New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman)

Dear Mr. President,

On Friday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, the South African jurist who chaired the United Nations commission that falsely accused the State of Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called it a twisted exploitation of the prize. That is a restrained description.

This letter is written to say something simple: the committee in Oslo does not hold the only ledger. There is another Judge, Whose accounting is exact, and Whose reward for those who stand up against evil does not depend on the politics of five Norwegians.

Koheles also teaches that there is “es l’milchamah v’es l’shalom” (Koheles 3:8), a time for war and a time for peace. True peace is not the absence of confrontation. Sometimes peace can only be reached by confronting evil directly and defeating it. Whoever confuses appeasement with peace has learned nothing from the twentieth century.

The Muslim Lives That Were Saved

The critics who claim to care about Muslim lives have strangely forgotten ISIS.

When President Trump took office in January 2017, the so-called Islamic State controlled vast territory in Iraq and Syria. It was carrying out mass executions, beheadings, crucifixions, and the enslavement of women. The overwhelming majority of its victims were Muslims, Sunni and Shiite alike, along with Yazidis, Christians, and others who refused to submit.

Within months, under rules of engagement that freed American commanders to act, Mosul was liberated in July 2017. Raqqa, the self-declared capital of the caliphate, fell that October. By March 2019, at Baghouz, the last sliver of ISIS territory was gone. In October 2019, American special forces cornered Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the caliphate, who died in the raid.

How many Muslim lives were saved because the caliphate was destroyed rather than contained? How many Muslim families in Mosul, Raqqa, and Deir ez-Zor were spared from the slave markets and the execution squares? No one can count them precisely. But the Mishnah in Sanhedrin (4:5) teaches that one who saves a single life is regarded as having saved an entire world. By that measure, the number of worlds saved is staggering.

Not one member of the Nobel Committee has ever explained why the defeat of ISIS did not count as a contribution to peace.

The Hostages, the Abraham Accords, and Iran

The Abraham Accords of 2020 did something the experts had said for decades was impossible: Arab states made peace with Israel without first being handed concessions that would endanger Jewish lives. Embassies opened. Flights began. Trade flowed.

In October 2025, under the ceasefire framework the President pushed through, every living hostage held by Hamas came home. Families who had waited more than two years for news finally embraced their sons and daughters. The mitzvah of pidyon shevuyim, redeeming captives, is described by the Rambam (Hilchos Matnos Aniyim 8:10) as greater than feeding and clothing the poor.

Few world leaders in history have had a hand in a pidyon shevuyim of that magnitude.

And the President took action against the nuclear program of a regime whose leaders openly call for wiping Israel off the map. Preventing a genocidal regime from acquiring the means to commit genocide is the very definition of pursuing peace.

The Genocide Libel

The charge that Israel committed genocide in Gaza deserves to be answered with facts.

Genocide, under the 1948 Convention, requires the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such. Israel did not start this war. On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel, murdered some 1,200 people, the largest slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust, and dragged roughly 250 hostages into Gaza.

What followed was a war against Hamas, an organization that deliberately built its tunnels and rocket launchers beneath homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals, and used its own population as human shields. Israel issued evacuation warnings by phone, text, and leaflet. It facilitated the entry of humanitarian aid while Hamas diverted it. Armies bent on destroying a people do not warn them to leave first.

Consider, too, the demographics. Gaza’s population was roughly 500,000 in 1967. Before the war, it had passed two million. A people subject to a campaign of genocide does not quadruple. Every civilian death in war is a tragedy, and Torah Jews mourn every innocent life. But tragedy is not genocide, and war is not genocide. To apply that word, coined after the murder of six million Jews, to the Jewish state defending itself against those who murdered Jews is a moral inversion and perversion of the worst kind.

The Prize That Endures

Mr. President, the Nobel Peace Prize was once awarded to Yasser Arafat. Its prestige among those who remember that fact has never fully recovered. A prize that can go to Arafat and now to the chief architect of the genocide accusation against Israel cannot claim to be the final word on who has pursued peace.

G-d Al-Mighty sees who stood against the butchers of ISIS, who brought the hostages home, who stood with Klal Yisroel when it was unpopular to do so.

That prize is not presented in Oslo. It is recorded Above, and it does not fade.

With respect and gratitude,
Rabbi Yair Hoffman