Fourteen years ago when Northern Ireland's troubles still raged, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were involved in the Oslo Process - an attempt to agree a solution under which two separate states could co-exist peacefully.
Israeli politician Ehud Olmert visited Londonderry to attend a conference on conflict resolution and spoke of the need for both sides in the Middle East to overcome their fears.
He told me he approved of the tentative talks which were then underway.
"The most important thing is that they are taking place, no major breakthroughs, but the very fact that they still go on is very important," he said.
Now, Ehud Olmert is the prime minister of Israel and in charge of its military campaign in Lebanon.
The immediate spark for the conflict was Hezbollah's cross-border attack, killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two.
Since then, hundreds have died - the majority of them Lebanese civilians.
In recent days, Tony Blair has compared the challenges faced in the Middle East with the progress made in Northern Ireland.
'Chain reaction'
He told an audience in Los Angeles that "the purpose of terrorism - whether in Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon or Palestine - is never just the terrorist act itself".
"It is to use the act to trigger a chain reaction, to expunge any willingness to negotiate or compromise," he said.
"Unfortunately it frequently works, as we know from our own experience in Northern Ireland, though thankfully, the huge progress made in the last decade there, shows that it can also be overcome."
A few days later, again speaking about the Middle East, he added: "We have got to get a process going that has the clear underpinning of an exclusively peaceful way of providing peace.
"I have struggled long and hard over the last 10 years, as you know, in Northern Ireland for a peace process to happen there, and the only way in the end we managed to get it going was once people committed themselves to a set of principles that everyone could agree on.
"You change situations by making politics vibrant and a matter of hope for people"
"We ended up with the close management of the situation that allowed us, step by step by step, to bring people into a different place where they would talk to each other and resolve differences."
How hard will that be given the level of violence in the Middle East and the complex and intractable nature of the problem?
Some local politicians believe the international community missed an opportunity to foster the kind of compromises necessary when they did not respond more positively either to the "Cedar Revolution" against Syrian influence in Lebanon or to the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections in January.
Sinn Fein MEP Bairbre de Brun, who visited the West Bank as an international observer, says "you change situations by making politics vibrant and a matter of hope for people".
"That should have been grasped... The EU helped set up elections, then we said to the Palestinians, 'sorry you voted for somebody we didn't want you to vote for, we're not going to support you in the future'. What kind of a signal was that to send?"
"If we want a longer term solution, we have to deal with the threat posed by Hezbollah"
Irish republicans have some things in common with Israel, including an influential lobby in the United States and a history of bombing British soldiers.
But as a rule they sympathise with the Palestinian and Arab cause.
Unionists, by contrast, tend to rally to what they view as Israel's battle against terror.
Not surprisingly then, DUP MEP Jim Allister draws different lessons, pointedly describing Hezbollah as a "vile, evil terrorist organisation" which has been allowed to participate in the Lebanese government whilst holding on to its weapons.
Mr Allister describes the death of so many innocent civilians in Israeli air raids as "very regrettable", but he refuses to echo Ms De Brun's support for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire.
Instead he backs Israel's military campaign as the actions of a sovereign state defending its citizens from attack.
"If we want a longer term solution", he argues, "we have to deal with the threat posed by Hezbollah".
"Israel has to be given the chance to deal with that."
He says that even if an international force is deployed, Hezbollah "will have to be dealt with sooner or later" so it would be "better to deal with them sooner and sort the matter out".
As ever, the DUP and Sinn Fein are at loggerheads.
During our discussion on the Middle East for the Inside Politics programme, Jim Allister studiously ignored Bairbre de Brun, avoiding any conversational niceties. It was not the stuff of a polite dinner party.
However, as the residents of southern Lebanon and northern Israel will tell you, there are rather worse places to be than Northern Ireland where, these days, political deadlock spells long meetings and heated arguments rather than the death of hundreds of men, women and children.
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