DEATH OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
The decision to honor Pillay is not a onetime lapse for the Nobel Committee. It is part of a long-standing trend. Members of the committee have said publicly that they wished they could take back former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres’s 1994 prize because of concerns over Israel’s conduct. A decade later, four of the five members were still defending former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat’s prize, awarded that same year. The Israeli laureate was judged by everything he did afterward. The Palestinian laureate was never judged again. Antisemitism today looks less like hatred than like scrutiny with one permanent defendant, carried out in the language of justice. Kåre Kristiansen, a member of the committee, understood this. He resigned within an hour of the 1994 announcement because he could not honor a man whose record was soaked in terror.
It is not that Pillay has done nothing worthy of praise. Her record against actual apartheid, in South Africa, is real. So was my father’s: In his Nobel lecture he spoke of Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and said, “Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as antisemitism.” So I don’t dismiss her work lightly. The problem is that she does not resent antisemitism the way my father despised apartheid. To take only the most notable example: When Miloon Kothari, a fellow member of her UN commission, complained in 2022 about social media being controlled by the “Jewish lobby,” Pillay defended him.
More importantly, the commission’s declaration that Israel is committing a genocide is wholly baseless. Consider the facts. On October 6, 2023, there was not a single Israeli soldier or civilian living in Gaza. In 2005, Israel withdrew every soldier from Gaza and removed thousands of its own citizens from their homes, against their will, to find out whether Palestinian self-rule would bring peace. Hamas seized the territory. It took hundreds of millions of dollars that could have built schools and hospitals and spent them on rockets and hundreds of miles of terror tunnels. Even so, Israel kept trying: In the months before October 7, it issued work permits to roughly 18,500 Gazans, looking to build economic ties with a population that desperately needed the work.
Critics say Israel’s control of Gaza’s borders makes it an occupier anyway. But Gaza has two borders, and Egypt has kept its own crossing as tightly controlled as Israel’s, flooding Hamas’s smuggling tunnels and razing homes to build a buffer zone. Hardly anyone calls that occupation. Could it be that no country wants terrorists crossing into it, and that only the Jewish state is condemned for feeling the same?
Hamas used Israel’s goodwill to plan the October 7 attacks. Its terrorists came with maps of the kibbutzim, down to the names of the families in many houses. They butchered nearly 1,200 people, Bedouin Arab citizens among them, babies alongside the elderly. They kidnapped 251 hostages, including infants and mothers. They raped. And then the self-proclaimed Palestinian resistance kept firing rockets at Tel Aviv from among homes, schools, and hospitals.
What followed October 7 was a war, fought against an enemy that hid beneath its own civilians. Israel dropped leaflets and called civilians to tell them to evacuate before striking. What genocidal country vaccinates its targets against polio? There are victims on both sides of the Gaza border, but just one party sought the bloodshed. Genocide is the intent to destroy a people, and that intent is spelled out in only one place: the charter and conduct of Hamas. Warping the definition of genocide makes it harder to prosecute the real genocides when they happen.
No committee can dilute the moral clarity of my father’s legacy. But it can dilute its own. I still remember the hope I saw on his face in Oslo. Those of us who share that hope will never forget him or his message. Our family will keep doing what he did: telling the truth about what happened, even when prestigious institutions prefer a more comfortable story.
In 1975, after the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism, my father wrote: “This is not the first time the enemy has accused us of his own crimes. Our possessions were taken from us, and we were called misers; our children were massacred, and we were accused of ritual murder.”
We will fight the lie that Israel committed genocide with facts, in every forum, for as long as it takes. My father took sides. So do we.