The statesman John Hume and lessons over the Middle East
Hume was fascinated by the Middle East conflict and we would often speak of it, writes Robert Fisk
John Hume provided quite a lesson for the Middle East. If you want justice for your people, it must be fought from the inside, consistently – against all the odds – and whatever the cost. You need to tell the world of your struggle – but don’t let the world bully you afterwards. His great heroes, Mandela and Gandhi, proved this to be true. That’s why Hume was a statesman rather than a politician, alongside O’Connell and Parnell.
Hume was fascinated by the Middle East conflict and did what he could to encourage Yasser Arafat to acknowledge the state of Israel’s right to exist. Arafat did just that in Strasbourg, but he was giving too much away too quickly. Did Ireland’s only living statesman realise this? I was with him that day and Arafat was to make his statement to a closed meeting from which journalists would be excluded.
Hume batted for Fisk – Hume was a cricket player, by the way – and insisted I accompanied him to the meeting, and there I actually saw Arafat acknowledge that “Palestine” would be partitioned forever. I muttered something about Michael Collins signing his death warrant when he put his name to the Irish Treaty. Hume did not reply.
Hume knew that compromise underwrote trust, but he was a little too free in his advice to the mutually suspicious “peacemakers” of the Middle East. In November, 2000, he wrote an article in the Jerusalem Post which appeared under the words “Peace must be painstakingly rebuilt” – an Israeli journalist’s headline, of course, which assumed that there had ever been a peace between the Jews and Arabs of the old “Palestine”. But John Hume’s thesis was also flawed. The challenge facing Israelis and Palestinians, he wrote, “is not one of geographical turf, but rather the construction of agreed institutions…”
It was not. There were far too many “agreed institutions” already, withdrawal agreements, postponed retreats, vital promises that would not be made until “trust” had developed, the question of Jerusalem – and refugees and “final status” – deferred. All the while, Arafat, narcissistic and corrupt, bathed in American approbation, heedless of the warnings of his critics: that the United States was and always would be an ally of Israel – and would never insist on fairness for the Palestinians.
Some weeks later, in Derry, I called Hume and he padded down from his home above the Bogside to a restaurant in the city centre for dinner. The problem, I suggested to him, was that the Irish version of the “peace process” – the Good Friday agreement was then less than three years old – might not travel well. Because a “turf” war – two groups of people arguing over the same piece of real estate – was precisely what the Middle East conflict was about. The nearest Irish approximation to the Israeli-Arab struggle, I suggested, would be an attempt to mediate an end to violence after the 17th century dispossession of the Catholics.
Urging the Protestant landlords and the mass of impoverished Irish Catholics to construct “agreed institutions” would not have commended itself to either side. The Anglo-Scottish settlers of that age – who, like the Israelis, built their colonies on hilltops – would have no interest in talking to the newly-dispersed native Irish whose principle claim would be the return of their confiscated land. In one sense, Ireland and “Palestine” – in comparison stakes – were historically rather too close for comfort.
John Hume still saw the Middle East struggle in terms of peace rather than immediate justice – of people rather than land – and I think he could do so because for him the United States was not only a nation intrinsically friendly to Ireland – and thus inclined via its Irish American politicians to take the nation’s side against the same power it fought in the War of Independence – but one which had infinitely greater influence over the United Kingdom. Washington’s influence over Israel was much touted, but highly questionable because most Arabs suspected that Israel might have greater influence over the United States than the other way round. Indeed, in US political campaigns, American contenders often spoke as if they were standing for election to the Israeli Knesset.
Hume, however, could bring in the Americans – and later the EU – because, unlike Arafat and almost all other Arab nationalists, he was an internationalist, more at home on the Hill or in the White House – or in Brussels – than he ever was in the Westminster parliament. He would not accept the blandishments of others – which Arafat and his miserable successor Mahmoud Abbas did – and turn himself into the grateful recipient of foreign generosity. John Hume may have been a lone man singing an often cliched song – and journalists’ cruel jokes about his “single transferable speech” ill befitted a profession which often wrote single transferable stories.
But Hume was never arrogant. Which is why his greatest victory (or betrayal to unforgiving friends) was to promote Sinn Fein at the cost of his own democratically-created political party. Domestic political power was the sacrifice which had to be made for peace, to persuade the IRA to lay down their arms. We may look in vain in the Middle East for a man of John Hume’s stature. Saad Zaghloul, that fine Egyptian patriot whose statue now stares tragically down from the Nile Bridge on Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s dictatorship, might make an attractive parallel. But like Arafat, he later kowtowed to the imperialists who offered him power.
Edward Said might have been Palestine’s “John Hume”; his message, laborious, repetitive, reciting the history of his people’s injustice, and of his crushed land over and over and over again, had much in common with Hume’s persistence. But Said lived in America – he was from Palestine, so to speak, but not of Palestine. John Hume could visit his friends on the American east coast as much as he wished – but he never chose to live there. Mandela, one of Hume’s greatest heroes, did not have much choice, of course.
Twenty-seven years in prison was a true test of South African citizenship – and, like John Hume, he could finally speak for all. Gandhi could not have been more “of the people”, a combination of salt, civil rights and freedom.
But physical as well as political courage seems to be a necessity for those who can lead, at least for those from the inside. Watch again that extraordinary clip of John Hume confronting the Parachute Regiment commander on Magilligan beach in Northern Ireland on the weekend before Bloody Sunday. He realised at once that the British army was adopting a far harsher approach to unarmed civil rights demonstrators. “I felt something had changed,” he told me at our dinner in Derry. “I felt that there was this new aggression which could be unleashed.” In his evidence to the official enquiry, he said that he did not believe this would involve shooting. Fourteen dead (and unarmed) civil rights protestors proved him wrong.
The Hume family never hid from the public John’s later dementia. A friend told me he often forgot the names of friends. But when I last saw him, in Derry eleven years ago, he and his wife Pat joined a small party of us outside the city and there he was, full of joy and perfect memories, not a shadow passing his face. I was therefore not surprised to hear that in later years, as he sat in his room in Co Donegal, he reacted when he heard a conversation about Brexit. “What’s Brexit?” he asked an old party colleague – who explained to Hume what it meant. It will never happen, Hume insisted. The Irish journalist who revealed this wonderful exchange this week enjoyed the finale.
But Brexit already had happened, Hume was told. To which the great man replied: “Bloody Tories!”
So there was our John, spot on to the end.