December 10, 2004, marks the tenth anniversary of two remarkably contrasting but connected events. On December 10, 1994, in Oslo, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres, and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat. And on the same night, in Jerusalem, Kaare Kristiansen was honored for his decision to resign from the Nobel Committee in protest of its selection of Arafat.
The latter event, sponsored by the Roth family of Jerusalem, was organized by Danny Eisen of the International Coalition of Missing Israeli Soldiers (ICMIS), James Oppenheim and Rabbi Shlomo Gestetner. Aryeh Gallin, on behalf of the ICMIS, accompanied Mr. Kristiansen throughout his stay in Israel.
Kaare Kristiansen, who received worldwide prominence for his decision to resign from the Nobel Committee, is a distinguished Norwegian elder statesman. He has served as leader of Norway’s Christian Democratic Party, minister of Oil and Energy, speaker of the Odelsting, the Norwegian House of Commons, and chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs.
Addressing an overflow crowd of thousands in a huge ballroom in Jerusalem’s Renaissance Hotel, Mr. Kristiansen explained that the decision of the Nobel Committee had to be viewed against the backdrop of the signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993. That agreement – also known as the Oslo Accords – had been negotiated in Norway between Israeli and Palestinian representatives during the preceding months. It constituted a source of pride for Norwegians and it was only natural for the panel, whose members are local political figures, to give preference in their selection process to Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
But the Nobel Committee’s five members, who represented a wide gamut of the political spectrum, faced a dilemma when confronted with the prospect of bestowing the honor of Nobel peace laureate upon Arafat in view of his terrorist record, which included among other things involvement in and incitement of airplane hijackings, the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, the slaying of schoolchildren in Maalot in 1974 and the massacre of Jewish worshippers in an Istanbul synagogue in 1986.
Even during the “Oslo peace process,” Palestinian terrorism continued. From September 13, 1993, through December 10, 1994, 92 people died in 47 separate Palestinian terrorist attacks, the most destructive of which was the suicide bombing attack on the No. 5 bus on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv in October, 1994, killing 21 Israelis and one Dutch national (Statistics supplied by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
Mr. Kristiansen related that in his opinion, his four colleagues on the committee justified the choice of Arafat – despite his terrorist past – on the grounds that it could serve as a catalyst for the future peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. According to this reasoning, granting the prize to Arafat would be an “asset for the peace process,” a type of incentive for good behavior.
Mr. Kristiansen told the audience that the four committee members, in overlooking Arafat’s terrorist record, were going beyond the criterion stipulated in Alfred Nobel’s will that the peace prize be bestowed upon “the person who shall have done the most or best work for fraternity between nations,” hardly a characterization that could be applied to the Palestinian leader. Mr. Kristiansen recounted that a Nobel Committee chairman had once listed the categories into which peace laureates could be classified: statesmen negotiating agreements, defenders of human rights, interpreters of international law, rebels, humanists, pragmatists and dreamers. He brought the house down with the observation that “even under such a vast definition, there was no room for terrorists…until now!”
