Rabin, Peres and Arafat Share Nobel : Honor: Peace prize awarded for historic agreement between Israel and Palestinians. But soldier’s abduction creates strain between parties.

The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat for the vision and courage of their efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after generations of war and bloodshed.

The long legacy of Middle East violence, however, obscured the new hope that the Norwegian Nobel Committee had wanted to celebrate; the fragility of peacemaking here and the uncertainty of success were all too clear Friday.

A 19-year-old Israeli soldier abducted by Islamic militants was killed in a fierce gun battle north of Jerusalem along with three of his captors and an Israeli officer leading a rescue team. Relations between Israel and the PLO had been thrown into a serious new crisis by the abduction.

There were also angry protests--even from within the Nobel committee, one of whose five members resigned--over awarding the prestigious peace prize to Arafat, whose Palestine Liberation Organization had used terrorism for years in its struggle against Israel.

And some Palestinian leaders complained that the award was not only premature but a Western attempt to win popular acceptance for agreements that remain controversial on the occupied West Bank and that are rejected by most Palestinian refugees.

But the Norwegian Nobel Committee was clear in its intention of strengthening the search for peace in the Middle East. It expressed hope that “the award will serve as encouragement to all Israelis and Palestinians who are endeavoring to establish lasting peace in the region.”

“For several decades, the conflict between Israel and its neighbor states and between Israelis and Palestinians have been among the most irreconcilable and menacing in international politics,” the committee said in announcing the award in Oslo.

“By concluding the Oslo Accords (on Palestinian self-rule) and subsequently following them up, Arafat, Peres and Rabin have made substantial contributions to a historic process through which peace and cooperation can replace war and hate.”

The award recognized Arafat’s political courage in accepting Israel’s existence and legitimacy. And it noted Rabin’s recognition, in return, of the Palestinians’ aspirations for self-determination and the right to govern themselves.

“This prize is for the whole nation, for the citizens of the state of Israel, for the bereaved families and the disabled, for the hundreds of thousands who have fought in Israel’s wars,” Rabin said in a statement. “The work is not yet finished--and the prize is a prize for the future more than it is a reward for the efforts for peace that have been made up until now.”

Arafat described the award as a tribute to Palestinians’ long struggle for recognition as a nation.

“This prize is not for me,” he said in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria. “It is for my people who have suffered much, for our martyrs, for our prisoners, for our children, so that we can have lasting peace.”

The inclusion of Peres, a surprise to some Nobel watchers, was a tribute both to his enduring vision of a Middle East at peace and the brilliance of his diplomacy in achieving the breakthrough agreement last year in months of secret negotiations with the PLO.

“We made the choice this way because we found it too difficult to distinguish between the efforts of Rabin and Peres,” committee Chairman Francis Sejersted explained. “On the (Palestinian) side, Arafat’s contribution was clearly the most important.”

The three men will receive gold medals at a ceremony in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who established the prizes, and they will share an award of $950,000.

Last year, the prize was awarded jointly to South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, now the nation’s president, and his predecessor, Frederik W. de Klerk.

It was the second time that the Nobel committee had honored participants in the search for a Middle East peace: In 1978, it had awarded the prize to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for their initiatives to make peace between their two nations.

The jubilation that might have been felt Friday both in Israel and the Palestinian territories was overshadowed by the death of kidnaped Israeli army Cpl. Nachshon Waxman, three of his Islamic militant captors and an Israeli officer during a botched rescue missue.

Peres, in a statement expressing gratitude for the peace prize, delivered before the incident, said the militants had “not only kidnaped a young man . . . (they were) trying to kidnap the peace process and destroy it.”

Arafat, speaking after a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher in Alexandria, said he was using all the means that he had as chairman of the new Palestinian Authority--ordering massive police searches of the Gaza Strip, roundups of Islamic militants and personal pleas to their leaders--to try to secure Waxman’s release.

“We are participants in preserving the peace from any acts of sabotage meant to damage this peace of the brave,” he said. “We hope the other side will understand that we should not give any extremist forces the chance to damage the peace process.”

The committee’s decision to award the prize to Arafat was the most controversial in 20 years.

Kaare Kristiansen, a conservative former government minister in Norway, a staunch supporter of Israel and a member of the Nobel committee for three years, resigned in protest immediately after the announcement. He said the veteran guerrilla leader’s “past is too tainted with violence, terrorism and bloodshed, and his future is too unpredictable to make him a Nobel Peace Prize winner.”

In 1973, the committee awarded the prize jointly to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, a member of the Vietnamese Communist Party Politburo, for their efforts to end the Vietnam War. Two committee members later resigned in protest, and Tho declined to accept the prize.

Outside the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, right-wing demonstrators chanted “Arafat is Hitler” and “Rabin and Peres are men of blood,” and some carried Israeli flags painted with black lines.

Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud Party, called the award to Arafat “shameful.”

“The fact that the prize is given to the person who invented international terrorism, the archmurderer who says he decided to stop killing for a while but whose men killed seven Israelis this year--this turns the prize into a farce,” Netanyahu said.

But Peres dismissed such criticism as simply blind to political realities. “Peace is made with one’s enemies,” he declared. “What’s the alternative? We all know that peace is made with yesterday’s enemies so that there won’t be a war tomorrow.”

Among Palestinians, there was criticism of a different kind.

“This is entirely premature, both for Arafat and for the Israelis,” said Haidar Abdel-Shafi, the respected Gaza physician who led the Palestinian delegation to the Mideast peace talks. “No one is certain that true peace will be realized in the region. All Israel’s actions--expansion of the settlements, the checkpoints and closures, the arrests--show there is no peace.”

Hanan Ashrawi, chairwoman of the Palestinian Human Rights Commission, called the award “a tarnished trophy.”

“The mission of peace has not been accomplished, and the peace process itself is in serious difficulties,” she said.

Mahmoud Zahhar, a leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip and a prominent critic of the accord, denounced Arafat as a “servant of Western imperialism.”

“It is well known that this prize is only given to those who serve the policies of the West,” Zahhar said to the cheers of worshipers at a Hamas-affiliated mosque in Gaza City.

Secretary of State Christopher urged both sides to recognize the award as the commemoration of the “great achievement of Arafat and Rabin in the peace accord signed just over a year ago in Washington and to keep the difficulties of reaching a full peace in perspective.”

“We have to step back from the tragic events of the last few days,” Christopher said, referring to the Waxman abduction, “and remember the tremendous progress that was initiated by Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat.”

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Alexandria, Egypt, researchers Dianna M. Cahn in Jerusalem and Summer Assad on the Israeli-occupied West Bank also contributed to this report.