The Walls Come Tumbling Down

And suddenly yet newer horizons opened up. The Arab and the Israeli shook hands. The walls came tumbling down. The lion and the lamb lay down together. The strangest things have come to pass.

The handshake on the White House lawn last week, between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, certainly shook the world. Over a century of bloodshed has gone into that ancient hatred. When the first attempts to find a peace began in Spain a couple of years ago, both sides appealed to history for their justification. And not just recent history. They went back and back, into the sands of time, thousands of years.

It is an ancient hatred, between brothers of a kind. Because, of course, they are both Semitic peoples. Once they were the same, before versions of divinity and exclusiveness came between them.

But that division was sufficient to carve different destinies over the centuries. The rise of Zionism in the last century, and the support of the British government of Balfour for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, were the key elements that tipped the balance.

But the small hostilities of the early 20th century were as nothing to those that followed. Hitler's holocaust gave tragic impetus to the Jewish dream, rendered it fierce and unyielding, intolerant and militarist. Arabs were treated in much the same way as were Jews in pre-war Germany. Uprooted from their homes, stripped of their rights and possessions, bereft of their citizenship and identity.

The Israelis did not have it easy either. Their fledgling state was attacked by the Arabs in 1948, in the first instalment of a long war that may be dying out today, as much from weariness as from conviction.

It was a good example of what goes wrong when big powers interfere and impose their own solution on unwilling peoples. It should be a salutary warning to those who talk of doing the same in Bosnia.

Do we need a Balkan version of the Suez crisis, the Six Days War, the Yom Kippur War, the Munich massacre, Black September?

These people exploded the '60s dream, when the Arab oil states reacted to the equivocal end of the Yom Kippur War by imposing an oil embargo, thereby ending the boom years and introducing the new awarenesses that we take for granted now.

Suddenly there were limitations. The brown people were talking back and the world shifted on its axis. The Arabs began to make demands. They became very wealthy. They bought parts of Knightsbridge. Arabic writing began to appear in duty free lounges.

Two separate spheres of influence were in conflict, the American Jewish and the Arab. And then came Khomeini. And the world shifted again.

Would things have worked out this way if Palestine had not been partitioned? Would the Americans have felt the need for two regional superpowers (Israel and Persia, under the Shah) to police the area and protect Western interests?

The radical Palestinians and the fundamentalists of Hezbollah are a direct consequence of the increasing repressiveness and militancy of the Israeli government over the last generation, just as Khomeini's radicalism gained favour among the masses in Iran because of the Shah's vicious repressions and conceits.

And now, as we always knew they would sometime, they have begun the first tentative steps towards peace. Just as Menachem Begin, the former terrorist became a statesman, so too has Yasser Arafat. There is no moral or philosophical difference that I can discern.

The lesson in all this is that we should not become too wrapped up in history. For the most part, our stories are myths. They are emblems not reality. Indeed, they frequently mask the truth, just as an abused child invents a parallel universe to encompass his or her horrors.

So, the bible is a kind of myth. So too is the Tain. And the myths continued one by one, side by side accumulating across the ages. We have a myth, an enhanced truth to explain everything, and to name the guilty party in those parts of the present that we don't like.

Cromwell was a guilty party. Or so we have always been told. But the myth may screen the truth. Drogheda historian Harry O'Sullivan has researched the first republican conquest of the town, and now argues that, far from butchering the women and children, the Lord High Protector ordered that they be spared, and that only those who had fought should die.

That's not saying he was a nice bloke. Many died. But not as many as legend tells us. Scarlet Street was so called before Cromwell was on the island. So why do we need to demonise Cromwell? Especially when the Gaelic population of the time egged him on to destroy the old aristocracy?

Because that old Catholic aristocracy and their clerical cohorts controlled the historiography of the time, they spread the terror of this devil and his fearsome armies. Similarly, in their time, the Protestants in the North demonised their dispossessed Catholic neighbours.

Undoubtedly there were grains of truth in the tales of death and destruction, and their settlements were attacked when possible by the displaced Catholics of Ulster. But not on the same scale as their bonding mythology would have you believe.

Three centuries later we still can't match the thousands of years that the Jews and Arabs can marshall behind their ancient hatreds. But we've got a problem that is just as intractable and as psychically draining.

So now that the Arab and the Israeli have bitten the bullet, what are we going to do about our own local conflict?

Bring in the Norwegians, of course. We could do with the mediation of these sane, impartial North European protestants.They have nothing to gain , , , apart from, maybe, a Nobel Peace Prize.

But what they brought to the Middle Eastern problem was precisely that northern european protestant liberal rational non-judgemental even-handedness that is lacking in the world's most intractable trouble spots.

The full story of their remarkable contribution has yet to be told, but from what we already know, they brought wisdom and compassion and reason to bear on the mutually-inflicted wounds of both sides; they broke the logjam; they challenged the fatalism. They opened a window and let another light into the private room.

Of course, it almost came off the rails from time to time. There was brinkmanship. There was despair. But in the end, there was light at the end of the tunnel . . . and it wasn't a train coming the other way.

It may be that the world gave both sides a signal that they were on their own. Certainly, Arafat was under no illusions, after his espousal of Saddam Hussein in the Kuwaiti affair, about the level of his support among the wealthier Arab states which had previously bankrolled his operations.

And Israel has been increasingly embarrassing for the Americans who paid so many of their bills: the recent pasting of South Lebanon is a case in point. So the paymasters were tired. But so too were the populations. When it all comes down, who wants to be at war all the time?

It is a question that must be asked in the North. Because surely the weariness of the people counts for something. Is it not time that the protagonists laid down their weapons and put aside their bombs, and turned their swords into plowshares?

If Israel and the PLO can shake hands on the White House lawn, so too can the various elements of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Once the logjam is broken, it's easy. All it really needs is the will.