WORLD IN BRIEF : ISRAEL : Physicist Forsakes Prize in Protest
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From Times Staff and Wire Reports
The father of Israel’s atomic program renounced his country’s top prize in protest at its being awarded also to an Israeli-Arab writer. Physicist Yuval Neeman, an ultranationalist politician, compared winning novelist Emile Habibi to Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer whose works are banned in the Jewish state. Habibi was the first Arab to win the prestigious Israel Prize for literature. Neeman, who won the prize in 1969 for exact sciences, said he would return it, including the cash award.
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