Does N. Ireland’s Good Friday peace agreement hold keys to sustainable peace in Gaza?

As Israelis and Palestinians await seeing whether the ceasefire in the two-year war in Gaza will truly hold, experts have frequently pointed to the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s, which may offer lessons on the difficult path from entrenched conflict to lasting peace.

Two key figures who helped navigate the Northern Ireland peace process — former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell — have returned to the international spotlight due to their involvement in discussions with the US and other nations about Gaza’s future, as highlighted in an article by AP.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said this week that “drawing on our experience in Northern Ireland, we stand ready to play a key role in the decommissioning of Hamas’ weapons and capability.”

During “the Troubles,” three decades of violence involving Irish republican militants seeking to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, around 3,600 people were killed and 50,000 wounded. After years of setbacks and false starts, a peace accord known as the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, largely ending the conflict and leading to the disarming of the Irish Republican Army and other militant groups.

Experts note parallels — but also key differences — between Northern Ireland and the devastating war in Gaza, which erupted after Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

“The level of challenge in the Middle East now is monumental,” said Kristian Brown, a politics lecturer at Ulster University in Belfast. “The level of bitterness, the sense of immediate threat and the levels of destruction [in Northern Ireland] were not as cataclysmic as Gaza.”

How Good Friday agreement came to be

The IRA eventually agreed to place its arsenal “beyond use” through a secret process supervised by an international commission. Disarmament occurred alongside political negotiations addressing the conflict’s root causes — a feat that more than three decades of US-led efforts in the Middle East have not achieved.

The process was slow: the first IRA weapons were decommissioned in 2001 and the last in 2005, seven years after the Good Friday Agreement. Several other British loyalist and Irish republican militant groups also disarmed during this period.

“The British might be able to counsel patience and pragmatism,” said Niall Ó Dochartaigh, a professor of political science at the University of Galway, in a statement to AP. “The IRA leadership had to be helped in various ways to make that argument (for disarmament) within the organization.

“Ultimately, decommissioning only happened in the Irish case once the IRA was satisfied that there was a political settlement bedded down,” he added. While “the contours of a compromise settlement emerged quite early in Northern Ireland,” a similar consensus in the Middle East appears far off.

By Nazrin Sadigova