"You can tolerate a situation where a small percentage completely withdraws from participation in society, but when you get to that sort of percentage, if they wish to disrupt and cause problems, they can do so. It is much better to have a decent structure within the society, to find some way of ameliorating and encouraging people to participate. So it was in our interest - and we keep saying that in meetings - to make Northern Ireland work."
But Trimble does not claim that the Israeli-Palestinian situation can be changed just by establishing a workable Palestinian state (not that that would be an easy task at this point). He is clear that a major factor in preventing peaceful negotiations is the fact that the surrounding Arab states encourage the radicals.
"Among Northern Irish nationalists, there were two main streams," explains Trimble. "The militants in the IRA and the moderates in the SDLP. South of the border, the Irish republic consistently supported the moderates. If the southern state had supported the IRA, we could never have had an agreement. Because the moderates would never have been able to make an agreement against the wishes of the state, which they regarded as their state.Interesting tidbit:
"The analogy I would draw from that, looking at Israel and the Palestinians, is that you have Hamas as the equivalent of the IRA. You might look at Arafat as the equivalent of the SDLP. But the states toward which [the Palestinians] look for support - the Saudis, the Iraqis - all support Hamas. So Jordan might offer support, and Egypt might be more moderate, but Jordan is too small to matter, and Egypt is in the wrong place . . . The ideology that motivates the attacks on Israel - attacks which take place, in part, because of its identification with Western values - has not been neutered in the way that the ideology of the militant Irish republican has been neutered. So, changing the outlook of the Saudis and changing the ideology are the same thing. Persuading the Saudis that they should support moderates rather than militants is the same as changing their ideology.
Trimble relates that one can find Israeli flags flown in Belfast by Protestants and PLO flags flown by Catholic nationalists.(via Haggai)
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