Former Israeli prime minister and Nobel Prize winner Shimon Peres has canceled his scheduled March 17 visit to Cornell University due to a political emergency in Israel.

Peres was to be the 1999 Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellow. He was scheduled to present the Bartels Fellowship Lecture on Wednesday, March 17, at 8 p.m., in the Alice Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall.

The lecture may be rescheduled for April.

Peres, 75, served as prime minister from 1984 to 1986 and again following Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995, remaining as prime minister until the Labor Party was defeated in the elections of May 1996. He currently serves in the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

In 1994, as foreign minister, Peres shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat for their work on the Peace Accords.

The Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellowship was established at Cornell by the Bartels in 1984 to foster a broadened world perspective among students by bringing distinguished international public figures to campus. Henry and Nancy Horton Bartels are both members of the Cornell Class of 1948.