History Has a Long Memory

“I used to joke that there were no good days left on the calendar. I now say it without humor. Every date is filled with what one people consider an atrocity committed by the other. Every discussion/debate/argument is framed by what happened in (pick a year). There is no end to the history invoked.”

Those words, from my first AJT column, published in February 2015, were written about Israel and the Palestinians, but they apply to Northern Ireland, as well.

The Rev. Gary Mason grew up in Belfast during “The Troubles” — three decades of sectarian violence with nationalist overtones that plagued Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998, involving Catholic and Protestant militias, and British troops and security forces.

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Speaking at Congregation Shearith Israel, he traced the origin of the hostilities back to the Battle of Boyne in 1690. History has a long memory.

Mason rejected the messages of hate that marked his upbringing and invested his Methodist ministry in efforts to end the conflict, finally achieved with the 1998 signing of the “Good Friday Agreement.”

In those three decades, 3,720 people were killed and more than 47,500 injured, the casualties of 16,000 bombings and nearly 37,000 shootings.

An end to “The Troubles” was negotiated when the combatants decided that the status quo could not be maintained and that this was not the legacy they wanted to bequeath to their children and grandchildren, Mason said.

A piece of paper — the product of two years of intense negotiations, aided by the United States — could not ease the grief, nor change competing narratives of history, but it largely stopped the killing and, in that context, was a blessing.

The umbrella for Mason’s work today is “Rethinking Conflict,” a conflict transformation organization that he founded a decade ago. In addition to being an adjunct professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University since 2015, Mason maintains relationships with the Carter Center and the King Center, and has preached at numerous area churches.

From his base in Belfast, Mason travels thousands of miles annually, sharing his experience with “The Troubles” and the “Good Friday Agreement” with those living in conflicts elsewhere.

Mason, who does not wear rose-colored glasses, told the Shearith Israel audience, “This is not a blueprint for the Middle East,” but there were “things we got right and wrong that may have applicability.”

“Does the G-d of Abraham want his disciples to kill each other?” he asked.

“People have hated in the name of the G-d of love. People have killed in the name of the G-d of life.”

[Yes, I listened to a lot of U2 while writing this column.]

“Most conflicts invariably involve land, identity, and religion,” Mason said. That was true in Northern Ireland. It is true between Israel and the Palestinians.

In both conflicts, history and memory were weaponized, becoming a cudgel more than a guidepost. “Memory becomes a form of resistance” — resistance to compromise, to change, to a future different than the past and the present, Mason said.

Even as details of the “Good Friday Agreement” were implemented, something was missing. “We still don’t have the framework for how to deal with the past,” he said.

Murals on walls in Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast are intended to make sure no one forgets. “The tales of what the other side did to us,” Mason observed. “Never what we did to them.”

Mason cautioned that addressing the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a technical problem is “a strategy that fails to address grievances, beliefs, and ideology that characterize the Middle East.”

One lesson learned in Northern Ireland was that “If you’re going to have a peace process, you have to bring in your extremists,” said Mason, who hosts Israeli and Palestinian delegations to expose them to what is possible. “Negotiating with your enemy is sometimes easier than negotiating with your tribe.”

He introduces young (20s and 30s) Israelis and Palestinians to British and Irish activists of that age cohort, to “empower them not to make the same mistakes” as their elders.

If you had bet during the 1980s which of three seemingly intransigent conflicts — Israel and the Palestinians, apartheid in South Africa, and “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland — would remain four decades later, it would have been the latter, Mason said.

Israelis and Palestinians say, “we can’t trust each other,” but “You can’t keep using trust as a reason for not beginning the process,” he said, explaining that in Northern Ireland it took several years to build a base of trust on which to begin negotiations.

That process cannot begin under the present circumstances. In a time of war, just “trying to maintain relationships is an act of dignity,” he said.

The headline on that first AJT column read “Not in My Lifetime.” Near the end I wrote: “With each passing generation, the timeline for peace — even as its definition is debated — moves further out. Today’s children have been fated by history to an adversarial relationship. A generation not yet born will have to find a way out.”

I still feel that way, unfortunately.