Haaretz-15/05/2007

TBC, (Haaretz)

"I envy the British for having Tony Blair as their leader. I recall my visits to Northern Ireland some 30 years ago. Parts of west Belfast - the focal point of clashes between Catholics and Protestants - looked worst than the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. It seemed then that "the troubles," as the fighting there was called, would never be resolved.

Therefore, who would have thought that a day would come when the Protestant firebrand Ian Paisley, whose tongue spewed fire and sulfur, would one day sit in the same government with the Catholic terrorist Martin McGuinness? Who could have had such creative imagination as to foresee that a day would come when Northern Ireland would witness an end to the bloodletting?

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is the one who with determination, with near religious fervor, stubbornly strove to reach a peace agreement, and who assigned Paisley and McGuinness the responsibility of managing Northern Ireland to bring an end to 400 years of oppression, political violence, religious extremism and indiscriminate terrorism.

I envy the British nation because the Israelis and the Palestinians need an Israeli Blair and a Palestinian Blair, who will lead us to the promised land of an end to the occupation, an end to the violence and to the terror, and on to a historic reconciliation.

To see Blair, Paisley, Gerry Adams and their friends, who up to a few years ago wanted, and even tried, to kill each other, shaking hands at a ceremony establishing the government, smiling, trading jokes and preaching peace - was to see a model for Israelis and Palestinians that today may appear to be a surrealist vision. It is like witnessing former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sitting in a peace conference with the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. That same Netanyahu who ordered the Mossad to assassinate Meshal in Amman 10 years ago for his role in ordering the murder of Israelis."

Back to top