The night before Shifa Alqudsi was going to blow herself up in a bomb attack on the Israeli town of Netanya she stayed up explaining it all to her seven-year-old daughter Diana, telling her to look for a star in the sky when she wanted to speak to her.
Last week she told the story again, this time to the people she had wanted to kill, among them a soldier with a tale of how he once took part in an operation to murder Palestinians.
The encounter took place in an Irish peace centre on Donegal’s north coast. Making peace the Irish way was at the centre of a ground-breaking meeting between 15 former Palestinian militants and the same number of Israeli war veterans who had only previously met sitting under olive trees at a checkpoint on the border with the occupied West Bank.
Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister and a former Provisional IRA commander, and Billy Hutchinson, who served a life sentence for murder and membership of the Ulster Volunteer Force, before helping to negotiate the Good Friday agreement, were on hand to offer their own experiences of negotiating an end to a conflict once thought intractable.
The Palestinian-Israeli group left Ireland on Saturday after what many of those who took part described as an extraordinary journey. “I am going home a different person,” said Roni Chelben, 27, a film student and reservist in Israel’s conscript defence forces. “The most important thing was losing my fears. For so many years I couldn’t face up to the Palestinians because I felt so guilty.”
But she and her co-participants in the group Combatants for Peace know that they face hostility and criticism at home, where fraternising with “the enemy” is akin to treachery. “It’s been hard, but we are stronger now,” Rima Jawabra said. “We’re like a family: you can fall out and fight with your mother or brother, but they remain your mother and brother.”
Even close friends and family have accused them of betraying their own sides — a story familiar to the ears of Mr McGuinness and Mr Hutchinson. Mr McGuinness received a death threat from the Real IRA last week at a republican Easter commemoration in his home city, Londonderry, while fresh graffiti on its walls reminded the Palestinian-Israeli group during a day visit to the city that the Irish peace process is not yet a done deal.
Combatants for Peace was established across Israel’s massive security barrier wall by Noor Aldin Shehada, a former Fatah militant leader from Tulkarm, and Chen Alon, a reservist major who has served a prison sentence for refusing to enter the occupied territories. All the Israelis in the group have taken the same pledge, a crucial factor for the Palestinians now working alongside them, who hope that the experiences of Ireland’s paramilitaries turned politicians can show an example.
Mr Alon said that one of the turning points for him was when he was in charge of imposing a curfew during an Israeli siege of the West Bank and he refused to allow a taxi full of children to get to a hospital for treatment.
“My phone rang and it was my wife saying she had a big problem picking up our daughter from kindergarten and I said I would arrange it with my mother to get her.
“Then I look at this taxi full of children and I cannot integrate any more the feeling of being so blind to them and being so loving to my own child.” He refused to serve in the occupied territories, a decision soon taken by hundreds of other soldiers.
Mr McGuinness has travelled widely, imparting the lessons of the Irish peace process to Sri Lanka and Baghdad, Finland, the Basque Country and to Washington. Last week he was on home ground when he told the group that in the early 1990s the IRA realised that it could not defeat the British Army. “We had a responsibility to challenge ourselves to find a way to break the vicious cycle of conflict and bring our political opponents into an inclusive negotiation,” he said.
His message to the Israeli Government, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, he said, carried a note of urgency. “You have a duty to negotiate. Whether you leave it for another 10 or 20 or 50 years, you will end up having to, so do it now and save lives.”
Mr Hutchinson told how he received 32 death threats — most of them from within his own loyalist community — as he led the UVF out of violence. “It is easy for us all to justify what we did but it is more difficult to recognise the position of others,” he said. “The thing that cemented the process for me was that republicans were on a parallel road.”
Paddy Logue, co-ordinator at An Teach Ban — the White House — in Downings, where the group gathered, said: “It has been extremely difficult and very emotional, they fly off the handle, but they all keep saying ‘the ground is solid’. One of the really encouraging signs was how they all decided to share out the rooms with an Israeli and a Palestinian sleeping in each.”
Shifa Alqudsi would not have been in Ireland but for an informer who gave her away hours before she was to carry out her suicide attack. She spent six years in an Israeli jail, but she said it was only last week that she realised that not all Israelis are her enemies.
“It made me angry when I heard the Israeli soldier describe how he and his comrades killed 15 Palestinians in cold blood, but what helped me was that he showed his regret and has decided to take a different road. I will go home and tell my family that I worked hard with Israelis who reject the occupation of Palestine and we all accepted that violence is not the way forward.”
The way forward
— Combatants for Peace no longer believe that the conflict can be resolved through violence
— We believe that the bloodbath will not end unless we act together to terminate the occupation and stop all forms of violence
— We call for the establishment of a Palestinian State, alongside the State of Israel. The two states can exist in peace and security one by the other
— We will use only non-violent means to achieve our goals and call for both societies to end violence
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