Peace Prize Winner Navi Pillay’s Long Record of Anti-Israel Hatred
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The Nobel Committee’s decision to award the anti-Israel shill the Nobel Peace Prize makes a mockery of this once-august award.
When Navanethem (Navi) Pillay heard that she’d been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, she wondered if “perhaps it was meant to be” that she learned about her honor while attending a legal conference in the German city of Nuremberg.
Speaking to reporters, Ms. Pillay put her work on a par with the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-6, which saw senior Nazis tried for crimes against humanity. She might have been better off referencing 1935, when a series of anti-Jewish “Nuremberg Laws” were passed during a Nazi conference in that city, for Ms. Pillay has devoted a considerable amount of her long career to trying to weaken and destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
Ms. Pillay began her career in her native South Africa, where she defended anti-apartheid activists. In 1995, South African President Nelson Mandela nominated her as a judge both on South Africa’s High Court in 1995 and on the UN’s new International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She later served as a judge in the International Criminal Court (ICC) and as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Throughout her meteoric career, she stood out for her antipathy for Israel and to its supporters around the world.
At the ICC, she pushed hard to admit Palestine in 2015, encouraging anti-Israel activists to use the ICC’s language of international law to isolate and demonize Israel. When she became the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees in 2008, one of her first acts was to reaffirm a notoriously shameful UN conference on racism (the Durban Conference of 2001), which had been taken over by shockingly antisemitic and anti-Israel hatred. Pillay declared her support for the Durban Conference's biased findings, downplaying its antisemitism.
UN Watch, which monitors UN agencies for bias, notes that Pillay “has a long record of one-sided statements that single out Israel for condemnation over alleged war crimes, human rights abuse and racism.” In 2020 she supported a call for the international isolation of Israel: it declared “Sanction Apartheid Israel!” A jurist of Pillay’s stature should have known better than to sign this noxious petition, yet she did, lending her considerable prestige to the global campaign against the Jewish state.
The UN has a major anti-Zionism problem. Its old Commission on Human Rights was scrapped in 2006, largely because of its obsession with condemning Israel. Instead of focusing on human rights abuses around the world, about half of its work was focused on criticizing Israel over and over again. It was replaced in 2006 with the UN Human Rights Council: a 47-member committee that includes some of the world’s worst dictatorships. The Council singles out only one nation in the world - Israel - for discussion at each and every session. The UN Human Rights Council has issued more statements lambasting Israel than it has criticizing Iran, North Korea, and Syria together.
In 2021, the PLO and Pakistan called for an urgent meeting of the UN Human Rights Council to berate Israel once again. The result was the creation of a new Commission of Inquiry which would place even more scrutiny on Israel, investigating what the Council called the “root causes” of violence and “systematic discrimination” allegedly faced by Arabs in Israel. It is tasked with producing two annual reports excoriating Israel in perpetuity. The leader of this new kangaroo court was none other than Navi Pillay, who’d already made it clear that her hatred of the Jewish state overrode any impartiality she might have as a judge.
On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, as well as countless numbers of civilians, invaded Israel and went on a spree of terror, killing, maiming, torturing, and raping Israeli civilians. Over 1200 Israelis were murdered and over 250 people were kidnapped and brought into Gaza.
Pillay’s reaction? “When you have a whole population oppressed for so long with no remedies, no relief, they are actually forced to resort to armed struggle.” (Never mind that all Israeli soldiers and civilians left Gaza in 2005. Israelis abandoned homes and farms they’d built there, and even dug up Jewish cemeteries and removed the bodies for reburial in Israel. If anyone was oppressing Gaza’s residents it was their own brutal Hamas-run government.)
Her commission quickly pivoted to producing reports that bolstered claims currently being argued before the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide. A 2025 report overseen by Pillay declared Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A 2026 report she oversaw went further, claiming that Israel was not only committing genocide, it was targeting Arab children not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank and elsewhere for utter “destruction.”
In both cases, Israel’s Foreign Ministry refuted her methodology and findings, accusing Pillay and her colleagues of relying on Hamas’ data and talking points, of ignoring Hamas’ role in causing suffering in Gaza, of ignoring viewpoints and information that contradict Hamas’ narrative, and of adopting a reflective, extreme anti-Israel stance.
Perhaps it was inevitable that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize would go to an anti-Israel activist. Of the five judges, two have a history of anti-Israel activism. Gry Larsen, one of the judges, previously called for a “full boycott” of Israel. Nobel Committee Chairman Jorgen Watne Frydnes has a history of criticizing Israel. On October 26, 2023, two and a half weeks after Hamas’ attack, and the day before Israel began its offensive in Gaza, he wrote that Gaza represented “an unprecedented humanitarian crisis,” laying the blame squarely on Israel, entirely omitting Hamas’ responsibility for embedding itself in civilian homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals in Gaza.
Frydnes told reporters that Navi Pillay’s anti-Israel activism was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”
It’s a pity that the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize is honoring Pillay. Here are a few alternative candidates who have displayed incredible heroism and deserve this prestigious award.
An Arabic-speaking Druze mother of four, Nasreen Yousef’s quick thinking saved her village of Moshav Yated on October 7, 2023. When a Hamas terrorist entered her house, Yousef left her safe room to confront him, telling him in Arabic: “look me in the eyes; I’m not afraid of you.” She gained his trust and learned about the location of other terrorists hidden throughout her small farming town.
When a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck Colombia on August 10, 2026, 80 Israeli search and rescue experts flew to the country to help search for survivors. They were part of Brit Re’im - “Covenant of Friends,” an Israeli organization led by Brigadier General (Res.) Yossi Pinto that sends rescue experts to major disaster zones. Brit Re’im volunteers labored for days, braving aftershocks, and helped to rescue survivors from the rubble.
Youssef Ziadna is an Israeli Bedouin mini-bus driver who saved 30 people from Hamas’ deadly massacre at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2026. Early in the morning he was driving near Sa’ad Junction in Israel when a survivor of the Nova festival intercepted his bus and desperately signalled for him to turn around and flee. Instead, Mr. Ziadna continued driving, dodging rockets and gunfire. “I had an option to go back,” he recalled; “A weaker man may have done a U-turn at that junction. But I said no way, I will throw myself at death if it means I can save lives.”
When an Islamist terrorist attacked worshippers on Yom Kippur in Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, in England, Rabbi Walker was leading services. As the terrorist rammed a car into the synagogue and began stabbing people outside, Rabbi Walker quickly helped bar the synagogue’s front door, then stood bracing the door as his congregants took shelter inside. Two congregants were killed; Rabbi Walker’s quick thinking heroism prevented the attacker from coming inside and stabbing even more people.
Yossi Landau is head of operations for southern Israel for ZAKA, Israel’s largest rescue and recovery organization with 3,000 volunteers. ZAKA volunteers prepare bodies for burial according to Jewish tradition: that means treating the deceased with dignity and gathering all parts of the bodies that were disfigured in war or in terror attacks. In the first week after Hamas’ 2023 attacks, ZAKA volunteers prepared over 670 bodies for burial, treating the deceased with dignity. In some cases, they were the first to find survivors, as when ZAKA volunteers rescued a baby from the back seat of a car in which its parents had been murdered. ZAKA volunteers recovered remains of Hamas fighters alongside with their victims, treating each body with respect.
“I am telling the volunteers that we are on a mission,” explained Mr. Landau, who also worked recovering victims’ remains in New York on September 11, 2001. “It’s a holy mission. It’s in our religion… We are going to get everybody to have a grave and a place where their family should be able to come and say a blessing and give a blessing.”
On October 8, 2026, Israeli President Isaac Herzog awarded Israel’s Presidential Award for Civilian Heroism to six heroes of FlyDubai flight 1073. “Through their courage, determination, and remarkable presence of mind, these heroes prevented a devastating aviation disaster that would have sent shockwaves all around the world, and they saved 174 precious lives,” Pres. Herzog said.
