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Non-Utopian Peace in Northern Ireland
(Fathom-BICOM) Tirza Kelman - In the 1990s people would wax lyrical about "a new Middle East" and "eating humus in Damascus." The rhetoric and reality in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is very different. While touring the city on a Sunday, we learned that even 20 years after what is considered to be a successful peace agreement, some gates within the so-called "peace lines" (which are physical barriers) are locked on Sundays. When we questioned our hosts about the need for large walls in the middle of neighborhoods, they explained that barriers make people feel safer, and that people throwing stones (from both sides) can happen as often as once a week. In their eyes, none of this contradicted peace. The writer is a graduate student in the Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University.