Once upon a time, the Nobel Peace Prize was founded to award genuine efforts to further world peace. Or so the legend goes.
Last week’s announcement that the 2026 prize is being awarded to South African judge, and strident critic of Israel, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, proves how far it’s come – in the wrong direction.
Pillay, a former International Criminal Court judge, served as UN high commissioner for human rights from 2008 until 2014 – a position she used to promote an anti-Israel agenda – and last year she oversaw the publishing of a UN-commissioned report that concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
Hamas, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization that literally committed an act of premeditated genocide during the October 7, 2023 invasion and mega-atrocity, in which 1,200 people were murdered in southern Israel and 251 abducted to Gaza, barely merited a mention.
The focus is on Israel, always on Israel. It’s part of the technique of delegitimization and demonization, with the aim of eventual elimination of the Jewish state.
What did Navi Pillay do?
In 2021, the UN launched an unprecedented, open-ended war-crimes probe against Israel. The “UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel” (COI) is tasked with submitting a report twice a year, in addition to the mandated sessions on Israel held by the UN Security Council every three months. Having uniquely granted the Palestinians “perpetual refugee” status, the UN needs to subject Israel to perpetual blame.
Pillay chaired the three-member COI, despite having already called for the boycott and sanctioning of Israel. She was joined by two members with equally problematic backgrounds, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti. The three resigned last year, apparently fearing they could face US sanctions like UN Special Rapporteur for Palestinian rights Francesca Albanese, another UN official with a proud anti-Israel bias.
The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee announced its decision on October 9, as Israel was deep in a week commemorating the barbaric frenzy of terrorist murders, rapes, and abductions three years ago – the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Pillay beat a list of contenders reported by Time magazine to have included, among others: Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms (acting to provide relief in the war that few notice because Israel can’t be blamed), and Mykola Kuleba, co-founder of Save Ukraine, an organization dedicated, among other things, to reuniting Ukrainian children kidnapped and held by Russia during the ongoing war.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry dropped the diplomatic language to post on social media: “If there were an award for lies, hatred, and blood libels, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender. She’d be a frontrunner. Her role in the relentless, politically motivated demonization of Israel and promotion of the genoLIE speaks volumes.
“Awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.
“Now that the Nobel committee has rewarded the biggest lie of the 21st century, Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell.”
Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov posted on X: “Maybe next year they will award the Chemistry Prize to a Hamas bomb maker.” Kasparov later clarified that he knows that the peace prize is granted by Norwegian committees while the other Nobel awards are given by Swedish institutions – but the joke’s on all of us.
In 2012, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union – another body that collectively promotes a Palestinian narrative at Israel’s expense. The irony that Norway isn’t even a EU member state was pointed out by Swedish editorial writer Henrik L. Barva, a brave supporter of Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
I first met Barva, along with a very mixed group of international journalists, on a press tour of Taiwan (the Republic of China) to celebrate Double Ten Day, the October 10 national day.
We were together when the decision to award the prize to Barack Obama was announced in 2009, before he had even taken office, and had fun thinking up other Nobel categories in which he could have won the award, including literature for his books and the prize for physics, for defying the laws of nature and becoming the first superman to be elected president of the US.
As it happened, Obama missed the chance to further world peace by failing to support the courageous Iranian Green Movement protesters trying to overthrow the Iranian regime in 2009, and later promoting the disastrous Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal. The results are still being felt globally today.
When the 1994 peace prize was given to Yasser Arafat (along with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) for the Oslo Accords, I didn’t find it funny.
I attended this year’s festive Taiwanese national day reception hosted by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Tel Aviv last week. Chief representative Ya-ping (Abby) Lee noted the reception also marked 30 years since Taiwan’s first direct presidential election, and highlighted a shared commitment to democracy and freedom.
She also emphasized, “Taiwan’s global role in technology and the potential for closer cooperation with Israel in innovation and AI, while reaffirming our support for Israeli communities recovering and rebuilding.”
Taiwan was ousted from the UN in 1971 and replaced with the People’s Republic of China. Hence, democratic Taiwan – an economic powerhouse with much to contribute to the fields of health and technology, for example – is unable to share its knowledge through UN bodies, while Communist China – still threatening to invade Taiwan – has a permanent seat (alongside Russia) on the UN Security Council.
JUST AS I wasn’t shocked by Pillay’s Peace Prize award, I was not surprised by the announcement last week that the Palestinian Authority elections had been postponed – yet again. The PA had promised several countries, including France, that it would hold elections in return for gaining recognition as “The State of Palestine” last September. (The UN also recognizes the borderless, failed state.)
The elections – the first in 20 years – were scheduled to be held next month. They have been tentatively rescheduled for September 11, 2027, but don’t hold your breath.
The date 9.11 will be forever remembered for the jihadist attack on the US rather than Palestinian democracy and good governance. PA head Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 21st year of his four-year term, also pushed off the presidential elections, blaming Israel, of course, for the delay.
Israel, unlike the Palestinian territories, is gearing up for elections on October 27, but democracy is no guarantee of winning praise, let alone awards, as both Israel and Taiwan can testify.
US President Donald Trump blasted the decision to award Pillay the prize he has been eyeing for years, but he didn’t stand a chance. If he wasn’t considered worthy of the award for creating the Abraham Accords in 2020, peace agreements that have proven themselves over the years, then he won’t get it now, after tackling Iran.
In 2024, reported peace prize contenders included the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, probably for the same reason that Pillay won it this year – dedicated criticism of Israel. It obviously wasn’t for creating peace.
Guterres gracefully complimented Pillay on her award, saying: “It has shown that the force of law must prevail over the law of force…”
Law professor Yuval Elbashan met Pillay in Nepal in 2009 and wrote in Israel Hayom this week: “Even then, in our personal conversation, she revealed hostility toward the very idea of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, in which she saw an exact reflection of South Africa’s apartheid regime.”
He called this year’s peace prize “evidence of the deep anti-Israel politicization that has spread through international institutions… The anti-Israel stamp of approval has become a springboard to the biggest prize of them all.”
Elbashan also noted that Pillay “is now leading the push to redefine the legal definition of ‘genocide’ so that it fits and encompasses Israel’s actions in Gaza. She is doing so as an ad hoc judge… in Gambia’s case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
“She isn’t crafting this new legal test for the Rohingya people. She is crafting it to convict Israel.”
With winners like Pillay, world peace and justice are the losers.