Through the conclusion of the Oslo Accords and its implementation, Arafat, Peres and Rabin made a “significant contribution to a historic process” in the Middle East whereby “war and hatred” could be replaced by “peace and cooperation”, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced at the time.
In keeping with the wishes of the prize’s founder, Alfred Nobel, the group acknowledged the great courage shown by leading Palestinian and Israeli politicians of the time to create new opportunities for a kind of brotherhood in the Middle East.
The prize should inspire both Israelis and Palestinians
“It is the group’s hope that this prize will be an encouragement to all Israelis and Palestinians who are committed to lasting peace in the region,” it said in Oslo. With the Oslo Accords, Rabin, Peres and Arafat wanted to lay the foundation for a two-state solution. The trio shook hands in front of the White House in Washington on September 13, 1993, in the presence of US President Bill Clinton, in a ceremonial signing just months before the Nobel Prize was awarded.
In the agreement, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) mutually recognized each other, laying the groundwork for five years of Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories. The basic goal was to create an independent Palestinian state in peaceful coexistence with Israel.
Expert: Schedule “collapsed”
However, as Jørgen Gensahagen of the Oslo peace research institute Brio told the AFP news agency, the agreement has “many structural weaknesses”. According to him, none of the main conflicts – the final demarcation of the border between Israel and the Palestinian territories, the status of East Jerusalem, the future of Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories – have been resolved.
So the Oslo accords were “not a peace treaty,” but merely a “declaration of principles,” Gensahagen said. The added timetable for the actual contract was “collapsed” by the following developments.
Controversial awards ceremony
The decision to award the Nobel Prize to all three was already considered controversial. Immediately after the decision was made in the fall of 1994, former Norwegian minister Kare Christiansen, then a member of the committee, resigned in protest at the award to Arafat.
He declared that Arafat was “not a worthy conqueror”. Arafat’s past was “marked by terror, violence and bloodshed.” Asked whether the same applies to the political and personal pasts of Peres and Rabin, two Israeli Nobel Peace Prize winners, Christianson said: “Such a comparison is completely meaningless.”
Honoring Arafat with the award discredited the award, said then-Israeli opposition leader and later longtime prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In Arafat he saw “the inventor of international terrorism”. Arafat, the PLO leader who died in 2004, was the co-founder and later leader of Fatah, the Palestinian party that has carried out numerous terrorist attacks on targets in Israel, Jordan and Lebanon.
Bloody hostages on the day of the announcement
The announcement of the Nobel Prize winners in 1994 was also overshadowed by a hostage situation: on the same day that Peres and Rabin were awarded the prize, an Israeli soldier kidnapped by the radical Islamist terrorist group Hamas was killed. At the time, the Israeli military launched a liberation effort in the occupied West Bank that killed an Israeli officer and three Hamas hostages.
A year later – on November 4, 1995 – Rabin was shot by an ultranationalist Israeli. The killer had rejected the head of government’s peace efforts with the Palestinians. At the time, Rabin’s widow accused Netanyahu of “encouraging the creation of an atmosphere of hatred.” After Rabin’s death, violence in the Middle East rose again. In 1996, Netanyahu became head of government. The climate between Israelis and Palestinians worsened.
Renewed Negotiations and the Second Intifada
In 2000, negotiations between Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and then-US President Bill Clinton to establish an independent Palestinian state ultimately failed. Arafat later supported the Second Intifada and lost influence on foreign policy.
Peres, who died in 2016, was part of Ariel Sharon’s government in the early 2000s. During their attack on the West Bank in 2002, several members of the Nobel Committee expressed regret that Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize years earlier.
There is little chance of peace
The edges will also harden in 2024: neither side is currently willing to compromise, Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm peace research institute SIPRI, told dpa. To create a peaceful coexistence, there must be basic respect for each other and leaders willing to sit at the table together and work towards peace.
“One should never say that peace is impossible,” Smith said, although he is highly skeptical that it will actually happen one day — or even in the near future — in the Middle East.
In retrospect, the peace researcher still believes that the Nobel Prize for Arafat, Peres and Rabin was justified. A major turning point occurred at that time and there was hope that the next major peace process would take place a year after the previous Nobel Peace Prize to Nelson Mandela and Frederic Willem de Klerk for ending apartheid in South Africa.
