Real people helping to foster peace
Interview: Travels through the Middle East
The question of achieving peace in regions ravaged by war is one which is usually considered in purely political terms. But can ordinary - and specifically, young – people have a real and positive impact on conflict and help foster peace? The Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation is a Co. Wicklow-based non-profit, non-governmental organization which believes that, through facilitating dialogues and shared experience, they can do just that.
Last January, the centre organised a trip to the Middle East for a group of young people from Northern Ireland and Palestine which included visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank. SpunOut.ie’s own Paddy Duffy was part of the team that travelled to the embattled region.
“Active citizenship through peace was the original concept, but then it became very much about how do you maintain hope and get people involved in situations of conflict,” explained Paddy. “It was very good to get the perspectives of the Palestinian people there and a lot of them had some tremendous stories to tell”.
Paddy recounted one such story which highlighted just how dire the humanitarian situation was for some of the Palestinians living in the historic Old City area of Jerusalem.
“About two days into the trip we were brought to this meeting on the outskirts of town. Basically, it was in a halting site, you’d see caravans in here. This old woman in her sixties had been there for the past few weeks because she had been forcibly removed from her house by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces). Her husband, though, took a heart attack on the doorstep of his house. An ambulance was called but wasn’t let into the scene by the IDF for a long time. He eventually made it to hospital, but took three more heart-attacks in three weeks and died at the beginning of December. She blames, in no small way, the involvement of the soldiers that night.”
Israel maintains extremely tight security throughout much of the region with numerous checkpoints, which Israel says lessen the threat of Palestinian suicide bombers. For Paddy, travelling from Jerusalem to the West Bank was a particularly daunting process.
“You are really treated like cattle when you go through there,” he said. “It is kind of metal girders and turnstiles and very, very thin. I’m not exactly a heavy-set fellow, but I had to take a deep breath going through. I would have a bit of experience with check-points from growing up on the border [to Northern Ireland] but I’ve never seen anything at the level of hostility that I saw there.”
But given that the elected Palestinian government, Hamas, lists the destruction of the state of Israel among its aims, are such security measures really that unreasonable?
Paddy believes that Israel’s actions are far from justifiable. “They are doing nobody any favours by what they have done in Gaza. It is only going to serve to galvanise the people they are trying to resist.”
Read Part two of the interview here.
By: John Power
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