror and the means to stop the global suicide bomber in his tracks.