Peace Media - How the UK's Guardian led peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians

Peace Media - How the UK's Guardian led peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians

It's the job of the press to report on wars in far flung parts of the globe and there's been no shortage of conflicts to cover in recent years, from the Gulf War to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan.

What is less obviously the role of the media is to engage in the business of peace making. But two recent collaborations organised by the UK's Guardian newspaper involving senior figures from the Middle East show how journalists, many of whom have seen the human cost of war at first hand, can turn their pens towards an altogether greater end-game.

The Guardian hosted a Middle East Dialogue where they brought together senior Israeli and Palestinian politicians including Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who was a former head of the Israeli army and Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior figure in the Palestinian Authority. Formerly soldier's at war they came face-to-face in pursuit of peace.

They were joined by the four lead negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement: Martin McGuinness from Sinn Fin, Sir Reg Empey from the Ulster Unionist Party, David Ervine, a former Loyalist paramilitary and Mark Durkan, the leader of the SDLP. It turned out that the peacemakers of Israel and Palestine had never been exposed to the story of Northern Ireland which, for its all imperfections, was one of the world's most successful peace processes.

One of the participants observed that the sight of seeing the key figures of the Good Friday Agreement - walking together, talking to each other, there was even humour between them - brought home to the Middle East politicians the realities of what peace could bring to them too.

At one point, Irvine quipped to McGuinness, Ten years ago he and I were trying to kill each other'. And now they were talking about peace to Israelis and Palestinian politicians.

This encounter led the Guardian, this time backed by the Portland Trust a Middle East economic development initiative led by Jonathan Kestenbaum, a leading peace activist who used to reside in Israel and Sir Ronald Cohen, the millionaire Egyptian-born private equity investor - to bring another group of influential yet polarised individuals together in London Palestinian and Israeli editors of the main national papers and broadcast outlets. At the heart of this dialogue was once again Northern Ireland. But the inspiration this time around was not aroused by politicians but by the Northern Ireland press.

People may not remember that during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, even sending a camera crew to cover the troubles risked inflaming the situation - the very presence of broadcasting from the scene could have stirred more strife.

Yet here in London was Noel Doran, the editor of the Irish News, a nationalist paper and Ciaran McKeown, the political editor of the Belfast News Letter, a Unionist paper. The two men sat together and explained an initiative that they had put together in the 1990s before the Good Friday Agreement.

They had a simple idea to ask their respective readers to Call this number if you say yes to peace'. In and of itself this may not seem so impressive except that it was carried in both papers - one a nationalist paper speaking mainly to Catholics and the other a Unionist paper speaking mainly to Protestants. Two papers on opposite sides of the divide ran the same half-page notice. 150,000 people responded - a tenth of the population. It was a basic statement but it had an effect. They then joined forces for one further significant act: They published identical editorials on the same day calling for peace. They'd worked together, sharing drafts and agreeing the final text. Editors preparing the ink for the Good Friday Agreement itself.

Jonathan Freedland from the Guardian, who participated in the talks said that having the editors from Northern Ireland allowed the Israeli and Palestinian editors to come off the level of the abstract and the academic and became very real'. He reports one Israeli editor saying, I am a Zionist, I am an Israeli and if this conflict has to have a winner, I want Israel to win. I am not going to pretend that this paper is neutral.' Another said We are not neutral in this conflict, we live here, this is our life.' Another Israeli editor said that it was important for his readers to know what daily life was like for Palestinians and that he would send out correspondents to report the daily brutalities of life under the Israeli occupation.

But the Palestinian Editors also spoke of their daily, practical obstacles they needed to overcome to publish their newspapers. One editor talked about the realities of carrying out his job whilst under occupation: where a curfew means that nobody can leave the building they are in, how he and his team had to work for a week in their office sleeping under their desks. And then when it came to distribute the paper, all the roads were blocked by Israel army checkpoints. In the end they resorted to two methods - one of them was to put loads of newspapers on the backs of donkeys and send them on their way and the other was to pay Jewish settlers to carry copies of the newspapers on the roads that Palestinians were not allowed to travel.

It would be reckless of course to make direct comparisons between the conflict in Northern Ireland and in the Middle East. To add to the many layers of complexity in the Middle East, the Israeli and Palestinian media literally speak different languages and have very different cultures and way of life.

The Middle East editors didn't leave London as friends. But they left having gained insight into the lives of people who were just like them in the same jobs and working for the same end cause.

A number of articles about the two-day dialogue have been written. One editor even kept a diary of the visit. They are remarkably similar in observation and in aspiration and show more than just a hint of people caught on opposite sides of a historical conflict that at times seems insurmountable. It will be interesting to see if the editors will collaborate with each other on their return home, indeed, if they will keep in touch at all. But more important, the editors left London understanding the huge responsibility that they can carry should they chose to exercise it.

In Amman, Jordan, a team of Israeli and a team of Palestinian senior politicians announced a peace agreement - a line-by-line detailed final status agreement dealing with every one of the outstanding issues between them. From Jerusalem to refugees to territory to the settlements, the Geneva Accords' as they are known are the final stage of a peace process sponsored by the Swiss government. The architects of the accord are the very same people who participated in the Guardian Middle East Dialogue earlier. Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo stood side by side in Amman, Jordan to present the Geneva Accords.

We know journalists are influential mouthpieces for the rest of the nation. We can articulate the feelings of our fellow men and women and we can publicly air them. Sure, people often disagree with us but we carry considerable power. The power to sway the masses towards opinions, ideologies and national causes. But we can also be something much bigger: As the Guardian have proved we can be the architects of peace making itself.

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