Rabbi Yaakov Menken is the Executive Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America
Forty years ago, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to Elie Wiesel and called him "a messenger to mankind." Wiesel had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and spent the rest of his life making sure the world would remember the genocide inflicted upon the Jewish People. In Oslo he told his audience: "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim."
This month, the Nobel Committee gave the same prize to Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, the woman who chaired the United Nations commission that accused Israel of genocide. It would be comforting to call this ignorance. It isn't, neither regarding Pillay nor the Nobel Committee.
Pillay certainly knows what genocide is better than most. As a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, she sat on the panel that convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu in 1998, issuing a landmark ruling that recognized that sexual violence committed to destroy a people can itself be an act of genocide. She went on to serve on the International Criminal Court and as the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights.
And that is where what had been an illustrious career went off the rails.
During her tenure as High Commissioner, she raised no objection as the UN Human Rights Council issued 39 condemnations of Israel. By comparison, North Korea was condemned just six times and Iran four, while many of the world's most notorious human rights abusers-including China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Qatar-went untouched.
Many of these regimes actively pushed the UNHRC to obsess over Israel in a way that deflected attention from their own conduct, and Pillay was worse than neutral as the Council made a mockery of its mission. Her office even reportedly provided the Chinese government with the names of Chinese human rights defenders planning to attend UN sessions. Among them was Cao Shunli, who was detained at the Beijing airport en route to Geneva and died in captivity six months later.
When the UNHRC created a Commission of Inquiry on Israel in 2021 - the first in its history with an open-ended mandate for endless investigation of a single country - it needed a chair guaranteed to reach a predetermined conclusion. Just a year prior, Pillay had signed an open letter calling to "Sanction Apartheid Israel." By any objective judicial standard, signing such a biased statement would be disqualifying; at the UN, it made her the ideal candidate. A fellow commissioner, Miloon Kothari, opined in 2022 that social media was "controlled largely by the Jewish lobby," and wondered aloud whether Israel deserved to be a member of the UN at all. Though he eventually apologized, Pillay only defended him.
In September 2025, the commission delivered the verdict it was built to deliver: Israel, it declared, was committing genocide in Gaza - at a time when Hamas was still holding and torturing 48 hostages.
The commission's report barely acknowledged either the hostages or the start of the conflict: the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, with over 1,200 murdered and over 250 dragged into captivity. Instead, it accused Israel's president, prime minister and former defense minister of inciting genocide, as if the release of the hostages was not even a plausible justification for Israel's actions.
It is that report that capped Pillay's career. And it is that which led directly to her Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Committee’s chairman, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, told AFP that the committee “is not the court" and takes no position on whether Israel committed genocide. In the same breath, he professed “great faith" in Pillay’s “integrity." The same day, he told reporters that her work on Gaza was “an important part of the reasoning" for the prize. He cannot have it both ways. One cannot honor a judge for her integrity while disclaiming her verdict, least of all when that verdict is the reason for the honor.
The committee cited Pillay for ensuring that genocide is prosecuted, yet the most prominent genocide charge of her career was a despicable libel. Those who welcomed the award understood exactly what was being honored. The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry promptly praised her for defending the rights of the oppressed “including Palestine."
There is an irony Mr. Frydnes may well have missed. Pillay also sits as an ad hoc judge at the ICJ, in the Rohingya case of The Gambia v. Myanmar - the very case in which the court is being asked to lower the threshold for proving genocidal intent. The same jurist who helped define genocide in Rwanda is now positioned to permanently dilute it, in a way that will make a charge against the defensive actions of any Western government far easier to sustain.
If Elie Wiesel turned the memory of genocide into a moral duty owed to the living, then Navi Pillay turned the accusation of genocide into a political weapon aimed at its survivors. The committee that honored the first has now honored the second, and it apparently sees no contradiction.
The Nobel Committee’s most fundamental disservice, though, is to the cause of peace itself.
Our Sages taught that "the world stands on three things: on justice, on truth, and on peace" (Avos 1:18). The Jerusalem Talmud (Taanis 4:2) adds that the three are really one: "when justice is done, truth is done, and peace is made," citing the prophet Zechariah - "Judge truth and the justice of peace in your gates" (8:16). Peace, in the Jewish understanding, is not merely the absence of shooting. It is the fruit of justice founded on truth. A judgment built on falsehood produces not peace, but the next war.
That is what the Nobel Committee accomplished with this award. Branding self-defense as genocide does not end wars; it tells the barbarians that start them that the world will take their side if only they hide behind enough civilians. Hamas understood that strategy from the first day, and now has Pillay's Nobel to prove it.
When the Nobel Committee gave its Peace Prize to arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat in 1994, one member, Kåre Kristiansen abruptly resigned in protest. No one resigned this time.
Elie Wiesel was right: we must always take sides. And the Nobel Committee took sides in a way that will now make real peace more difficult to achieve, in every conflict around the world.