Ruth Dudley Edwards: Just as the Israeli Amos Oz tried to understand Palestinians, I tried to do the same with unionists
I have no Jewish blood, but as an admirer of brave, brilliant, beleaguered little Israel, I became a self-identified Zionist.
Similarly, although my background is largely Catholic nationalist, I became a friend to Ulster Protestants, including the loyal institutions, and eventually, a unionist.
In both cases, I came to like and admire cultures that encouraged freedom of speech.
Like Jews, Presbyterians particularly never seemed to stop arguing.
Annoying and often self-defeating though this could be, it attracted me much more than the hierarchical nature of Roman Catholicism and Islam and the obedient acceptance of dogmas being preached from above by priests and mullahs.
Yesterday, feeling disinclined to keep wearing my ‘I stand with Israel’ badge because — like many Zionists — I am now very unhappy with the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, I came across on my shelves a little but deeply inspirational book called How to Cure a Fanatic by the Israeli writer Amos Oz.
In 1998, in my friend David Trimble’s great speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (much of it written by the Irish controversialist Eoghan Harris) he drew much on Oz, who never regretted having fought for Israel in two defensive wars but reached out to the Arab tradition.
Similarly, Trimble made great efforts to understand unionism’s traditional enemies.
Oz sees the issue dividing Jews and Palestinians as fundamentally one of real estate.
Both peoples have been hounded out of other countries and, Oz believes, are “rightly claiming the same small country as their one and only national homeland in the whole world”.
The Palestinians, he explains, simply “are in Palestine because Palestine is the homeland and the only homeland of the Palestinian people… The Israeli Jews are in Israel because there is no other country in the world which the Jews, as a people, as a nation, could ever call home”.
That resonated strongly with me because although I knew from my childhood about the passion my countrymen felt for Ireland, it took immersing myself in the culture of Northern Irish Protestants to appreciate that unionists felt the same.
“The Palestinians have tried, unwillingly, to live in other Arab countries,” Oz continued. “They were rejected, sometimes even humiliated and persecuted, by the so-called ‘Arab family’. They were made aware in the most painful way of their ‘Palestinianness’, They were not wanted as Lebanese, or as Syrians, or as Egyptians, or as Iraqis.”
Ironically, “In a strange way the Jewish people, just as the Palestinian people, have had a somewhat parallel historical experience. The Jews were kicked out of Europe…just like the Palestinians were first kicked out of Palestine and then out of the Arab countries, or almost.”
Calling for tolerance, compromise and, essentially, partition, Oz said it would be very painful. “Because both peoples love the country, because both peoples, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, have equally deep, different historical and emotional roots in the country. One of the components of this tragedy, one of the aspects which has a certain irony about it, is the fact that many Israeli Jews don't recognise how deep is the Palestinian emotional connection to the land. And many Palestinians fail to recognise just how deep is the Jewish connection to the same land.”
Ring any bells?
• Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of ‘The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions’ and 'Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice’