Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, was co-recipient of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, "for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East." Rabin was assassinated in Jerusalem exactly a year later, on November 4, 1995, by an Israeli Jewish separatist who regarded Rabin as a traitor to the cause of a Jewish state of Israel.
When he traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Prize a year earlier, Rabin asked his friend, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), to accompany him and read from his poems at the Nobel ceremony.
Later Amichai himself was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. In 1982 he received the Israel Prize for Poetry for effecting “a revolutionary change in poetry’s language.”
Amichai knew war intimately, having survived World War II as a Jew in Germany, and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973-74 and 1982.
(The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Hundred Years of War, by James L. Gelvin. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Amichai read his poem "God has pity on kindergarten children" at the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo. The poem is inscribed on a wall at the Rabin Museum in Tel-Aviv.
God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children — less.
But adults he pities not at all.
He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach the dressing station,
Streaming with blood.
But perhaps
He will have pity on those who love truly
And take care of them
And shade them
Like a tree over the sleeper on the public bench.
Perhaps even we will spend on them
Our last pennies of kindness
Inherited from mother,
So that their own happiness will protect us
Now and on other days.
Amichai wrote "Wildpeace" later, in memory of his friend Rabin.
Wildpeace
Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great weariness.
I know that I know how to kill, that makes me an adult.
And my son plays with a toy gun that knows
how to open and close its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)
Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace.
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell.
Here is one more poem from that volume, expressive of the manifold experience of resurrection:
Resurrection
Afterward they will get up
all together, and with a sound of chairs scraping
they will face the narrow exit.
And their clothes are crumpled
and covered with dust and cigarette ashes
and their hand discovers in the inside pocket
a ticket stub from a very previous season.
And their faces are still crisscrossed
with God’s will.
And their eyes are red from so much sleeplessness
under the ground.
And right away, questions:
What time is it?
Where did you put mine?
When? When?
And one of them can be seen in an ancient
scanning of the sky, to see if rain.
Or a woman,
with an age-old gesture, wipes her eyes
and lifts the heavy hair
at the back of her neck.