There is no such thing as an international conflict that cannot be ended, the US Senator George Mitchell has told an audience in Dublin.
Comparing current pessimism in the Middle East with the situation in Northern Ireland during the peace talks he chaired, Sen Mitchell pointed out that there had been little or no progress in Belfast until "the very end" of two years of negotiations. "In a real sense, we had 700 days of failure and one day of success."
During the final months there was also a surge of sectarian violence, in which nationalist and unionist leaders were under pressure from their constituencies to walk away from the table, and when they knew that "their political futures, even their lives, were on the line", he added.
Addressing a Royal Irish Academy conference entitled: "A Good Friday Agreement for Kashmir and Palestine?" Sen Mitchell said the violence of the past two years meant that any new peace plan for Palestine would have to come from outside.
"It can't be developed by the parties themselves. Their mutual mistrust is total. The culture of peace, so carefully nurtured over the previous decade, has been shattered. In its place there is a sense of futility and despair, of the inevitability of conflict."
If the two sides were to succeed in reaching a settlement, they would have to "give up some of their illusions", he added.
Some Palestinians continued to believe they could destroy Israel and rid the Middle East of a Jewish state. "That cannot and will not happen. It is a fantasy that will only generate more misery and suffering on both sides."
Equally, some Israelis believed that all Palestinians could be physically uprooted and moved to another country. "That cannot and will not happen. It, too, is a fantasy."
Palestinians wanted a state, while Israelis had a state and wanted security, he said. "I believe that neither can attain its objective by denying to the other its objective."
Other speakers at the conference included Dr Radha Kumar, of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, who has studied partition-related conflict in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Palestine and Cyprus. She was pessimistic about prospects for peace in Kashmir.
By contrast with Northern Ireland, she said, even the idea of containment of violence was "alien" to all parties in the Kashmiri conflict. There was no consensus yet, even that the violence must end.
Where civil society had played an important role in Northern Ireland by showing politicians and paramilitaries there was a desire on the ground for peace, this was currently impossible in Kashmir.
