Pillay’s Peace Prize ‘a moment of disgrace’

When terrorist organisation Hamas congratulated South African jurist Navanethem “Navi” Pillay on winning the Nobel Peace Prize last week, it demonstrated how her work has not advanced the cause of peace, and instead entrenched extremism and hate, particularly in the Middle East. 

“A prize meant to honour peace now carries the endorsement of those who perpetrated the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” says South African Zionist Federation spokesperson Rolene Marks. 

Pillay chaired the United Nations (UN) Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded that Israel has committed “genocide” in the Gaza Strip. 

In her long career, she defended apartheid activists like Nelson Mandela, and served as a judge and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. But she is also known for controversial actions. In China, Cuba, and Iran “she picked the regime over its victims”, in the words of Polish journalist Hanna Shen. 

It is not only Jews and Israelis who’ve condemned the prize being awarded to Pillay. Former Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Møller said he was “shocked” and “angry” when he heard she had won. Møller told Danish media he considered Pillay “not qualified”, accusing her of advocating for censorship during his past dealings with her as UN High Commissioner during the Muhammad cartoons crisis. 

Hamas said it honoured Pillay and considered her Nobel “a significant step towards international justice and a renewed international acknowledgement of the crimes committed by the Israeli enemy against the Palestinian people”. 

But Pillay has not done anything to advance peace in the Middle East, and “her record is particularly appalling when it comes to Israel”, says human rights lawyer Anne Herzberg. 

In 2009, as UN High Commissioner, Pillay “presided over the racist Durban II conference, giving a keynote platform to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As head of the Human Rights Council anti-Israel Commission of Inquiry, Pillay allowed her commissioners to make egregious antisemitic remarks and repeatedly violated international fact-finding standards,” says Herzberg. 

In 2022 at the UN General Assembly, nearly 20 countries condemned her commission for antisemitic discrimination, says Herzberg. “She has whitewashed Hamas terrorism and sought to cement the genocide libel, premised on another lie that it was Israel that attacked Gaza on 7 October.” 

According to UN Watch, Pillay’s record includes handing dissidents’ names to China, despite the danger to them and their families, defending her fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari after he railed against “the Jewish lobby”, and calling Muhammad cartoons in France’s satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo “malicious and deliberately provocative”. 

In 2010, Pillay refused to attend Chinese political prisoner Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, reportedly due to pressure from China. A review of her first two years as UN human rights chief found no public statements by her on human rights abuses in dictatorships including Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Belarus. 

World Jewish Congress (WJC) president Ronald Lauder says Pillay “is no diplomat and certainly no peacemaker”. Awarding her the Nobel prize is “a shocking affront to those who oppose antisemitism and defend Jewish life everywhere”. 

The WJC rejects Pillay’s accusations of “genocide” against Israel as “baseless, politically motivated, and unsupported by credible evidence”. She has lent the UN’s authority to “a campaign that demonises the Jewish State and fuels hostility toward Jews worldwide. The biased process she has led has brought shame upon the UN and undermined its credibility.” 

Jewish communities “repeatedly challenged her conduct and called for her removal”, but “the [Nobel] committee has chosen to reward conduct that should have warranted her dismissal”. 

Lauder says the decision to honour Pillay is particularly troubling “given the UN’s treatment of those who refuse to fall in line with politically-motivated attacks on Israel”. 

For example, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the UN’s former Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, “saw her mandate go unrenewed after resisting pressure to label Israel’s defensive war as genocide. Meanwhile, Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has retained her UN role and received prestigious honours, despite promoting discredited conspiracy theories, and antisemitic tropes.” 

Marks says, “A Peace Prize should recognise peace-making, moral clarity, and even-handedness. On Israel, Pillay’s record reflects none of these.” 

Pillay had said the 7 October massacre did not occur in a vacuum, “a framing that muddies moral clarity about the atrocities committed that day”, says Marks. “The UN Commission of Inquiry she chaired applied a false and highly politicised ‘genocide’ label to Israel, a profound inversion of reality.” 

But this was not an isolated episode. “Before her appointment to chair the commission, Pillay had already signed a statement calling for sanctions against what it called ‘apartheid Israel’, publicly taking a position on the very subject she was later asked to investigate impartially,” says Marks. 

Other South Africans questioned the award going to Pillay. 

“Explain to me how falsely accusing Israel of genocide for its response to Hamas terrorists promotes peace in any way, shape, or form,” wrote local commentator Ivo Vegter. “Taking sides in one of the most intractable conflicts in the world does not strike me as conducive to a peaceful resolution.” 

Veteran journalist Tim Cohen, who says he has been sympathetic to the Palestinians for most of his life, wrote, “Pillay deserves enormous credit for much of her life’s work. But the point is that the Peace Prize is not a lifetime-achievement award for distinguished lawyers. It is supposed to advance the cause of peace.” 

“It is impossible to regard the timing of the award as politically neutral,” said Cohen. 

“What exactly does this award accomplish?” he asked. “The [Nobel] committee declares that peace requires justice. But justice requires more than confidence in the righteousness of one’s position. It requires consistency, impartiality, and a willingness to subject one’s own conclusions to the same scrutiny imposed on everybody else.” 

Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini, the author of The Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, wrote that this is “a moment of disgrace for the international community. It has proved that there is no bottom to the pit of hostility, hypocrisy, and racism directed against Israel.” 

He says that the UN Human Rights Council appointed Pillay to chair the commission investigating the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories. On 22 September 2024, the commission submitted a 28-page report to the UN General Assembly in which Israel is mentioned 277 times. “How many times is Hamas mentioned? Zero. The word ‘terrorism’ does not appear in the report either,” says Yemini. 

He says Pillay was “not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize despite being consumed by a profound hatred of Israel. She was chosen precisely because hostility toward Israel is such a central part of her work.” 

And even now, while serving as an ad hoc judge in the Myanmar case before the International Court of Justice, “she is attempting to change and broaden the rules governing the crime of genocide to pave the way for Israel’s conviction”. 

Director of the Middle East Africa Research Institute, Benji Shulman, agrees that Pillay’s antizionism may have clinched her the award, and that the Nobel may give her more influence to change the definition of genocide, in order to convict Israel of that crime. 

The Iranian Embassy in South Africa congratulated Pillay, as did many South African institutions. President Cyril Ramaphosa said her Nobel “allows us to celebrate the progressive contributions she has made to strengthen peace, uphold human dignity, and bring hope in South Africa and to peoples globally”. 

Yet the Simon Wiesenthal Center said the Nobel Peace Prize should embody “a commitment to justice that does not bend to politics or prejudice, one that holds every nation to the same standard. This award risks reinforcing concerns that those standards change when Israel and the Jewish people are involved.” 

For Yemini, “We thought the international community had already reached the bottom of the barrel. We were wrong. When the most prominent defender of hatred toward Israel is awarded the highest honour of all, it is not only Goebbels who must be smiling in his grave. Orwell, too, must be turning in his.”