Only human contact will find a solution to Israel-Hamas war, says Nigel Nelson

And the teenagers in the audience couldn’t see eye to eye either – because those from the church schools sat on one side of the hall and the Muslim youngsters on the other.

They were as far apart as it was possible to be, a swathe of empty chairs down the middle symbolising the chasm between them.

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And what we were saying from the platform was not helping as the more ill-tempered the pair of us became.

But I don’t think the students were paying us much attention, which was probably just as well in the circumstances.

We broke for lunch and the kids went off in their separate groups and I was dreading the afternoon session.

But then something quite extraordinary happened. After lunch the youngsters returned – and they all sat mixed up together.

Girls in their neatly pressed hijabs were next to boys from Christian schools in scruffy jeans . Everyone was chatting, laughing, and joking. It was as if they had all been pals for years.

What I took from this was that it’s not conflicting argument which overcomes differences so much as the opportunity for human contact. That when people are allowed to find what they like in each other – and forget what they imagined they disliked – then “peace be with you” or “as-salaam-alaikum” has real meaning.

And there was not a youngster there at the end of that day who would not have moved heaven and earth to prevent the atrocity in New York if they could.

The divisions which have opened up in this country since Hamas terrorists massacred Israelis and Israel attacked Gaza reminded me of this event. And I wonder if a similar exercise with Jewish and Muslim schools might produce the same result.

There will never be peace in the Middle East until common ground can be found and the actions of Hamas have kicked that further away than ever. Those MPs calling on Israel to agree a ceasefire at this stage are whistling in the dark.

Israel is now embarked on destroying Hamas and regime change in Gaza. Quite what that will look like when the dust settles is unclear.

But although the principle of not negotiating with terrorists must be right, accommodating the cause of it is the only way forward.

There would be no relative peace in Northern Ireland had Tony Blair not been prepared to sit down with Sinn Fein’s terrorist-in-chief Martin McGuinness to hammer out the Good Friday agreement.

That even meant the Queen shaking hands with the man who had been a top IRA commander when her beloved cousin Lord Mountbatten was murdered in 1979. McGuinness went on to become First Minister of Northern Ireland.

The British left Palestine in 1948 largely because of the activities of Jewish terror groups Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang. Stern leader Yitshak Shamir became Israeli prime minister twice, Irgun boss Menachem Begin between 1977-83.

The final straw for Britain’s mandate in Palestine came when two kidnapped British Army sergeants were hanged by Irgun in revenge for two of its members being executed.

We washed our hands of the problem and passed it to the United Nations to sort out. It opted for partition and the creation of two states with Jerusalem and the holy sites under the control of a neutral international administration, a solution the British had previously rejected as unworkable.

The Arabs were furious and started a war in which they were comprehensively defeated. Israel took 60 per cent of land set aside for Arabs and 700,000 lost their homes, still remembered today as the Nakba or “catastrophe”.

That is the historical backdrop to the circle which has been impossible to square since, and the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas has made it unlikely it will be in our lifetimes.

One day all sides will have to sit down with each other. But unlike those kids more than two decades ago, it’s going to take more than a lunch break to bring them together.