Thirty years on: Nobel Peace Prize hopes for Mideast shattered by decades of conflict

OSLO, Oct 4 — Of all Nobel Peace Prizes, the one awarded 30 years ago to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is among the most controversial, featuring a laureate branded a terrorist, a jury member’s resignation and a bloodbath.

On October 14, 1994, a year after the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Peace Prize was awarded to Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation; Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister; and his foreign minister Shimon Peres.

The Nobel committee hailed “their efforts to create peace in the Middle East”, after a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeared finally within reach.

“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.

As head of the PLO, Arafat, who died in 2004, personified the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation, ordering indiscriminate attacks even though he publicly distanced himself from terrorism.

The day of the prize’s announcement, Rabin was hunkered down in his office dealing with a crisis sparked by Hamas’s seizure of an Israeli soldier as hostage.

That evening, the Israeli army raided a house in the occupied West Bank. The officer leading the raid was killed, as were three Hamas militants. The hostage was found 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.

Elusive peace

The Oslo Accords were hammered out in secret in the Norwegian capital and signed by Arafat and Rabin on September 13, 1993, sealed with a historic handshake in front of US President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn.

The accords agreed on the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO, and laid the foundation for five years of Palestinian self-governance, with the implicit aim of creating an independent state.

But the deal had “a number of structural weaknesses”, said Jorgen Jensehaugen, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo.

None of the major sticking points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — agreement on definitive Israeli and Palestinian borders, the fate of East Jerusalem, the future of Palestinian refugees, or the issue of Israeli settlements — were settled in the accords.

“The Oslo Accords are not peace accords,” Jensehaugen said at a recent seminar.

They are “a declaration of principles... and a timeline” designed to “lead to a peace deal”, but they “collapsed” in the wake of developments in the region, he said.

They included Rabin’s assassination in 1995, followed by the ascent to power in 1996 of Benjamin Netanyahu — an opponent of the peace process — and a series of Hamas suicide attacks.

And in what could be an allegory for the peace that seems to elude the Middle East, Geir Lundestad, the Nobel Institute head at the time, recalled that just before the award banquet in Oslo, he found Arafat and “a large part of the PLO leadership” engrossed in an episode of “Tom and Jerry” — a cartoon featuring a cat who fails to catch the mouse every time. — AFP