This year’s winner has a long history of blaming Israel for the world’s problems.
This year’s winner has a long history of blaming Israel for the world’s problems.
F ocus. Divert. Shield. That’s the signature play of Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, the Hamas ally who has received this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The South African jurist pioneered the strategy eagerly adopted by so-called human rights defenders: Focus on Israel’s war on Hamas to the point of obsession and libelously depict it as a genocide. Divert attention from other, far graver human rights emergencies back onto Israel. Shield from criticism and condemnation the repressive and brutal regimes that carry out those abuses.
Pillay’s record is a testament to this approach. During her tenure as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, the Human Rights Council passed 39 resolutions slamming Israel. By comparison, North Korea was the target of six resolutions, and Iran was the target of just four. Other serial human rights abusers, including Cuba, China, Pakistan, Russia, Qatar, and Turkey, were the target of precisely zero.
And as revealed by the human rights lawyer Emma Reilly, who was on Pillay’s staff at the Human Rights Council, Pillay did not simply shield China from sanction but actively assisted in its crushing of dissidents.
According to Reilly, Pillay and her staff passed the names of 50 dissidents to the Chinese authorities, many of whom were detained, tortured, and “killed in concentration camps.” Reilly argues that Pillay is personally “complicit” in the genocide of the Uyghur minority in northwestern China.
After her stint as high commissioner concluded, Pillay continued with her efforts to stain Israel with the fake charge of genocide while turning a blind eye to real, legally documented genocides in Sudan, Myanmar, and China, becoming the head of the U.N.’s “Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” That commission was established in the wake of the brief 2021 war between Israel and Hamas, functioning as a kangaroo court in which Israel had already been convicted before a shred of evidence was presented.
Unsurprisingly, the commission turned into an antisemitic circus. One commissioner denounced the “Jewish lobby,” which he said controls “social media.” Another commissioner scoffed, at a time when hate crimes targeting Jews were already rising steeply in several countries, that “accusations of antisemitism are thrown around like rice at a wedding.” Rather than denouncing the antisemitic remarks, Pillay condemned those who highlighted them for attempting “to discredit the work” of her commission.
Predictably, the group’s report into the war triggered by Hamas’s bestial atrocities on October 7, 2023, concluded that Israel was guilty of “genocide.” In keeping with Pillay’s established playbook, that judgment was preordained. The report manifestly fails to prove the special intent required for genocide — a legal term with a fixed meaning. This is an exceptionally high bar, as it should be, given the magnitude of the crime. It necessitates that there be no other reasonable inference — like fighting against a sadistic death cult such as Hamas — that could explain the actions of the accused party.
Pillay’s report sought to depict the dense urban warfare in Gaza as genocide, erasing Hamas’s role as a belligerent and ignoring the many ways in which Hamas maximized Palestinian casualties alongside Israel’s efforts to minimize them. It ignored how Hamas’s use of tunnels transformed Gaza’s crowded physical environment into a combat zone.
After departing from the commission following the publication of the genocide report, Pillay quickly pivoted to her next attack on Israel, which remains a work in progress. At the International Court of Justice, Pillay is using a legal case brought against Myanmar to change the definition of genocide enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention to deemphasize the accused party’s intentions. In other words, she wants a definition that can be used to convict Israel, because the current one sets the threshold too high. If Pillay is successful, Israel will be the first target, but it won’t be the last. Other countries, including the United States, could find themselves open to genocide charges simply for fighting a war that was imposed on them, as it was on Israel.
Sadly, none of that deterred the Nobel Committee from awarding Pillay its Peace Prize. Much as its members might believe that they honored a peace activist committed to upholding international law, in reality they selected an activist conducting lawfare against democratic countries — foremost among them Israel.
Ben Cohen is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where David May is research manager.