The Nobel Peace Prize given to the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort thirty years ago is one of the most contentious ever, with a terrorist label applied to the winner, a jury member resigning, and a massacre taking place.
A year after the Oslo Accords were signed, on October 14, 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and Leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat received the Peace Prize.
Once a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian issue seemed finally within reach, the Nobel committee applauded “their efforts to create peace in the Middle East”.
“By concluding the Oslo Accords, and subsequently following them up, Arafat, Peres and Rabin have made substantial contributions to a historic process through which peace and cooperation can replace war and hate,” the committee said at the time.
That hope proved fleeting.
Over the following three decades, weapons continued to be fired across the Middle East, killing tens of thousands, and the region now risks descending into full-scale war as fighting rages between Israel and the Islamist movements Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by Iran.
As soon as the 1994 prize was announced, protests erupted, with the choice of laureates — especially Arafat — harshly criticised.
An hour after the announcement, one of the five members of the Nobel committee, Kare Kristiansen, co-founder of the Norwegian parliament’s Friends of Israel group, tendered his resignation.
“Arafat’s past is too tainted with violence, terrorism and bloodshed” to be worthy of a Nobel Prize, said the former Christian Democratic MP, who years later demanded an “apology” from the Nobel committee.
Even though he openly disassociated himself from terrorism, Arafat, the leader of the PLO who passed away in 2004, embodied the Palestinian resistance against Israel’s oppression by directing indiscriminate attacks.
On the day of the award ceremony, Rabin was holed up in his office with a problem that had arisen from Hamas’s capture of an Israeli soldier.
The Israeli army invaded a residence in the occupied West Bank that evening. Three Hamas militants and the raid’s senior officer were slain. The captive was discovered dead.
“I would have preferred to have the two (Israeli) men alive and not to have the Nobel Peace Prize,” Rabin said later.
He was assassinated a year later by a young Jewish extremist.
As for Peres, his participation in Ariel Sharon’s government during an Israeli offensive in the West Bank in 2002 led several Nobel committee members to publicly regret that he was awarded the Peace Prize.
Peres died in 2016.
