Nobel Peacemaker Should Make Use of His Prize to Further Middle East Peace
by: Joshua Stanton on October 13th, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Though typically loath to jump into hypothetical discussions — in this case about where President Obama should donate the 1.4 million dollars he’s set to receive along with Nobel Peace Prize — I wanted to follow up on the insightful articles by Dave Belden and Valerie Elverton-Dixon to suggest that where Obama donates the funds may be nearly as important as the fact that he received the Nobel Prize at all.
Photo courtesy of newsday.com
There is a great deal of speculation about where President Obama might donate the 1.4 million dollars he will receive this December when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize. Every major charitable foundation and peace-building organization is craving the money and publicity such a donation would bring. Yet the single biggest contribution Obama could make with the funds would be to found an association to support joint Palestinian and Israeli business ventures.
As President Obama and his top negotiator, George Mitchell, meet with Palestinian leaders, they offer a combination of carrots and sticks; American diplomatic and economic support on the one hand, and the lack thereof on the other. But there is no clear set of incentives other than land that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators can offer each other. At best, they can promise an end to hostilities.
The hope of a foundation for joint Palestinian and Israeli business ventures would be to increase economic incentives for peace. Currently, Israeli firms do not seem to need Palestinian workers, and Palestinians are leery of traversing checkpoints to seek out work in Israel. Yet with current technology – namely, cell phones and the Internet – there are many fewer logistical barriers to collaborative projects. The real problem is a lack of impetus and a lack of incentive to found such projects.
If an independent foundation subsidized the cost of creating parallel branches of a firm, one in the Palestinian Territories and the other in Israel, a significant number of entrepreneurial ventures could be founded. By using Palestinian savvy to market Israeli-invented products to the Arab world, or relying on Israeli connections to market Palestinian produce in Europe, joint ventures could capitalize on the expertise of each group for the benefit of both. The potential for significant gains is there; it is only the startup energy that is lacking.
No doubt, any sort of collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians comes with potential risks, whether in the arena of diplomacy or business. Stigma for “collaborators” and the legitimate threat of violence has historically hampered the progress of would-be innovators and peacemakers. But with the funding from a new foundation – no doubt boosted by friends and donors to the President and a media blitz – significant headway could be made for Palestinians and Israelis seeking to work together. Ultimately, the successes they attain in collaborative business ventures could translate into an enduring force for peace and a tangible reason for both sides to put the ongoing conflict to rest.
President Barack Obama has brought hope to the United States and much of the world, and his latest accolade – the Nobel Peace Prize – has reaffirmed the significance of that hope. But in the Middle East, where peace is scarce and talk is rife, hope is a distant second to concrete action. If Obama backed up his words with personal funding for a Palestinian-Israeli business association, he could significantly alter the oft-touted (and lamented) “facts on the ground.” In doing so, he could live up to the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s words of praise for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
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Halleluja for this article, from your lips to God’s ears Josh–and Alhumdullilah!
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“HOPE has two children. The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it.”-St. Augustine
And Obama’s Nobel is a Mandate from Oslo!
In his congratulatory message to President Obama upon being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Israeli President Shimon Peres stated:
“Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such profound impact. You provided all of humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a Lord in heaven and believers on earth. Under your leadership, peace became a real and original agenda. And from Jerusalem, I am sure all the bells of engagement and understanding will ring again. You gave us a license to dream and act in a noble direction.” [1]
Within days of the announcement for 2009’s Nobel Peace Prize, twenty-two time nominee, Mordechai Vanunu declined the honor in a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo:
“I am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations…I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres…Peres established and developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in Israel…Peres was the man who ordered [my] kidnapping…he continues to oppose my freedom and release…WHAT I WANT IS FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM….FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW.” [2]
In 1994, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Peres were all awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for playing a part in achieving the Oslo Declaration of Principles. According to the preamble of the DOP, peace was to be based on mutual respect and reconciliation.
Alfred Nobel’s intention was to reward people with a moral backbone and he hoped to create icons and examples to humankind. Here’s hoping President Obama seizes his Nobel Prize as a mandate from Oslo and also hold Israel accountable for past sins of omission and obfuscations.
In 1963, when Vanunu was nine years old the Zionists came to his home town of Marrakech, Morocco and convinced his Orthodox father to abandon his general store and pack up the first seven of his eleven children for the land of milk and honey. Instead, the Vanunu’s were banished to the desert of Beesheva. A few months later, Shimon Peres, then Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense met with President John Kennedy, at the White House.
Kennedy told Peres, “You know that we follow very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region. This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason we monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?”
Peres replied, “I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first.”
Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, said Palestinians hope the prize “will provide an additional incentive” for Obama to keep striving for an end to the decades-old conflict while Reuven Rivlin, speaker of Israel’s parliament, called the Nobel decision “very strange.” [3]
The Nobel committee “stressed that it made its decision based on Mr. Obama’s actual efforts toward nuclear disarmament as well as American engagement with the world relying more on diplomacy and dialogue.” [4]
President Obama, is now the third sitting American president to win the award, and his peers include Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who won the Nobel for helping end the Cold War which raged from 1945 to 1991, and Nelson Mandela, who fought for the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
Instead of repenting and abolishing nuclear weapons after the terrorism inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American government upped the ante of nuclear insanity and thus bears the most responsibility for the political conflict and economic competition that ensued during those 46 years.
The apartheid regime in South Africa existed from 1948 until 1994; but it was not until the late 1980’s that the American government got on-board with the over twenty years of a global call for boycott, divestment and sanctions that finally brought that apartheid system to its knees.
The Norwegians are way ahead of US in regards to people power and human rights activism for justice in Israel Palestine.
The Norwegian government dropped the Israeli firm Elbit Systems Ltd. from the government pension fund, because regular people brought to the attention of their government Elbit’s involvement in building the Apartheid Wall in the Occupied West Bank.
“Norway’s Council of Ethics cited the 2004 International Court of Justice ruling that declared the Separation Wall to be illegal. Elbit Systems supplies essential components for the building of the Wall, including surveillance technology, and is also a manufacturer of weapons used to sustain Israel’s Occupation of Palestine… [and] because of the firm’s material support for the illegal Occupation and crimes against the Palestinian people… [and because they] supplied arms to Israel in the full knowledge that these weapons would be used against civilians in Palestine and Lebanon.” [5]
Knowledge always brings responsibility and there are no secrets on the World Wide Web!
On October 2, 2009, The Washington Times reported that “Obama agrees to keep Israel’s nukes secret [and] reaffirmed a 4-decade-old secret understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections.”
In 2005, Vanunu, told me:
“President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. Prime Minister Ben Guirion said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.”
“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection.
“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ‘69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.
“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.”
On April 5, 2009, President Obama stood on the world stage in Prague and admitted, “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act…When we fail to pursue peace, then it stays forever beyond our grasp. We know the path when we choose fear over hope. To denounce or shrug off a call for cooperation is an easy but also cowardly thing to do. That’s how wars begin. That’s where human progress ends…the voices of peace and progress must be raised together…Human destiny will be what we make of it…Words must mean something.”
Here’s hoping President Obama will courageously pursue the mandate issued from Oslo with an unrestrained audacious daring and that President Peres is ready to ease his conscience and allow Vanunu the right to leave occupied east Jerusalem.
Here’s hoping too, that together they will pursue the dream of a nuclear free world.
“HOPE has two children. The first is ANGER at the way things are. The second is COURAGE to DO SOMETHING about it.”-St. Augustine
1.http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1254861908462
2.http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1216&Itemid=218
3. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-obama-nobel-israel10-2009oct10,0,6389213.story
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/10/world/10nobel.html?th&emc=th
5. http://www.waronwant.org/news/latest-news/16659-victory-for-bds-campaign-as-arms-firm-axed
Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com
Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory”
Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”
Thank you for taking the “high road”. Perhaps if it were not for President Obama, the Nobel Committee would not have issued a “Peace” Award this year. “Aspiration” and “Inspiration” have more value than most attribute to them. One or the other can be the deciding factor of whether to give up now or take that next deep breath, that next to the last quivering step forward and forge ahead through the hopelessness. It could be the lighten rod to draw unto it similar minds and hearts who truly want to support somebody with the presence such as Obama to say, “Wait a minute. Have we tried talking to these people yet?” It could be the last hope in what seems to be more and more hopeless situations. Or ti could be even the hope of the dying, knowing their time is up, that their offspring stand a better chance at a better day ahead. What a relief to feel on one’s death bead. There is nothing that can be more demoralizing and hurtful and defeating than “hopelessness.” Ayesha K. Mustafaa, Editor, Muslim Journal newspaper