After decades of violence, in a conflict, long supposed to be beyond the hope of resolution, there is “a truly historical opportunity for a new start”.
It was the spirit of animation behind the plan that President Donald Trump launched this week to finish two years of devastating war in Gaza and bring peace to the Middle East.
But the words come from the opening page of another Plan, aimed at resolving another equally insoluble conflict: the 1998 Friday agreement of Friday, which ended three decades of sectarian murder in Northern Ireland.
Why we wrote this
The perspectives of peace in Gaza and the wider Middle East is not brilliant. But the prospects for success were not encouraging in Northern Ireland 30 years ago either. And this is not the only common factor between the two situations.
And although Mr. Trump is undoubtedly the engine of the Gaza initiative, his plan presents remarkable similarities with the peace process in Northern Ireland that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has helped to go to success.
Mr. Blair received a brief mention during the launch of the White House of the Gaza Plan. Trump said that “very good man” would be a member of his international surveillance organization guiding a transition provided to a post-Hamas government.
But much more important are the strong echoes of the Good Friday agreement in the Gaza Peace Plan at 20 points: its conception and strategy, its basic hypotheses and a number of its key details.
Mr. Trump’s plan is based on the hope that what worked in Northern Ireland will work in Gaza, and on a hypothesis above all: that the Israelis and the Palestinians are ready to accept that continuous violence will obtain none of them what they want.
The extent to which the parallel of Northern Ireland holds true will determine which of the three possible Gaza scenarios will take place in the days, weeks and months to come.
The plan could strike an early dead end. Hamas or Israel could go back, leading to an Israeli military assault renewed against Gaza with the Approval sign of Mr. Trump.
Or the first stage of the plan could be successful, an important achievement in itself.
This would imply a ceasefire, an exchange of Israeli hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, and – especially – a respite by months of catastrophic violence and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
And then there is the ultimate hope: a triumph on the scale of the Good Friday agreement, inaugurating a stable, safe and economically relaunched Gaza which opens a path to a wider Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Mr. Blair knows well the difficulties and frustrations of the manufacturing of peace in the Middle East.
As a British Prime Minister, he worked with Israeli, Palestinian and Arab leaders to try to push the region to peace. He continued these efforts after leaving Downing Street, when he became the representative of what is known as Quartet, a diplomatic group made up of America, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.
Now, however, Mr. Blair has long condemned that the lessons of Northern Ireland could break the Israeli-Palestinian Logjam and offer a wider peace of the Middle East.
Key lessons have been woven in the Gaza plan.
This is a step -by -step plan, by initially focusing on the end of violence and leaving the most thorny political questions for later.
Using the Mechanism of Good Friday, it aims to strengthen confidence regularly thanks to provisions for the versions of prisoners, the Amnesties and the placement of the weapons of Hamas “exceeded by use”, as the Ireland Agreement of the North said.
And it all depends on the strong involvement and supported by external leaders that the belligerent parties will listen to and trust.
In Northern Ireland, the fundamental question was the future political identity of the majority Protestant region – established within the framework of the United Kingdom, when Catholic Ireland has become an independent country.
Protestants from Northern Ireland were unspoken down to be part of the United Kingdom. Many Catholics wanted to join a single united Ireland. In the 1960s, the argument became violent, with paramilitaries on both sides engaged in a campaign of punishment, murders and bombing while thousands of British troops had trouble keeping order.
The Good Friday agreement set out a vision of the decentralized government, including the Protestants and the Catholics.
The main question of knowing whether Northern Ireland would remain part of Great Britain or join the Republic of Ireland has been opened, to be resolved at a future stage by popular referendum.
The key to its success was the commitment of the governments of Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. The president of the time, Bill Clinton, was deeply invested. George Mitchell, the retired American senator appointed as his Northern Ireland envoy, played an essential role as independent negotiations.
Mr. Blair and President Trump obviously hope for the key elements of the approach of Northern Ireland will prove to be reproducible in Gaza.
But they will also be aware of a key difference.
In Northern Ireland, as peace talks began, all the great political and military actors had concluded that it was in their interest to find a way to end violence.
And civilians on both sides, despite a deep and lasting distrust between the Catholic and Protestant communities, also had enough. The proof of this came in the Ireland referendum of the North required for the agreement to take effect. Eight out of 10 people voted. A resounding 71% of them voted yes.
It is something far from being obvious in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
However, it had taken 700 days in Northern Ireland to reach intense negotiations to reach such a point. When they started, and at many times along the way, success had seemed a distant perspective.
It is this harshly won transformation, above all, that the authors of the Trump plan hope to reproduce.
