Looking Back

James Fallows notes the historically solid track-record of the Nobel Peace Prize:

There are a few choices that look fishy in retrospect. (Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973??? Arafat as co-winner with Peres and Rabin in 1994?) But the great majority stand up very well. Desmond Tutu, and then Mandela and deKlerk. Albert Schweitzer. George C. Marshall. Lech Walesa, Willy Brandt, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Norwegian Nobel Institute has earned the benefit of the doubt for choosing people whose achievements will stand up over time.

I don't really know what the state of play was in 1973, but even though the '94 Nobel looks bad in retrospect, it doesn't seem like that bad a mistake. Rabin was murdered, Peres lost the election, we had the bad faith of the Netanyahu years, and then Arafat walked away from the table in 2000 but that sequence of events wasn't inevitable; rather, Israel-Palestine in the 1990s brought forward several good candidates for the hypothetical war prize for scuttling a once-promising peace process.

Comments

What must really be galling the wingnuts is the fact that an historical consensus is forming, in which their guy (Bush) is looking very bad, and their guy's bête noir (Gore) is looking very good. They can rant and rail against it, but it's congealing, and once in place, this consensus will define the way their whole movement will be seen for the rest of time.

A counterexample to the notion that victors get to write history.

Posted by jimBOB | October 14, 2007 12:28 PM

Arafat didn't walk away from the peace table in 2000. He didn't accept the Clinton parameters without reservations in December 2000/January 2001 (neither did the Israelis) and can be faulted there, though I would fault Sharon and the Bush Administration more for acting as if, having come that close to a reasonable peace agreement, such terms could never be offered again.

Shlomo Ben Ami, one of Barak's negotiators, said that if he were a Palestinian he'd have rejected the summer 2000 Camp David offer, which ought to lay to rest the notion that it was "generous". He goes on to say that in his opinion, Arafat wasn't capable of agreeing to anything, which is fair enough. Maybe he's right, but that doesn't mean we have to keep repeating falsehoods about who did what in 2000.

By the way, was Rabin (break their bones Rabin during the first Intifada) or Peres (bomb them at Qana in 1996) any more worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize than Arafat? I'd say not.

I forget if you need to do the html stuff for a link here, so I'll just paste the address to the Shlomo Ben Ami interview--

http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl?issue=20060214

Posted by Donald Johnson | October 14, 2007 12:48 PM

Correction--I should have said Arafat did "walk away" from a bad offer in the summer of 2000. The implication of merely saying he walked away is that there was a generous offer on the table that he should have accepted. There wasn't. The accusation has more weight if it was limited to what happened in January 2001 at Taba, but even then it lets the Israelis off the hook, since Sharon is a moral agent and could have said "We'll offer something along the lines of Taba anytime you're reasonable enough to accept it."

It isn't true, however, that the Palestinians gave up on peace talks in the summer of 2000. Negotiations continued. If you read Charles Enderlin's account or Clayton Swisher's, what happened was that the Palestinians wanted to emphasize how much progress had been made, while the Israelis and the Clinton Administration decided to blame Arafat for not accepting a deal that Shlomo Ben Ami now agrees was a bad one.

Posted by Donald Johnson | October 14, 2007 12:56 PM

I think it's unclear whether Arafat would have rejected a 2000-style agreement if Rabin had lived.

But I still would have given Arafat the prize, even if he didn't really want peace for its own sake. If you give someone a Nobel Peace Prize for peace negotiations, you have to give the other side the prize too.

It's also the case that subsequent events in Israel-Palestine were far, far worse than anyone in 1994 probably imagined.

Posted by Mr. Noah | October 14, 2007 12:58 PM

All the examples Fallows cites were honored for work that had a pretty direct connection to promoting peace. Al Gore's work, by contrast, promotes awareness of and political action on climate change.

In light of that, I'm not even sure how the Nobel committee's opinion is even potentially falsifiable, unless Gore is elected president and unleashes the climate wars.

What people have been pointing out, and what is a bit bizarre, is the association of Gore's work with promoting peace. It seems like they just wanted to give Gore the biggest prize they had.

Posted by southpaw | October 14, 2007 1:19 PM

Upon reflection, I should have said, Fallows examples have a direct connection to promoting peace or the liberation of violently oppressed populations. I think my central point still stands up pretty well, though.

Posted by southpaw | October 14, 2007 1:48 PM

Looking forward, the WSJ suggests some candidates for next year, men and women who "put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression."

Posted by Fred | October 14, 2007 1:54 PM

What people have been pointing out, and what is a bit bizarre, is the association of Gore's work with promoting peace.

See, it's really not bizarre at all, if you consider the fact that many wars (especially in Africa) are are already fought over resources and that climate change combined with population growth will increasingly disrupt people's access to resources, thus creating the potential for even more conflicts.

Posted by novakant | October 14, 2007 2:15 PM

"Looking forward, the WSJ suggests some candidates for next year, men and women who "put their own lives and livelihoods at risk by working to rid the world of violence and oppression."

Posted by Fred | October 14, 2007 1:54 PM"

So basically you're saying that no American leader or influential American should ever win the Nobel Peace Prize again. That's rather cosmopolitan of you. Kudos.

Posted by Reality Man | October 14, 2007 2:15 PM

The idea that there was ever a serious offer put forward at Camp David or Taba by the Israelis is one of the great myths of the conflict. It is undone, of course, by the fact that the concessions that were supposedly offered by Israel have never been offered since. Why on earth would the Israelis offer these things and then say "Sorry, that was then, this is now?" If a contiguous state was on the table then, put it on the table now. If border control, access to potable water, removal of intra-territory checkpoints, and meaningful political sovereignty on the table then, why aren't they now?

The truth is, we again see that the Palestinians labor under a burden that the Israelis simply don't. When Palestinians reject Israeli demands, they are obstructionists who are not seriously committed to peace. But when the Israelis reject Palestinian demands, they are ensuring their security.

Posted by Freddie | October 14, 2007 2:55 PM

Why on earth would the Israelis offer these things and then say "Sorry, that was then, this is now?" - Freddie

I got a flyer in the mail a few months ago. They were offering left-handed smoke shifters for $0.03 a smoke shifter. I went to the store that sent the flyer yesterday and left-handed smoke shifters were selling for $2.00 each. I said "surely cost increases haven't been so high that the price has gone up from $0.03 to $2.00 ... how come I can't get the promotional deal you promised in your flyer for the month the flyer was sent?" The responded -- "Sorry, that was then, this is now?"

See how it works?

It's called bargaining -- sometimes you offer "one time deals".

*

The fact of the matter -- and the problem with the Israel/Palestinian conflict -- is that for either side to even go to the negotiating table is a huge compromise in and of itself. Most lefty moonbat types are perfectly aware of how it's a huge compromise for the Palestinian side -- they had to already "give up" a huge chunk of land for Israel to exist in the first place: even acknowledging the existance of Israel is a huge compromise.

However, take some time to listen to some Zionist propaganda sometime and understand where the Zionist side is coming from (and if you cannot manage to do that, how dare you call your un-empathetic self a liberal? you should then get your head examined.): given the world's reaction to the Jews, why shouldn't we have our own homeland? And where else would you put it? So, some Palestinians were removed from their homes in 1947/1948 ... that was unusual for the time, how? And so Israel ended up occupying territories after the 1967 war ... if any nation had troops massing against its borders threatening to invade, struck pre-emptively and won, wouldn't they keep the land too?

From the Israeli point of view, no less than from the Palestinian point of view, there is no particular reason to even negotiate! Why shouldn't Hebron be in Israel? Etc ...

For either side to even negotiate ... that's all they should have to reasonably give up (and btw ... the real issue, c.f. Gore winning the peace prize, is water). See the rub?

Posted by DAS | October 14, 2007 4:02 PM

"given the world's reaction to the Jews, why shouldn't we have our own homeland? And where else would you put it? So, some Palestinians were removed from their homes in 1947/1948 ... that was unusual for the time, how? And so Israel ended up occupying territories after the 1967 war ... if any nation had troops massing against its borders threatening to invade, struck pre-emptively and won, wouldn't they keep the land too?"

I think there should be a Zionist state, but it could have easily been the people who had actually perpetrated the Holocaust who could have been forced from their homes instead to create a Zionist state. Zionist intellectuals were not always wedded to putting it in what was then the Mandate of Palestine. Late 19th-century Zionist thinkers, for instance, argued that the US should invade what is now Ghana, kick out the locals and create a Zionist state there. The reason why European nations helped to put the Zionist state in the Middle East was as a convenient way to kick Jews out of their own countries or have them leave voluntarily, either way leaving their countries with no Jews. The Zionist state is located where it is in part because of anti-Semitism. Why should the Zionist state be located where Israel was thousands of years ago? Because the Bible says so? Native Americans have suffered as European Jews have and have had their culture destroyed to an even greater extent. Should we deport everyone from Manhattan and give it back? When you say, "that was unusual for the time, how?" you leave the door open to justify any atrocity you want at any time. Hell, a Holocaust apologist could point out that the Holocaust occurred not too long after genocides in the Belgian Congo, the Philippines, against the Herrero and the Armenians, etc.

The problem is that the Zionist elite (as opposed to the majority of Israeli Jews who were local Middle Easterners who were deported to Israel after the war) shared similar Orientalist views of the vast brown Other as their Christian European counterparts. The racist structure of European imperialism was starting to unravel (the US gave independence to the Philippines, India gained independence, etc.), yet the founders of Israeli ignored this trend. European thought, including Zionism, treated the peoples of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America as a vast brown, black and yellow tabula rasa onto which European will could be projected. This is why countries like India, which have historically been anti-anti-Semitic and safe for the local Jewish populations (with the exception of the Portuguese Catholic colony of Goa) have been very critical of Israeli policies for the past half-century (ironically, the political allies in India of those who self-consciously take their cues from fascism have been the most pro-Israeli because they see Israel as an ally in killing off Muslims). Whether the perpetrator is a European Christian or a European Jew, European-style colonialism is still colonialism.

"From the Israeli point of view, no less than from the Palestinian point of view, there is no particular reason to even negotiate! Why shouldn't Hebron be in Israel?"

Between things like the Rape of Nanjing and the testing of biological weapons on human subjects in Harbin, the Chinese people suffered greatly during WWII. By this logic, why shouldn't Tibet be in China and what was wrong with Mao's ethnic cleansing policy of moving Han Chinese into Tibet to destroy Tibetans claim to their own land and nation? Also, the Occupation is actually unpopular among Israelis. They don't want some idiotic vision of Greater Israel leading to deaths. However, the right wing and the treasonous settler movement have outsized influence in Israel relative to their numbers because of the odd structure of Israeli domestic politics. When you give "the Israeli view," be sure to actually do that instead of just giving Likud talking points.

Posted by Reality Man | October 14, 2007 5:00 PM

"It's called bargaining -- sometimes you offer "one time deals"."

This would only make sense if all land controlled by Israel was going to have an overall Jewish majority into the far future. The Palestinian Territories have the world's highest population growth. In about a generation, the majority of people subject to Jerusalem will be a majority of non-Jewish Arabs. At that point, Israel will have to either choose between democracy and thus the end of Zionism or Zionism and thus the end of Israeli democracy and the official start of Israel as an apartheid state. Under such conditions, offering the Palestinians a one-time deal is insanity.

Posted by Reality Man | October 14, 2007 5:09 PM

The Pentagon is developing plans for the unrest and strife that AGW is expected to produce. Drought and crop failures have a way of producing strife and unrest.

If you have a Fireman Prize, it's peculiarly narrow-minded to object to a prize for someone who advocates building fire-proof houses.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | October 14, 2007 6:18 PM

Arafat accepted the Arab League Peace Plan (then the Saudi Peace Plan) in 2002. Accepting 22% of Palestine (ie the 67 borders) as opposed to roughly half as in the UN 1947 partition plan (see map in Jimmy Carter's book "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" p. xiii) was indeed generous on Arafat's part. If the US Israel Lobby and Israel had accepted peace then, we wouldn't be mired in Iraq today. No doubt the current peace talks are also designed by The Lobby to fail, with failure again being falsely blamed on the Palestinians. Meanwhile The Lobby pushes for war with Iran.

Posted by Sabine Wales | October 14, 2007 7:36 PM

I'd call Henry Kissinger and Menachem Begin more than just 'fishy' in retrospect. One oversaw the massacre of half a million Indonesians while the other levelled most of southern Lebanon.

More to the point, while most of the honorees have done decent work, few can claim much in the results column. Not exactly the most hopeful sign for Al Gore.

As to Israel/Palestine questions, let's just say that it comes as no surprise that Matt accepts the standard orthodoxy laying the blame at Arafat's feet. Not that most of the above comments go very far towards a better explanation.

Posted by faux facsimile | October 14, 2007 11:56 PM

I don't question any of the previous awards, but the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was never a laureate does raise the question of which deserving laureates were always ignored (in this case it seems due to a combination of racism and colonialism, if the two can be separated).

Posted by Keith | October 15, 2007 12:40 AM

the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was never a laureate does raise the question of which deserving laureates were always ignored (in this case it seems due to a combination of racism and colonialism, if the two can be separated).

He was passed over in 1947 (apart from the reasons you mentioned) because the selection process took place in the context of substantial religious and ethnic strife between India and Pakistan following partition, and he was seen as too strongly tied to one side.

It is likely would have been the Nobel Peace Laureate for 1948, had he not been assassinated two days before the completion of nominations. The committee did consider breaking with tradition and conferring the prize posthumously, but ultimately decided not to-- to their lasting regret.

As a result, there was no Peace Prize awarded in 1948.

Posted by Anthony Damiani | October 15, 2007 2:39 AM

Al Gore, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, in late September, 2002:

"In 1991, I was one of a handful of Democrats in the US Senate to vote in favor of the resolution endorsing the Persian Gulf War. I felt betrayed by the first Bush administration's hasty departure from the battlefield, even as Saddam began to renew his persecution of the Kurds in the North and the Shi-ites in the South..."

Yglesias, Krugman, Drum, etc. scorn wingers who think Gore's a hypocrite.

Posted by ERF | October 15, 2007 9:03 AM

Wonder what standards Fallows is using for "fishiness"... Why is Arafat suspect (co-receiving with Rabin and Peres) but DeKlerk is not (with Mandela)?

For that matter, is the problem with Le Duc Tho and Kissinger that Fallows feels unable to bless either recipient? LDT had the integrity to decline the prize; Kissinger went on to further feats of mass murder.

Posted by Nell | October 15, 2007 1:04 PM

Arafat is the godfather of international terrorism.

He was plotting murder till his last days on this earth.

Posted by David | October 15, 2007 3:15 PM

How about Teddy Roosevelt for negotiations involving the Phillipines?

Posted by bob | October 15, 2007 6:05 PM