Joe O'Reilly: Radical Empathy for Israeli-Palestinian Peace

Welcome to our guests and thank you for the wonderful work you have done and continue to do. And indeed, I was just picking up on one of your last remarks there, that we need hope. Hope is probably the most absent element in the Middle East at the moment, and optimism, sadly. But to start, I'll ask you a sequence of questions and I'll just wait for the answer for each separately. With the Netanyahu government and indeed with the entire political establishment in Israel, there's a hardening of attitudes, a really strong hardening of attitudes, an anti-two-state solution and efforts being made to make sure it can't happen through the settlement process. And yet, and of course, no willingness to compromise at all, and yet Israel will have to be a key part of a solution. So how do we kind of reconcile that? How would you say we'd start to deal with that? That's the first question. I'll take the easy question first. To recognise the need for the compromise and yet the hardening. I think if we can go back to draw lessons on our process, I think that we saw in the colleagues from the ultra-unionist side of the house, or the unionist side of the house, the loyalist side of the house, was fear of change, fear of sharing power and wondering how that would impact on them and also having that fear of living with an armed insurrection against them as they saw it for 30 years. And I think that this is what I was saying earlier about having empathy, being able to be empathetic, which in the context of the Israel Palestine process is very difficult. This is why I talk about radical empathy, because you really need to put yourselves in the shoes of the Israeli government, of what they're thinking, of what is driving not just their position, but what are the interests behind it. And I think having a negotiating platform or a process that is designed to unpack that, to address their hurts, to address their fears, even though we see that both sides are hurting each other and both sides, when we go back to 2023, that it's, it creates a difficulty. But I think that continuing to respond by not engaging, even though it's very, very difficult, is not going to move the process forward. And that's not to say that there's any incentive for the Israeli, the current Israeli government to move forward, but I think that if there are, as Brona has just noted, if there are interventions that the Irish government can make, that other governments can make to ensure that those who are interested in peace are, have the ability to have some form of space to engage both inside their own community and between the two communities. And I think the internal community space is also easy. So if there, you have that process of holding that space, of creating that space, of holding that space, of enabling them to generate options, so that when you do have the larger political process, that, that there will be people at the ready who will have generated some options that may create an incentive. It's not that it is, it's A plus B equals C, it's not a mathematical formula, but that's what you have to try and do, is to create that kind of incentive. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's also indirect. I mean, we're really talking about power and the most militarised and nuclear powered state in the Middle East. So it's very difficult to contend with that. There is not a kind of an equality or a balance of power in any shape or form in that region, and certainly not with the Palestinians. And I think the other, I mean, it's, I suppose it's about unleashing other voices and finding back channels and finding proxies. Now, unfortunately, the opinion polls are showing a high degree of support in one sense for the government and for the war in one sense. And people have been very traumatised from the 7th of October, but a lot of stuff that has been, you know, built on that, say, in terms of propaganda. But there are other voices around there. One of the things that I do is I speak every year to a group from England who are a young Jewish group, and they ask, will you come and speak? I don't know if everybody does speak, and we have challenging conversations, because we all know, just like in our situation, the diaspora, particularly the diaspora in the United States, were very important in our conflict. And these are young people in universities who feel like fish out of water. They almost cannot even talk about it at home, because their view is very different. But there are people there, you know, within communities, within Israel, within other places, and it's about actually giving them the hope and support. Just to say that, when I was there last year, two things, I think, were very helpful. I did a big public meeting, and it was the day that Netanyahu broke the ceasefire on the 18th of March, and the Irish embassy didn't know if there would be a big, but there turned out to be a big turnout. And it was so helpful, that external intervention and what the Irish government did to keep communications open with people and alternative discourses. The next day, there was a big march, and within that march, people were hearing feedback about the public meeting, and that was reported back to them, about how energising it, how their spirits had been lifted, and all of that. And the second thing, on those trips, you can also do public events. So I did a podcast with Haratz, which then went around. So it's actually finding those ways to help to broaden, to change opinions, to move things on, which I think is important. Thank you. My next question neatly fits into that last one. Yeah, in that the United States are clearly not an independent broker, they're clearly so pro-Israel, and Norway were traditionally an independent broker, but now the relationship is sour. So obviously the Irish government are one in the context of the presidency, but what other states and actors, if you like, would you see as potentially being able to unlock things to intervene in mediation sense and in subsequent negotiations? I've been given a lot of thought to that, given that we were fortunate, and of course the US constantly refers to Northern Ireland as one of its rare foreign policy successes. And we should continue to build on that. So you are looking to see how you could get countries. It was strange that Pakistan came in. It would have not been the one that we would have thought of. I've recently returned from Japan, and I made the point to the Saskawa Peace Foundation that they should give more consideration to being intermediaries. We have been invited by the Norwegians and the Finns, or Scandinavians generally, have been the accepted third party, but probably not in the Middle East, because Norway has recognised Palestine, as has Spain and Ireland. So you are looking, and it would be very hard to satisfy Netanyahu in terms of who he would consider to be an accepted third party. But it is worth maybe having a combination. We had a combination. We had Finland, we had Canada, and we had the United States. Drawing on the Northern Ireland experience. Sorry, Senator, we'll come to you the next round. That's okay. Thanks a million. Could I just say on the leadership one, when Mandela, we went for three days to South Africa, and in despair, it was the first, at the end of the first year of the peace talks in 97, it was the middle of that year, and we thought we were going nowhere. There hadn't been a second IRA ceasefire, and Sinn Féin were outside the process, but Sinn Féin were in South Africa with us, so there was two of everything. We brought apartheid to South Africa, as President Mandela said to us, and we were saying something about leadership, and it's to your point, and I'm sure the Israelis are asking themselves that question, as are Palestinians, and he looked at us and he said, go home and grow them. And we had to think very deeply about that, and I think that's what needs to happen also in Israel. I mean, the institutions, the judiciary, standing down the judiciary and standing down the kind of rule of law and extending the death penalty to people who are in detention, you clearly have to ask about the leadership, and so I guess the despair is about the United Nations and where its standing is now in the world. But the Israelis themselves and Palestinians are looking at that, why have our leaders let us so badly down?