U.S. President Barack Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize win last Friday has generated mixed and wary reactions from the Israeli and Arab public.

(Read our FACTBOX on reactions from the Arab Streets in Iraq, Iran, and Gaza.)

A Twitter search for ‘Obama’, and ‘Nobel’ in Hebrew returned thousands of Hebrew-speaking users sarcastically tweeting their shock and doubt at the news. @shaiinbal tweeted, “Another proof that the Nobel Peace Prize has been used as a political tool. Obama has yet to help resolve the Middle East Conflict. But he might!”. (Read our Q&A on whether the Nobel is a “Peace” or “Political” prize.)

Another tweeter @CandyFlossGirl wrote, “Hope the peace for which Obama received the Nobel Prize will be a bit more successful than the peace for which Rabin and Arafat received the prize.”

Tariq Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of the Arabic daily newspaper Asharq al-Awsat called Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize a “down payment” for future action:

“When I was at primary school, my maternal grandfather would give us a small amount of money as a gift on the first day of our exams. My grandfather, may God rest his soul, used to say to us, “Whoever fails must give me back the money… it is apparent that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize came as a “down payment” and as a way of [expressing] encouragement and goodwill, especially as Obama himself said that he considered the prize a “call to action.” If Obama achieves [something] then he will have deserved the prize, no doubt, but if he doesn’t, then who knows whether he should return it just as we had to return our grandfather’s money if we failed [our exams] when we were young!”

Using puns against Obama’s election campaign slogans “Change we can believe in” and “Yes, we can,” an Israeli pundit, Gideon Levy, wrote in a scathing editorial for the left-leaning daily Haaretz that Obama did not deserve the prize at all, only at most “a conditional award, an IOU”. In a more tame editorial, the Haaretz staff called Obama’s win “more an award for the hope of peace than a sign of recognition for making peace”.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York, agreed that Obama was awarded for effort rather than action or tangible results. But he concluded on a somewhat positive note, noting that Obama is “a president whom we, the world, wish to succeed” and that the prize is an encouragement for America’s first black president to achieve his policy initiatives.

Newsweek’s Ben Adler and Daniel Stone saw the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s decision as possibly less than praise for the freshmen president and more as “an extension of Europe’s middle finger to his predecessor”. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recommended that Obama receive the prize “on behalf of the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century — the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps”.

Click below to see Obama delivering a statement at the White House Rose Garden, on his winning the Nobel Peace Prize on October 9, 2009:

Click below to see praise and criticism from around the world of U.S. President Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize:

Read our analysis on what honor and burden Obama faces by winning the Nobel award.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama comments on winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize while delivering a statement in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington October 9, 2009. REUTERS/Jason Reed