The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Yasser Arafat, of Palestine, and to Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, of Israel, to honor a political act which called for great courage on both sides, and which has opened up opportunities for a new development towards fraternity in the Middle East. In his Nobel Lecture, Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli extremist who opposed the terms of the Oslo Accords, said:
“To defend those lives, we call upon our citizens to enlist in the army. And to defend the lives of our citizens serving in the army, we invest huge sums in planes, and tanks, in armored plating and concrete fortifications. Yet despite it all, we fail to protect the lives of our citizens and soldiers. Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life. There is only one radical means of sanctifying human lives. Not armored plating, or tanks, or planes, or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is peace.”
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes created by the Swedish industrialist, inventor, and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel. Since 1901 it has been awarded annually (with some exceptions) to those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” Over the next few months we’ll be introducing you to the past Nobel laureates, leading up to the award of the 2016 prize in October.
