Nachshon Waxman died last week just a few miles from where his mother had prayed for his life to be spared. Accompanied by 50,000 of her countrymen, Esther Waxman had gone to the Wailing Wall, the remnant of King Herod's Temple and Judaism's holiest shrine. There she had asked for Nachshon's deliverance, if not by God then by the Islamic militants who had kidnapped him four days earlier. In the end, in a hail of bullets, her son, a corporal in the Israeli Army, died when Israeli commandos tried to rescue him from his captors. Nachshon Waxman was 19 years old.
This is what passes for peace in the Middle East, a place of chronic incongruities. A few hours before the young soldier died in a terrorist hideaway, a panel of judges in Oslo, Norway, announced that it had awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Yassir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The inclusion of Arafat, once an avowed supporter of terrorism, enraged many, Jews and non-Jews alike. "Mr. Arafat is not in any way worthy of this prestigious prize," said Kare Kristiansen, a Nobel jurist who resigned in protest. "His past is too tainted with violence, terrorism and bloodshed, and his future too unpredictable."
Kristiansen's co-panelists in Oslo said they hoped the award to Arafat and his Israeli partners in last year's historic peace accord would serve to advance the cause of peace between Israel and its neighbors. That, however, was before Nachshon Waxman died. During the kidnapping drama that appeared to obsess all Israelis, Prime Minister Rabin suspended peace talks with Syria so he could devote all his energies to securing the soldier's release. He also put pressure on Arafat, who had assumed control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho. Arafat had a "strategic choice," Rabin said, between making peace with Israel and making peace with Hamas, the radical group that kidnapped Waxman. After Waxman was killed -- in a village north of Jerusalem not under PLO control -- Arafat aides tried to make the point that the PLO was blameless in the matter.
That will be a difficult proposition to sell to the Israeli people. Since returning from exile last summer, Arafat has played cat-and-mouse with Israel to avoid a showdown with Hamas. The group has claimed 14 murders of Israelis since Arafat's return, including a shooting spree in Jerusalem last week that killed two people. Arafat's failure to deter these attacks has stoked Israeli ire. As Shimon Peres put it: "He [Arafat] does not need to show 100 percent success. But he needs to show 100 percent effort."
