Leo's confusion arises because he assumes that ethnic antagonisms come first and the political process responds to them afterwards. That's why he can assume that the political process is simply trying to solve the already extant ethnic conflict.
But as a rule ethnic conflicts only persist where there is something to fight for. In both Israel and Ulster, sponsor nations (the US and the UK respectively) fostered the supremacist groups, through financial, military, political and diplomatic support.
If Israel had not been economically subsidised and diplomatically supported Zionism would have petered out after the war, like all the other attempts to create a Jewish state in Argentina or Uganda.
Similarly, the Protestants of Ulster were not necessarily driven by sectarian hatred. On the contrary, the British government spent vast amounts of money subsidising the employment of nearly a quarter of them in the sectarian security forces. The Loyalists' meek acceptance of power-sharing with Sinn Fein indicates that it is the UK that is pulling the strings.
The problem with the so-called peace-processes is that both grant political recognition to the populations only as representatives of their competing ethnicities. Consequently they tend to exacerbate ethnic conflict rather than healing it.
In Palestine, this has become explicit, as the Israeli's have assumed that it is all-or-nothing and adopted a strategy of not another inch.
In northern Ireland it is less obvious, but in fact the ethnic division of the province is more explicit now than it was ten years ago. Nobody has driven the protestants into the sea, but they have all moved out the towns into the suburbs to put more distance between them and the nationalists. While paramilitary operations on the Republican side have been reduced to 'police operations' against dissidents, spontaneous sectarian attacks on Catholics and Protestants have carried on.
Leo writes
>>The peace process worked "badly" for the Irish??? No doubt, we should load
>>all of the Protestants onto boats and send them back to Scotland and
>>England, because their ancestors only arrived in the north of Ireland three
>>centuries ago. No doubt, we should go on with endless rounds of sectarian
>>violence, along the lines of throwing bombs at children going to school, as
>>we saw in the last week, until the settlers leave. No doubt, killing each
>>other because we are Catholics or Protestants, Jews or Moslems, is far
>>preferable to a solution where we recognize that neither of us is going to
>>disappear, or be driven, into the sea, and that we must figure out how to
>>live in peace.
-- James Heartfield