Farce, an event organizer’s nightmare, was never so public and cruel.
Having awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize to US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho, the award ceremony’s Norwegian hosts ended up greeting neither.
Le Duc Tho refused to accept the prize, claiming the peace it was meant to celebrate had not been achieved. Kissinger did accept the prize, but in absentia, as his nomination sparked an uproar by peace activists who considered him one of the war’s engines. “Political satire became obsolete,” said satirist Tom Lehrer of the Nobel Committee’s choice.
It was, to be sure, an exception in the award’s 124-year history.
Most Nobel Peace Prize laureates deserved it; people like president Teddy Roosevelt after crafting the 1905 peace treaty between Russia and Japan, or Martin Luther King, who inspired the American civil rights movement, or Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor who engineered the rapprochement between the Cold War’s rival blocs.
Some of its laureates did not just deserve the peace prize, but were martyrs of its cause; people like Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjold, who died in an air crash while flying to negotiate peace in the Congo, not to mention Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, who were killed not merely while, but because, they labored for peace.
Still, setting aside the controversial choice of Kissinger, and the even more dubious choice of Yasser Arafat, some choices were odd, apparently because there hasn’t been enough peace happening to celebrate a new peacemaker every year.
Such, for instance, was the choice in 2001 of the United Nations, an organization whose contribution to peace has been negligible, and arguably negative. Equally unwarranted, and even more absurd, was the choice of Barack Obama in 2009, a time at which his presidency had hardly begun, and his peacemaking record was as naked as a bird.
Trump is the embodiment of everything a peacemaker should not be
Now, following Donald Trump’s nomination last Monday by Benjamin Netanyahu, many think the idea of this American president winning the Nobel Peace Prize should be added to the outlandish choices its committees have made over the years. It shouldn’t.
NO ONE, least of all this column, can deny Donald Trump’s embodiment of everything a peacemaker should not be.
Before all else, a peacemaker should never speak the language of hatred. Trump’s rhetoric, alas, has radiated, legitimized, and fanned hatred.
The man who has called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US” is no paragon of peacemaking. The man who (according to his former executive John O’Donnell) said “laziness is a trait in Blacks” is not the natural peace broker. Nor is the man who said about the immigrants that Mexico “sends” to the US: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.” Nor is the man who reportedly said of women: “You have to treat them like shit.”
A peacemaker should also not be a man who, in his deeds, raises physical walls between countries. A peacemaker should also not be a man who raises economic walls between nations, and throws monkey wrenches in international trade. Nor should a peacemaker be a man who inspires a physical assault on a house of lawmakers, leads a defamation campaign against the press, and lays political siege to his country’s courts.
Well, despite all this, Trump has already emerged, and may soon re-emerge, as a peacemaker.
Trump has emerged as a peacemaker, despite everything
TRUMP’S ELIGIBILITY for a Nobel Peace Prize need not wait for the future. What he has delivered in the past, the Abraham Accords, is a lot more than others who received the prize ever did. That deal created diplomatic ties between Israel and three Arab countries. That’s three peace deals more than Obama delivered.
The same goes for the present. Trump’s distaste for war, despite the machismo he likes to exude, has been demonstrated in the Ukraine War, which he tried to end, and in Iran, where his attack was brief – 30 minutes – and followed with a swift imposition of a ceasefire.
These two episodes obviously do not justify a Nobel Peace Prize, though they do indicate that Trump is sincere when he says, “I hate to see people killed,” as he did this week. The Abraham Accords, however, were not episodes. They were real peace breakthroughs, and should have granted Trump the prize he never got, even if others conceived and engineered those accords. They happened under Trump’s watch.
Now, circumstances may lead to an even bigger deal.
Regionally, the two enemies that terrify most Arab governments are also the sworn enemies of the Jewish state: the Islamist idea and the Iranian regime. That combination alone has generated previously unthinkable Arab cooperation with the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, in the most important Arab country, Saudi Arabia, this transformation comes coupled with a genuine ambition to modernize its economy and liberalize its society. Peace, for such a mindset, is not opportunism; it’s a prerequisite.
Then there are Lebanon and Syria, which have been released from Iran’s stranglehold and seem eager to build and prosper after years of civil war. Then there are the Palestinians, whose hijacking by Hamas can be brought to an end, as part of a grand scheme to rebuild Gaza.
And finally, there is Donald Trump, whose urge to strike peace might be part of his narcissism, but its effect can be priceless.
Yes, it would be one of the most complex deals ever struck anywhere, involving multiple governments, billions of dollars, and millions of people, but if such a deal’s stars ever aligned, the constellation would look like what we’re staring at now.
Will that mother of all deals offset, or at least excuse, Donald Trump’s record as an engine of autocracy and hate? It won’t. It will, however, be a sorry Middle East’s gospel, and its bearer’s ticket to the peacemakers’ hall of fame.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.