THE PARTNERSHIP

How two officials defied systemic indifference to help save Jews in Nazi Europe.

By Michel Levine

During the Second World War, two senior American officials worked together to help the Jews of Europe who were victims of Nazism. Their goal was to push a reluctant President Roosevelt to intervene, and grant asylum and protection to the millions of men and women in mortal danger — even if it meant altering his foreign policy. The story of this difficult effort deserves to be known.

THE POLITICS OF INDIFFERENCE

In the 1930s, like most major European powers, the United States practiced a policy of strict indifference toward Nazi Germany, while also working to bar entry into its territory to refugees from that country. Jews in particular. Successive presidents, Hoover and Roosevelt, pursued the “America First” doctrine, which restricted immigration, because immigrants were seen as a potential burden on the country or as likely to provoke backlash amid the high unemployment that had persisted since the Great Depression.

From the very start of the war, the America First doctrine intensified. Within President Roosevelt’s circle, it was well known that he peppered private conversations with disparaging remarks about Jews — too many at this or that university, too influential in this or that profession. His administration included numerous antisemites, not to mention Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which waged a fierce hunt for “subversives” (foreigners, Jews, liberals, supposed or real communists). The result of this foreign policy speaks for itself: 90% of the immigration quotas available to nationals of countries under Nazi control went unused until the end of the war.

A RESPECTFUL JEW

Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1891–1967) served as Secretary of the Treasury in the Roosevelt administration from 1934 to 1945. The two men were very close. They were neighbors, both passionate about agriculture, and their respective wives, Eleanor Roosevelt and Elinor Morgenthau, were also very close friends. When Roosevelt became Governor of New York in 1928, he brought in Morgenthau to handle agricultural matters. Once elected president in 1932, he continued to entrust him with these responsibilities, and in 1934 named him Secretary of the Treasury. Morgenthau then played a central role in financing the New Deal, and later in financing his country’s war effort.

Close Encounters. Close friends, Eleanor Roosevelt and Elinor Morgenthau at NYC art show in 1944 – an exhibition of war paintings done by men in the army, and lent by the War Department to the Treasury Department. 

He was also one of the few Jews to hold a top-level position in the federal administration — and the only one to sit in the president’s cabinet. A symbol of assimilation, deeply Americanized, not very observant, and opposed to Zionism, this sensitive and discreet man was reluctant to draw attention to himself as a Jew in public life. And although he suffered deeply from his country’s isolationist policy, out of intellectual integrity he refused to exploit his long friendship with the President to try to change his attitude toward his fellow Jews.

Fortunately, one of his colleagues had no such reservations…

Men on the Move. Franklin D. Roosevelt (right) and Henry Morgenthau Jr.(left) shared a deep personal and professional friendship that spanned decades, rooted in their neighboring estates in Dutchess County, New York. The inscription on the car door in the photo, written by Roosevelt, famously refers to the two men as “from one of two of a kind”, reflecting their close alliance during the New Deal era.

AN IRREVERANT GENTILE

Josiah E. DuBois Jr. was not Jewish, but he was outraged by the fate befalling the Jews, and by their abandonment by the nations at war. Indeed, he was by nature an indignant man. A lawyer trained at the prestigious Penn Law School, he began working in the 1930s as chief legal counsel for the Treasury Department’s Division of Foreign Funds Control, under Morgenthau’s authority.

Man on a Mission. An American attorney at the U.S. Treasury Department, Josiah Ellis DuBois Jr. played a major role in exposing State Department obstruction efforts to provide American visas to Jews trying to escape Nazi Europe. His 1944 report led to the creation of the War Refugee Board.

Once war broke out, Morgenthau learned that the World Jewish Congress, wishing to send funds to Europe to help Jewish refugees in France and Romania, had requested special authorization from the government. But the State Department’s response was slow in coming, and replies to official reminders were evasive. Morgenthau therefore asked his young colleague (twenty years his junior) to intervene. DuBois assembled a team of Treasury lawyers (John Pehle, Randolph Paul, Ansel Luxford) who set to work energetically gathering evidence of the obstruction. The evidence was unequivocal: senior State Department officials had not only deliberately obstructed opportunities for financial aid to Europe’s Jewish communities, but had also sent telegrams ordering consular authorities to prevent information about the Holocaust from reaching the Treasury — or American public opinion. He also discovered that Breckinridge Long, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of immigration and refugee matters, was an avowed xenophobe, an avowed antisemite, and a great admirer of Hitler. It was he who was working behind the scenes to block, virtually indefinitely, the entry of refugees into the United States.

A New Page. The “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews” was drafted at the request of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. by two Treasury Department officials: Chief Counsel of Foreign Funds Control Josiah DuBois and Director of Foreign Funds Control John Pehle. It was in response to reports that Morgenthau had received stating that the State Department was blocking attempts to rescue Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe.

AN EXPLOSIVE REPORT

On Christmas Day 1943, DuBois wrote a report in his own style, whose title alone was deliberately brutal:

“Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”

The document laid out, point by point, the deliberately delayed attempts to obtain funds for Romanian and French refugees, the immigration quotas left deliberately underfilled, and the censoring of information about the Nazi massacres, concluding bluntly with this accusation:

Certain officials were guilty not only of gross procrastination and deliberate failure to act, but even of deliberate attempts to prevent measures being taken to save Hitler’s Jews, and unless drastic corrective measures were taken immediately to prevent the complete extermination of the Jews, this government would forever share responsibility for that extermination.

The document explicitly named Breckinridge Long as the organizer of the effort to abandon the Jews to their fate.

STORM IN THE OVAL OFFICE

DuBois handed this explosive report to Morgenthau on January 13, 1944, accompanied by an implicit ultimatum: if the Secretary of the Treasury did not immediately bring the matter before Roosevelt, DuBois himself would resign and call a press conference to publicly denounce the federal authorities’ conduct.

On January 16, 1944, Morgenthau went to the Oval Office and presented President Roosevelt with an abridged version of the report, deliberately toned down in its most explosive language and retitled “Personal Report to the President” — accompanied by a draft executive order establishing a new agency, the War Refugee Board. This time, he spoke openly of his Jewishness and the feelings it stirred in him, also invoking the memory of his own father, Henry Morgenthau Sr., who as ambassador to Turkey during the Armenian genocide had fought to alert international opinion. He told Roosevelt that if the President did not act to save the Jews of Europe, he himself would ask Congress to act. According to the account of this meeting that Morgenthau later gave DuBois, President Roosevelt appeared “as shocked as he was” upon reading the report. One might see this as a touching attempt to burnish his friend Roosevelt’s image in the eyes of his impetuous aide — though more likely, the President simply yielded to fear of scandal in an election year.

Read All About It. Finally, after Treasury Department officials presented Roosevelt with a report, the president agreed to create the War Refugee Board, signing an Executive Order on January 22, 1944.  Saving the Jews became official US policy, although the War Refugee Board could not do anything that might delay Allied victory.

A BITTER VICTORY

On January 22, 1944, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9417 creating the War Refugee Board (WRB). Officially, the agency was placed under the joint leadership of Morgenthau, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson. In reality, however, it would be run by Morgenthau, with DuBois serving as his legal counsel.

Ideally Speaking. Pushing the government to live up to its ideals, a meeting of the War Refugee Board with, (l-r), U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., War Secretary Henry Stimson, and War Refugee Board Director John Pehle, Washington, D.C., March 21, 1944. ( Photo: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

The WRB financed numerous rescue initiatives, notably that of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg in Budapest, who managed to save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportations organized by Adolf Eichmann. The WRB also helped fund escape routes into Spain for Jews hiding in France. DuBois and his colleagues advanced the cause of rescue through unconventional means, including bribing certain border guards and producing false identity papers to protect refugees. The WRB also helped circulate threats from world leaders against Horthy’s fascist Hungarian government to force an end to the deportations. As a result, some 120,000 Jews survived in Budapest, and the Board organized the movement of 48,000 Jews from Transnistria to safe areas in Romania. In total, historians estimate that the War Refugee Board helped save between 100,000 and 200,000 lives. Most of its efforts were hampered by American bureaucracy — as Morgenthau himself would later put it, officials dodged their responsibilities, stalled when concrete rescue plans were submitted to them, and even suppressed information about atrocities.

Planning Salvation. War Refugee Board staff members Albert Abrahamson (left) and Josiah DuBois (center) meet with the WRB’s executive director, John Pehle (right), in his Treasury Department office, March 21, 1944. (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, Hyde Park, NY)

As significant as these numbers of lives saved by the WRB may seem, they cannot obscure the terrible reality: by the time the WRB was created, more than five million European Jews had already been murdered. Had American aid been mobilized as early as 1942 instead of waiting until January 1944 — eighteen months lost that Morgenthau himself would later call “terrible” — the number of lives saved would likely have reached at least several hundred thousand.

The WRB also suffered failures. When DuBois tried to persuade Roosevelt to establish temporary shelters for refugees in the United States, the President agreed to create only one such shelter, which took in a mere 982 refugees at Oswego, near New York. DuBois also repeatedly asked the War Department to bomb the railway lines leading to Auschwitz, and even the gas chambers and crematoria themselves, but these requests were consistently rejected in the name of offensive strategy, which required concentrating bombing on military targets in order to secure victory more quickly — and to outpace Soviet forces, given the looming Cold War.

All About Bonding. President Franklin Roosevelt buys the first of the U.S. government’s Defense Savings Bonds, from his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. FDR called this “a frank and clear appeal for financial support to pay for our arming ….”
 

THE POSTWAR YEARS

After the war, Morgenthau’s relations with the new President, Harry Truman, grew strained, and he was forced to resign in July 1945. Retiring to his farm in Duchess County, New York, he devoted the rest of his life to Jewish philanthropic causes, serving as president of the United Jewish Appeal before his death in 1967.

Josiah DuBois, for his part, was appointed chief prosecutor representing the United States in the case against the chemical firm IG Farben as part of the Nuremberg trials (1946–1949). He secured the conviction of thirteen company executives for their role in producing Zyklon B gas and in the use of forced labor from the camps. He died in 1983, relatively unknown to the general public.

Refuge at Last.  A Jewish father carries his daughter on arrival at the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter, in Oswego, NY in August 1944 where some 1,000 mostly Jewish refugees lived behind barbed wire, having signed documents promising to return to Europe after the war. (Photo: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park)

“Too little, too late” is the verdict most historians pass on the WRB’s work. Still, the Morgenthau–DuBois duo managed to drive a wedge into a bureaucratic machine as indifferent as it was powerful. DuBois, without Morgenthau, would have remained an isolated whistleblower, and Morgenthau, without DuBois, would likely never have stepped out of his reserve to confront his old friend the President. Their courageous partnership deserves, for that reason, to be remembered.

“Whoever saves a single life, Scripture considers as if he had saved the entire world,” teaches the Talmud.



About the writer:

Michel Levine is a historian of Human Rights and the author of a work dedicated to the major cases of the League of Human Rights (Unclassified Cases. Unpublished Archives of the League of Human Rights, Paris, Fayard, 1973).
Further publications include a historical investigation on the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (The October Ratonnades. A Collective Murder in Paris in 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; reissue Jean- Claude Gawsewitch Publisher, 2001.)






While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

REST IN PEACE, NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

With the UN and the Norwegian Nobel Committee handing jurist Navi Pillay a megaphone on a platter, little wonder Hamas has welcomed her as its poster girl.

By Marika Sboros

(A shorter version of this article appeared in the Daily Friend on October 18, 2026.)

South African jurist Navanethem “Navi” Pillay was at a conference in Courtroom 600 at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice on October 9 when the news broke that she had won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

Pillay (85) told journalists that the last thing she did before hearing the news was to “deliver the report on Gaza, naming what’s happening there as genocide”.

In the room where Nazi war criminals stood trial after World War II, a jurist declared the worst possible allegation against the Jewish state a guilty verdict. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has given it a seal of approval.

The timing was, by all accounts, coincidental. There was nothing coincidental in her choice of words, nor anything about peace.

Hamas has embraced her as its poster girl. Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim called Pillay’s prize a “message of hope.” Given the terror group’s explicitly genocidal charter against Israel, I don’t dare imagine what he actually hopes for.

Australian political cartoonist John Spooner was similarly cynical.

Pillay the Parot. John Spooner’s cartoon in an Australian newspaper captures Navi Pillay’s track record of a persistent bias against Israel much appreciated by Hamas that perpetrated the worst mass execution of civilian Jews since the Nazi Holocaust.

AN ‘IMPORTANT PART’….

Norwegian Nobel Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes told reporters that Pillay’s “work on Gaza” was “an important part” of the committee’s reasoning. That work is her report as chair of a United Nations (UN) Commission of Inquiry, which in September 2025 concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

Frydnes told Agence France-Presse that his committee has taken no stand on genocide, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) must still rule on it. That’s disingenuous. A committee that makes a genocide finding a key reason for its most cherished prize doesn’t get to claim it says nothing about genocide.

Governments, legal experts and organisations have vigorously disputed the commission’s methodology, handling of genocidal intent and the impartiality of all three commissioners.

Even admirers of Pillay’s record find the report hard to defend. The report’s account of the war begins on October 7, 2023, the day, it says, that “Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza”. The report is silent on why.

Hamas’s massacre of around 1,200 people and the taking of 251 hostages on October 7, 2023, appear nowhere in that account. The first mention of Hamas surfaces 13 paragraphs later, as one of Israel’s “terror targets”.

For a finding that rests on inferring Israel’s intent, that is no small omission.

South African historian Peter Swanepoel, writing in the Daily Friend, concedes that the commission documented Hamas’s atrocities in an earlier report – but in a report assessing genocidal intent, he says, “such a selective opening chronology is difficult to defend.”

I’d call it indefensible.

Criticism of the prize comes not only from Israel’s supporters in South Africa. Financial journalist Tim Cohen, (who is not Jewish, despite his name) whose sympathies, he says, “have largely been with the Palestinians,” respects Pillay. Yet he too believes that the committee “made a mistake.”

Frydnes saw all the political landmines and handed Pillay the prize anyway.

WHERE’S THE COURAGE?

His committee has commended Pillay’s “exceptional courage.” She professed surprise. “Why would you need courage to speak the truth?” she asked. “You interpret the law, you look at all the facts, so it’s impartial decision-making.”

She was oblivious to the ironies drenching that statement.

The UN’s own Declaration on Fact-finding says that fact-finding should be “comprehensive, objective, impartial and timely.”

As a jurist and former judge of international tribunals, Pillay knows that.

In June 2020, she signed a petition by South Africa’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Coalition urging governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel”. A year later, she was chairing a UN inquiry into the very state she had condemned.

When fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari complained in July 2022 that social media were controlled largely by the “Jewish lobby,” she brushed it off, insisting he’d been “deliberately misquoted.”

Pillay defends Antisemite. Following Miloon Kothari (above), a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s special commission into Israel and the Palestinian territories questioning in an interview “why [Israel is] even a member of the United Nations,” and complaining that social media was controlled by “the Jewish lobby”,  Navi Pillay came to his defense saying he was “deliberately misquoted.” (Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)

A month later, attorney Sara Gon, writing in the Daily Friend, set out Pillay’s long, unedifying record of demonising Israel, including accusations of deliberately murdering Palestinian children in conflict zones.

Gon called for Pillay’s removal as chair. Pillay stayed in the post. So much for her courage and impartiality.

CREDIT WHERE IT IS DUE

Pillay’s early record is commendable. She defended opponents of apartheid and won rights for Robben Island prisoners, Nelson Mandela among them, including to see lawyers.

As a judge at the UN’s Rwanda tribunal, she sat on the bench that delivered the first conviction for genocide by an international court, and helped establish that rape can be an act of genocide.

That alone means that she understands the legal meaning of genocide. How she could equate Rwanda with Israel’s military response to Hamas, whose charter is explicitly genocidal against Israel, is astonishing to many legal and military experts.

Pillay’s defenders like to claim there’s no evidence that Israel has not committed genocide in Gaza, even that the ICJ has already ruled Israel plausibly guilty of genocide in Gaza.

That’s simply false, as ICJ judge president at the time, Joan Donaghue, has publicly confirmed. It turns the law on its head. The burden of proof lies with accusers.

A jurist, of all people, knows that.

A jurist also knows that pictures of flattened buildings do not prove genocide. Mosul lay in ruins after the battle to drive out Islamic State in 2017. The US-led coalition faced accusations of war crimes, not genocide. Destruction is evidence of war.

So, why does the word genocide matter so much?

Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it in 1944 to name what the Nazis were doing to Europe’s Jews. Turning it wrongly against the Jewish state casts descendants of the Nazis’ victims as the new Nazis.

That is Holocaust inversion of the worst order. It’s why so many Jews call the genocide claim a “blood libel”.

In Nuremberg, Pillay reminded world leaders of their “legal obligation to protect human rights and refrain from war.” Three weeks after Hamas launched its war against Israel on October 7, 2023, she told Al Jazeera that Palestinians were “actually forced to resort to armed struggle.”

The obligation to refrain from war, through her lens, binds some more than others.

‘PEACE REQUIRES JUSTICE’

Alfred Nobel set the bar. His will reserved the prize for work towards “fraternity between nations”, disarmament and peace congresses. He knew that judges generally don’t make peace.

Negotiators, ceasefire brokers and reconcilers do.

In squeezing Pillay to fit Nobel’s will, the committee recasts international law as “peace conferences in their modern form.” Its claim that she “strengthens fraternity between nations” rests shakily on three words from Frydnes: “Peace requires justice.”

That presents a heavily contested philosophical contention as settled truth.

Scholars of international law and history have long warned that justice crusades can wreck the very order that keeps the peace. They pose the question the committee ducks. Whose justice?

Pillay’s own country chose truth and amnesty over prosecution to move beyond apartheid. Even the Nuremberg trials began only after Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Peace came first; victors decided later what justice looked like.

Whichever way Frydnes spins it, the Nobel Peace Prize to Pillay is a deliberate, significant propaganda coup for the anti-Israel lobby. Pillay cannot ply her pro-Palestinian trade in a vacuum. The UN and the Norwegian Nobel Committee have handed her a megaphone on a platter.

Former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky says Pillay’s award “appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza.” He warns that “just because the entire world believes something does not make it true.”

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov posted on X that “maybe next year they will award the Chemistry prize to a Hamas bomb maker.”

MISSED OPORTUNITY

South Africans are entitled to celebrate their first female Nobel Peace laureate.

Equally, they’re entitled to ask why she is feted by terrorists who mass-raped women, children and some men, tortured and slaughtered children in front of parents, parents in front of children, burned families alive and took civilians, including children and babies, to Gaza as hostages on October 7.

Among the hostages was 84-year-old Ditza Heiman, held for 53 days, 48 in the attic of a UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) teacher. At the UN Human Rights Council on September 15, her daughter, peace activist Neta Heiman Mina, asked:

“How could you place the education of Gaza’s next generation with someone involved in holding an elderly woman hostage?”

Exposing UNRWA. Addressing the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on the conditions her mother Ditza Heiman endured after being abducted during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and being confined to the attic of a an UNRWA teacher, Neta Heiman Mina (above) appealed to the United Nations to reconsider its continued funding of UNRWA. (Photo: Courtesy)

The Nobel Committee missed a golden opportunity to show that people can hold the pain of innocent Palestinians and Israelis together, in their hands, hearts and heads.

That’s what real peacemakers do. And real peacemakers know who is and is not a terrorist.

Pillay does not fit that bill.

Her Nobel Prize, aimed at strengthening peace through international law, is already hardening battle lines against peace. It will likely make the world less peaceful and more dangerous for Jews.

As the Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers put it, “It’s possible that the Nobel Committee will someday bestow its peace prize on a less worthy recipient than Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay, but we doubt it.”

“The last thing this prize will do is promote the cause of peace,” they say.

Amen to that, I say.



About the writer:

Marika Sboros is a South African freelance investigative journalist with decades of experience writing fulltime for the country’s top media titles on a wide range of topics. She started her career as a hard-news reporter in the newsroom of the now defunct Rand Daily Mail, a campaigning anti-government newspaper during the worst excesses of the apartheid era. She commutes between South Africa and the UK.

Marika Sboros is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow Marika Sboros on:  @MarikaSboros
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Feature photo:  Courtroom 600 at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, where Nazi war-crimes trials were held. The backdrop to the Nobel Peace Prize 2026 award. (Photo: JensKunstfreund, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustration: Niklas Elmehed. Composite by Marika Sboros.)






While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Lay of the Land Weekly Newsletter – 25 October 2026

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THE ISRAEL BRIEF – 19-22 October 2026
(Click on the blue title)



Lay of the Land’s ‘Photo Pick’ of the Week

MESSAGE FROM ISRAEL’S MASSES

Israel switched to winter time on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 2:00 a.m.
Hours earlier, at Tel Aviv’s iconic Hostages Square, the message from the people (below)  was
‘More important to change the government than the time!’

Government moves time back; people demand country moves forward. Addressing rally organized by families and friends of victims and survivors of the Hamas massacre, Mally Zander, whose daughter Noa was murdered at the Nova Festival, said: “A country cannot move forward without soul-searching, leaders cannot ask citizens for trust without taking responsibility. I stand here three days before the most fateful elections in all our years living here, and I am not asking you to choose this candidate or another. I am asking you first of all to go out and vote, to do what our children cannot do for themselves and to vote for them as well, to choose responsibility.” (Photo: Amir Goldstein)

FINAL COUNTDOWN

Lay of the Land together with TbT (Truth be Told) hosted a packed pre-election panel debate at Beth Protea in Herzliya.

A packed Beth Protea of the English-speaking community in the Sharon area, were treated to a riveting election debate on a wide range of issues confronting an embattled Israel as it navigates an uncertain future. Seen here are panelists representing various parties and moderator, Lay of the Land editor, David Kaplan (R).



ARTICLES

Please note there is a facility to comment beneath each article should you wish to express an opinion on the subject addressed.

(1)

THE CHILDREN HAD NAMES

Israel’s failure in the information war
By Andrew Fox

“No one will dare to tear down a poster of a dog, but of Jews? No problem”. Holding posters of the ginger-haired Bibas kids, street artists Dede and Nitzan (above), who started the viral hostage poster campaign, express shock at videos of people tearing down the posters, labeling it “antisemitism”.

THE CHILDREN HAD NAMES
(Click on the blue title)



(2)

NAVI PILLAY AND THE HEDGEHOG TRAP

Why the Nobel Peace Prize sacrificed genuine peacebuilding for ideological reductionism and anti-Israel bias.
By Yoram Blumstein

Hands-on Huntress. By rewarding an anti-Israel activist-jurist and chief peddler of baseless “genocide” claims with the prestigious 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, the Oslo Committee did not recognise peace – but weaponized lawfare and institutional bias against the world’s only Jewish state.

NAVI PILLAY AND THE HEDGEHOG TRAP
(Click on the blue title)



(3)

ON THE WAY TO GAZA

Repeated visits reveal fresh insights, revelations and questions.
By Jonathan Feldstein

“The Day the Music Died”. Despite the repeated visits, each time the writer tries to process the mindset of those from Gaza who preyed upon Israeli party-goers with glee unleashing murder and mayhem.

ON THE WAY TO GAZA
(Click on the blue title)



LOTL Cofounders David E. Kaplan (Editor), Rolene Marks and Yair Chelouche

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While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

THE ISRAEL BRIEF – 19-22 October 2026

19 October 2026 – France burns, condemnation for attack on journalist and more on The Israel Brief.



20 October 2026 – Are strikes against Iran imminent and The Diplomat pays tribute to Hersch Goldberg-Polin on The Israel Brief.



21 October 2026 – Did President Trump stop an attack on Iran and an icon heads to Tel Aviv and more on The Israel Brief.



22 October 2026 – Roro has some words for Francesca Albanese, mensches, morons and more on The Israel Brief.





While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

THE CHILDREN HAD NAMES

Israel’s failure in the information war

By Andrew Fox

On 26th February 2025, tens of thousands of Israelis lined the roads for the funeral procession of Shiri Bibas and her sons, Ariel and Kfir. Orange balloons, the colour of the boys’ hair, marked the route. Men dressed as Batman, Ariel’s favourite superhero, saluted as the coffins passed. Ariel had been four when he was abducted; Kfir was nine months old. Through family photographs and a desperate campaign to bring them home, strangers worldwide came to know these two little boys, who were brutally killed by Hamas in Gaza.

The Color Orange. The world could relate to the tragic unfolding horror of the Bibas family – the brutally kidnapped mother and her two kids – easily recognizable by their ginger hair.

Israel’s government should have understood why their story reached people who would never read an IDF briefing. The families had kept their children recognisable through months of arguing about a war in which they had no say. Doing so deserved sustained government support from the start. Leaving so much of it to people already enduring the unimaginable was a failure of both compassion and, if we are being brutally cold about it, strategy.

Psychologists call the tendency to respond more readily to a named person than to anonymous suffering the ‘identifiable victim effect’. In a 2007 study, Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic compared an appeal about deprivation across Africa with one about Rokia, a seven-year-old girl in Mali. Among participants who received no prior explanation of the effect, those reading about Rokia donated an average of $2.83, compared with $1.17 from those given the statistics.

That said, for balance, later research has been less conclusive: a 2016 meta-analysis found a small average effect, and a subsequent replication using hypothetical donations failed to reproduce it. We cannot turn a charitable-giving experiment into a measure of how many people changed their minds about Gaza. It does, however, give us a useful starting point for understanding why an individual’s suffering can command attention that casualty figures struggle to hold.

There is much less uncertainty about Yahya Sinwar’s calculation. In June 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported on messages in which he treated Palestinian civilian deaths as an advantage in the war. Citing the losses suffered in other conflicts, he called them “necessary sacrifices”. More deaths meant more pressure on Israel. Sinwar believed he could outlast the Israeli offensive whilst the people of Gaza paid for it. The suffering itself needed no invention. In November 2023, footage of Khaled Nabhan kissing his dead granddaughter, Reem, travelled around the world. She was three. In CNN’s account, he remembered the game in which she pulled his beard, and he pulled her pigtails; he spoke about the fruit the children had wanted and the tangerines he had managed to find. Anyone with a child or grandchild could recognise the affection in those small exchanges, and something of the agony of losing them. This is the key to the information war: making the suffering of innocents feel personal to those observing the physical war from abroad.

The Young and the Dead. These are just some of the faces of the children violently impacted by Hamas’s attacks against Israel on October 7th. 2023.

The opportunity for Hamas arose when that grief provided the sole explanation for the war. The viewer saw a dead child and the consequences of an Israeli strike, with all context stripped away. The men who had launched the massacre on 7th October and who continued to hold hostages could disappear from the account. Whenever sympathy for Palestinians became pressure on Israel to stop fighting, without equivalent pressure on Hamas to release their captives and surrender power, their strategy benefited. Foreign audiences did not have to like Hamas for this to work.

They used Israeli suffering with the same ruthlessness. On 16th October 2023, Hamas released footage of Mia Schem, wounded and captive. Her mother, Keren, recognised her daughter’s fear and believed she could see Mia repeating what her captors had told her to say. Hamas had abducted her; now they controlled what her family could see of her. A Palestinian family’s bereavement could be used to generate pressure against the offensive, whilst an Israeli family’s desperation could be used to press for a deal on Hamas’s terms. Their control over the hostages gave them a way to prolong that desperation.

The bitter irony is that Israel had their own human stories from the first morning, and yet was unwilling, and many will argue, rightly so, to use those stories as an information war opportunity. Shani Louk was a 22-year-old German-Israeli tattoo artist who went to Nova to dance. Much of the world first encountered her through the footage of her body in a pickup truck, subjected to the humiliation her killers chose for her. Her family’s memorial website shows her drawings and offers her tattoo designs for others to use. There is work there which she made before anyone knew her name, and which people can still choose to carry on their skin. Her family have given strangers a way to know her beyond the manner of her death.

Killing Kids. The child’s stroller and personal belongings seen here seen on the road next to a car near Kibbutz Kfar Aza reveals the horrendous horror of an orgy of butchering young families while traveling on a country road. (Photo: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

The families of the observers at Nahal Oz have done something similar. Roni Eshel was 19 and loved Taylor Swift. Her parents planted fruit trees in her memorial park because she loved them. Her father, Eyal, has also spoken about the warnings she gave before the attack and the army’s failure to listen. Remembering Roni properly means making room for all of this. Her youth and enthusiasms belong alongside the responsibility she carried at the border, and her father’s anger at the people who were supposed to protect her.

These efforts by ordinary Israelis and their friends worldwide began early. The “Kidnapped” posters created by Nitzan Mintz, Dede Bandaid and Tal Huber put names and photographs on streets around the world within weeks of the massacre. Israeli officials spoke about the hostages too, including Kfir Bibas. The Israeli government failed to turn those scattered efforts into a coherent campaign, with the resources and continuity a prolonged information war required.

“No one will dare to tear down a poster of a dog, but of Jews? No problem”. Street artists Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz (above), who together with Tal Huber started the viral hostage poster campaign, expressed shock at videos showing individuals tearing down the posters, viewing it as a blatant expression of antisemitism. (Photo: BFA)

In October 2025, former IDF spokesman Nachman Shai wrote that Israel still lacked a unified public advocacy structure that brought government and civil society together. He was right. Two years into the war, this was an extraordinary indictment of the government’s priorities. I would go further than Shai’s criticism of the machinery. Explaining why the IDF had struck a tunnel was necessary, but the explanation also needed to reach people who had no understanding of what it meant to live within reach of Hamas or the way in which they weaponised the suffering of their own people. The victims’ families could make that danger comprehensible in ways a military briefing could not.

The Nova exhibition shows what was possible. It opened in Tel Aviv in December 2023 and reached London in May 2026, bringing belongings recovered from the festival together with testimony from survivors and bereaved relatives. A friend of mine went multiple times with a variety of people from different backgrounds, and they all came away with a different perspective on 7 October and the subsequent war in Gaza. The organisers had been doing this work for years. Their achievement makes the Israeli government’s failure harder to excuse: people outside the state had already demonstrated how to give foreign audiences a sustained encounter with the lives destroyed on 7th October. Israel should have helped such work reach far beyond those already inclined to listen.

The audience is more hostile now. Pew’s June 2026 findings showed that 69% of British adults viewed Israel unfavourably, up from 61% a year earlier. Let us be real: anger at Israeli policy and the destruction in Gaza cannot simply be attributed to manipulation, and no poll tells us what a better Israeli campaign would have achieved. It does show how difficult it is to secure a hearing for Israel today.

Israel ceded the initiative while much of the world was forming its understanding of the war. Testimony can still change minds, but a family speaking now may first have to persuade an audience that their loss deserves a hearing at all. The opportunity to shape those first impressions has gone. Recovering ground will take more than belatedly discovering that the dead had names. The government should pay for translation and help willing families take their testimony abroad, without making support conditional on what they say. If ministers want the world to hear Roni Eshel’s story, they must accept that her father will also tell the world who ignored her warnings. They cannot ask for the authority of his grief and then edit out his accusation.

Butchering Babies. What Israelis fail to recover from and what most the world hardly saw and remain uninterested or are subsequently interested in seeing are images such as this of toys and personal items lying on a bloodstained floor of a Jewish child’s bedroom in kibbutz Beeri following the massacring by Hamas gunman. (Photo: Ronen Zvulu/Reuters)

No bereaved family should have to owe the state a PR campaign. Those willing to speak deserve its support, with the freedom to say things ministers would rather the world did not hear. Israel’s government should have understood this when families were putting up posters and pleading for help. By the time people lined the roads with orange balloons, those families had spent months asking the world to care. They should never have had to shoulder so much of that work themselves.



About the writer:

A veteran of three grueling tours of Afghanistan, Major Andrew Fox holds a Batchelor’s degree in Law & Politics, a Master’s in Military History & War Studies, Msc in Psychology and is currently studying for a PhD in History.







While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

ON THE WAY TO GAZA

Repeated visits reveal fresh insights, revelations and questions.

By Jonathan Feldstein

On the way to the Gaza border, my friend asked how many times I had been there since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and massacre.

I had to think about it.

I remember the first trip vividly. Several other trips were outstanding whether visiting soldiers and bringing supplies or preparing and providing food, one on one like the time with my friend Marziyeh (Marzi) Amirizadeh and seeing the devastation through the eyes of a woman who suffered the evil hatred of radical Islam growing up and living in Iran and identifying the evil we faced with the evil that she lived under for most of her life, or planning for and implementing our incredible Root & Branch program bringing Christian volunteers to harvest olives in Israel and along the Gaza border.

There were other trips with friends and donors, as well as relatives, media and more. In the car, I estimated that I had visited the Gaza border at least 30 times. In retrospect it’s probably more. Surely averaging once a month. Considering my travels, that’s a lot.

Some trips blur together. Some are memorable for different reasons. All are emotionally draining. Yesterday was no different. It had been a while since the last time.

Horrific Legacy. High school students from across Israel were visiting the sights where the massacre and killings took place three years earlier. (Photo: Jonathan Feldstein)

Along the roads from Routes 34, 232, 25 and more, I noticed the increased number of memorials along the side of the road. From once piles of stones with flags and photographs these have been “developed” to permanent and thoughtful memorials. In America and other countries, you see similar respectful homage where people have died in car accidents. The roads here have been repaved and show no signs of what happened that day anymore. But I remember the countless points where one would drive and see large dark spots on the road with a slight bump as you drove over them, burn marks from the high temperature flames where cars were set on fire. Torched with people inside.

Graveyard of Vehicles. A young school student engages at the Car Wall memorial near moshav Tkuma in Israel’s Gaza Envelope where over 1,500 burned, twisted, and bullet-riddled vehicles are stacked into the shape of a wall.  With each damaged ‘shell’ representing lives lost, the memorial functions as an educational and remembrance site for visitors, families, and delegations. (Photo: Jonathan Feldstein)

The roads no longer have the scars but the memorials along the side of the roads show the points where hundreds of people were shot and burned to death, their bodies and their cars littering the roads.

I looked at the piles of the shot up and burnt remains of the vehicles from that day. More than 1000 cars, many of which became death traps for their passengers. As we visited the site that also has been built up as a permanent memorial, first I noticed dozens of tour buses. Most were for Israelis for whom the site has become a pilgrimage. People wanting to see, understand, bear witness to the horrors of that day.

Murderers on Motorbikes. A piled heap of burnt motorcycles used by Hamas terrorists during the assault is displayed alongside the victims’ vehicles as physical testimony of the attack. (Photo: Jonathan Feldstein)

There are few tourists in Israel now so most of the guides and survivors telling stories of what happened that day were speaking Hebrew. What broke my heart, other than the memorial itself, was the prevalence of young people. It’s terrible that we must educate our children about this all and it’s part of the legacy we leave them. It’s not new but it is still sad. Many high school students. Some of whom got to practice their English in a spontaneous conversation with Marzi about her life and imprisonment in Iran. She connected the dots of the Islamic Republic and Hamas as the same evil. That we have the same enemy. That the Iranian people are not the regime that hijacked Iran 47 years ago and that the people support Israel.

Three years ago, they were early adolescence and three years from now they will all be serving in the army defending their country. I wondered if in 7 or 10 or 15 years, my own grandson’s will be part of this pilgrimage.

I saw a group of soldiers. Three years earlier they were the age of the high school students we encountered. They stood there with weapons over their shoulders, against the backdrop of piles of dozens of burnt remains of just some of the cars. Their weapons are used to defend us against the evil that perpetrated the crimes that we witnessed with the cars just as one reminder, listening to things they surely remember from three years ago when they were just students and Israel was at its most vulnerable.

Burden of Defense. Responsible for protecting Israel today, young IDF male and female soldiers at the Car Wall memorial, who were school students when the massacre occurred in October, 2023. (Photo: Jonathan Feldstein)

At the site of the Nova Music Festival where some 25% of the 1200 people killed that day were slaughtered, the memorials have become uniform and standardized, albeit with personal touches from the loved ones of those who were killed and mutilated there that day. I always describe it as a cross between Woodstock and Auschwitz. We spent nearly an hour there, but what’s really needed to understand the enormity and the scope of the loss is much more, even if you’ve been there multiple times before as I have.

Dance to Death. The site of the dance floor at the Nova Music Festival massacre where, Hamas terrorists raped, mutilated, beheaded, burnt, slaughtered and shot 364 of the attendees, party staff, police security, and medical service personnel. (Photo: Jonathan Feldstein)

In Sderot, we visited the powerful memorial at the site of the former police station in which all the police on duty that morning were killed and many others on the street. As hard as it is to think, amid the slaughter there was incredible heroism and it was a miracle that more people were not killed there that day. Of course, that’s no comfort for the survivors whose loved ones are no longer with us.

Poignant Pillars. ‘Pillars of Eternity’, the memorial built on the ruins of the original Sderot police station destroyed by heavily armed killer Hamas squads. The memorial features 18 tall, eleven-to-twelve-meter columns representing the fallen police officers and defenders, integrated with Hebrew letters symbolizing hope and energy. (Photo: Jonathan Feldstein)

I told the story of the Suisa family, the young parents, Odaya and Dolev, who were trying to flee Sderot in their car and were caught in an ambush and murdered in front of their two young daughters, leaving them orphans. It must be noted that the person who sacrificed his life trying to save the family was a Bedouin Arab, Amer Odeh Abu Sabila. A construction worker who was in Sderot early that fateful Saturday morning, Amer heard Odaya screaming after Dolev had been killed and got into the driver’s seat to try and bring Odaya and her two young daughters to safety at the Sderot police station. Not knowing that the police station had already been overrun by the terrorists, both Abu Sabila and Odaya were murdered, while the two kids, Romi, 6, and Lia, 3, lay on the floor of the car unscathed. There is harrowing video footage from that day that shows the two young girls screaming for help as police officers arrived.

Brutally Murdered. Odaya (33) and Dolev Swissa (34) who were murdered in front of their two daughters. The family tried to leave Sderot as sirens sounded but were attacked by Hamas terrorists and killed in their car.

Amer Odeh Abu Sabila’s story is not unique as many Israeli Arabs were killed that day, including a police officer inside the police station, but is important to recount as it reveals the reality of life in Israel of Arabs who tragically died alongside their fellow Jewish citizens.

Sacrificed his Life. Bedouin construction worker, Amer Abu Sabila (25), lost his life as he bravely attempted to rescue Dolev and Odaya Swisa’s two daughters near the police station in Sderot.

As the sun was setting, we made our way to one of the lookout points from which Gaza is visible. Despite international claims to the contrary, even with the naked eye one can see entire cities still standing. And even three years and a week after the inhuman Hamas attack and massacre, there was a jarring audible punctuation of the reality as we heard gunfire in the distance coming from inside Gaza, indicating that if these killers are not fought and pushed back, they will rise and try to attack us again and again.

The numbers alone do not sufficiently represent the enormity of the day. Each of the 1200 people, including Jewish and Arab Moslem and Druze Israelis, as well as many foreigners including Christians, is the loss of an entire universe for them and their loved ones. But there’s a national story as well, timeless in the sense that it’s an unfortunate part of the reality of Jewish history and the foreseeable future.

“The Day the Music Died”. Photo memorials of each of the murdered party-goers at the Nova Music Festival. (Photo: Jonathan Feldstein)

However many times I have gone to visit these sites, each time thinking that there’s nothing particularly new in doing so other than bringing people who have not yet witnessed it, I am sadly shocked at how there’s still so much to absorb and process and how such experiences are necessary.



About the writer:

Jonathan Feldstein ­­­­- President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Journal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.







While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

NAVI PILLAY AND THE HEDGEHOG TRAP

Why the Nobel Peace Prize sacrificed genuine peacebuilding for ideological reductionism and anti-Israel bias.

By Yoram Blumstein

By rewarding a rabid anti-Israel activist-jurist and chief peddler of baseless “genocide” and “apartheid” claims against the Jewish state with the prestigious Peace Prize, the Oslo Committee did not recognise peace – but weaponised lawfare and institutional bias against the Jewish people and Israel. The Nobel Committee, which lacks a moral compass, forms part of a coterie of ignoble institutions that espouse systematic animus towards the Jewish state and provide a fertile ecosystem for the normalisation of antisemitism.  Israel and the United States (U.S.) rightfully rejected the decision to award the coveted Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a South African ad hoc judge at the compromised International Court of Justice (ICJ) and former jurist on the International Criminal Court (ICC), as it is an affront to the Jewish people and rewards Hamas and Israel’s enemies. Conversely, the feckless South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, France, Iran, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and Hamas praised the award as a victory for international justice.

Hands-on Hatred. Navi Pillay addressing the Nuremberg Forum in Nuremberg on 9 October 2026 following the announcement that she will be awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has kept her hands on the ball on promoting anti-Israel bias. (Photo: Daniel Karmann/ Getty Images)

Fundamentally, the Oslo Committee (which bears sole responsibility for awarding the Peace Prize) betrayed Alfred Nobel’s (a genius, polyglot, and inventor of dynamite) stated conditions (as enshrined in his last will), which required the recipient to meet specific criteria for advancing international diplomacy, peace, and dialogue. Pillaydid not meet Alfred Nobel’s essential requirements to be elevated to the pantheon of great peacemakers such as Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, F.W. De Klerk, Henry Kissinger, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat and Elie Wiesel, amongst others, and is an affront to the Jewish people.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK

In his 1953 essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, the British Jewish philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin asserted that:

 “…the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Berlin borrowed the line from the ancient Greek poet, Archilochus. Berlin’s dichotomy can serve as a heuristic tool to expose confirmation bias and as a stark warning against singular, dogmatic thinking.  Metaphorically, hedgehogs are monists who reduce reality to a single, central vision or organising principle. By contrast, foxes are pluralists who relentlessly pursue different avenues, nuances, variety, and complexity without forcing everything into a rigid, singular vision. Berlin used the distinction to analyse Leo Tolstoy’s inherent personal contradictions, whom the British philosopher diagnosed as a “fox by nature”, but a “hedgehog by conviction”. Tolstoy, a cerebral writer, foresaw the infinite complexity of life, but he desperately tried to force it into a “grand singular theory of life.” In Berlin’s philosophical dichotomy, a hedgehog-like approach is not inherently bad, but political scientists like Philip E. Tetlock have repurposed the “fox-and-hedgehog” framework to warn analysts and policymakers against overconfidence, single-cause grand perspectives, and confirmation bias in expert forecasting.

THE NOBEL PEACE COMMITT’S HEDGEHOG TRAP

The Nobel Peace Committee’s diabolical decision fits the hedgehog diagnosis. The decision is inextricably linked to the current torrent of violent antisemitism and anti-Israel bias. It carefully reduced the criteria for the prize to a singular grand vision (as a purported fact), while filtering out complex realities about:

– the Israel-Palestine conflict

– the normalisation of antisemitism, and

– the role of terror networks such as Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah.

Politicizing a Prize. Would Alfred Nobel view the 2026 Nobel Peace prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay as a faithful fulfillment of his will or a weaponization of the award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice?

Before the prize announcement, Pillay prodigiously used the label “genocide” and “apartheid state” to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. She supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and endorsed the UN Durban Anti-Racism Process, which set the tone for a notable uptick in modern antisemitism and institutional bias. In addition, she failed the neutrality test as an international jurist when she signed a joint letter accusing Israel of “domination and oppression” before heading the UN Commission of Inquiry into the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In September 2025, the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Pillay, released a report concluding that Israel had committed “genocide” in Gaza. However, the ICJ has yet to rule on South Africa’s baseless accusations. The report took statements from individual Israeli senior officials out of context and recommended criminal prosecution for senior Israeli officials at the ICC. Pillay and the bodies she represents are structurally biased against Israel and the Jewish people. Even when the Oslo Committee notified her of the award, she continued to accuse Israel of “genocide”:

“The last thing I did was the report on Gaza naming what’s happening in there as genocide…Why would you need courage to speak the truth? You interpret the law. You look at all the facts, so it’s an impartial decision.”

Check your facts at the door, Pillay:

Your reporting shows no impartiality; your statements and opinions are steeped in tendentiousness. You are an ingloriously useful idiot!

Pillay was visibly surprised when she was announced as the 2026 recipient, as other deserving nominees, such as U.S. President Donald Trump, played a pivotal role in negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza, spearheaded peace talks between Israel and Lebanon, and agitated for a modus vivendi between Israel and Syria. Geopolitical optics do matter. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, continues to use her office to frame Israel’s actions in Gaza and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as “genocidal” while failing to acknowledge Israel’s defensive policies against a genocidal terrorist entity.  The September 2026 United Nations General Assembly debates focused almost exclusively on Israel. The United Kingdom’s recent import ban on “settlement” goods, sanctions frameworks, and arms export restrictions align with European and Western nations (such as Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, and France) in restricting trade with Israel following meritless advisory opinions from international legal institutions like the ICJ. In a different, yet crucial context, on October 4th, the Green Party of England and Wales adopted a preposterous policy at its annual conference, formally equating Zionism with racism. While the Green Party is a fringe party with a few parliamentary seats, the decision carries significant political and diplomatic weight. It will further galvanise the normalisation of antisemitism in Europe and beyond. On October 17th, during a local elections campaign rally in Rylands (Cape Town), a predominantly Muslim and Hamas-loving suburb, Ramaphosa emphasised South Africa’s ongoing genocide case against Israel and the African National Congress’ (ANC) steadfast support for the Palestinian cause. It is perplexing why a head of state would use a misguided foreign policy issue to attract Muslim voters when the focus should be on fixing service delivery failures in ANC-led municipalities.

Based on the above, the Nobel Committee fits the hedgehog framework with a singular, misguided vision. By betraying Alfred Nobel’s explicit wishes, the Oslo Committee has succumbed to the prevailing cosmos (which is dominated by narratives munificently bandied about by the “New Antisemites” – a violent neophyte species of state and non-state actors) that demonises and delegitimises the State of Israel. Hence, the said Committee has failed to uphold impartiality in awarding the peace prize to an individual whose career has been fixated on spreading disinformation about Israel. Regrettably, the Oslo Committee is afflicted with a growing pathology of institutional bias, as highlighted by incessant anti-Israel resolutions and declarations by the UN and its allied institutions.

Institutionalizing Antisemitism. Far from promoting peace and international law, the Committee’s selection of Navi Pillay exposes the double standards and deep-rooted hostility toward the Jewish state within international institutions.

A FOXLIKE COUNTERARGUMENT

Lamentably, the Nobel Committee exposed its bias in awarding the prestigious prize to Pillay by failing to consider:

– the prevailing facts on the ground

– alternative or contrarian perspectives

– Israel’s right to self-defense, and

– Pillay’s track record of vehement anti-Israel rhetoric.

These factors are inconsistent with the qualities of a peacemaker, which Pillay lacks. The facts speak for themselves. A fox would have determined that Israel did not commit genocide or war crimes, cause mass starvation in Gaza, or deliberately kill babies and civilians. In fact, Israel took reasonable measures, which are well-documented, to comply with laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian conventions.

The real danger lies in ideological monism, when international institutions (like the Oslo Nobel Committee) gravitate toward “hedgehog thinking” and compromise their role as neutral arbiters. By awarding the Peace Prize to Pillay, the Nobel Committee acted as the sole, supreme arbiter of peace, and the decision was biased, predetermined and influenced by the anti-Israel zeitgeist and extremist voices. The Nobel Committee’s decision is consequently alarming, as it facilitates the normalisation of antisemitism, which is disturbing to Jews as violent antisemitism sweeps across Western capitals.

Pillay is not a peacemaker and unworthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. She should have declined the award as she had not done enough to comply with Alfred Nobel’s wishes. The key state instigator of unfounded genocide allegations against Israel, South Africa, was the first to congratulate Pillay on her undeserved prize. Yet, the ANC’s reckless decision to take Israel to the ICJ provided the building blocks for antisemitism to thrive. Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, remarked in early October that South Africa’s ICJ genocide case against Israel led to an exponential increase in antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility.

Under the Shadow of Nobel. Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism asserts that South Africa’s decision to make its ICJ case against Israel a centerpiece of its foreign policy is contributing to global antisemitism.



About the writer:
Editor’s Note: Yoram Blumstein is a nom de plume the author uses to protect their identity because of previous security threats.





While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Lay of the Land Weekly Newsletter – 18 October 2026

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THE ISRAEL BRIEF – 12-15 October 2026
(Click on the blue title)



Lay of the Land’s ‘Photo Pick’ of the Week

ISRAEL’S ELECTION FEVER

Captured on a local TV news network poster, the look on all three faces captures concern, whether for themselves or the country

As Israel prepares to head to the polls on October 27, 2026, for the first election since the October 7, 2023 attacks, the nation is experiencing a high-stakes campaign that functions as a literal referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. With a nation still in trauma and deeply divided, is it to be – a political stalemate or a time for change?



ARTICLES

Please note there is a facility to comment beneath each article should you wish to express an opinion on the subject addressed.

(1)

REMEMBERING RAB

Jewish survivors of the Rab concentration camp form battalion to fight the Nazi German forces occupying Yugoslavia.
By Michel Levine

Rab Revival.  Not to forget the heroic past, French historian recalls the formation of the ‘Jewish Rab Battalion’ (above) on the Adriatic island of Rab following their liberation from the Italians in September 1943 and then went on to fight the Nazis, where a 100 fell in combat.

REMEMBERING RAB
(Click on the blue title)



(2)

A HOUSE DIVIDED CANNOT STAND

America needs to confront its unsustainable debt problem that is threatening to collapse the economy of the world.
By  Neville Berman

Debt Clock Ticking. A bus shelter on Independence Avenue, Washington DC where an electronic billboard on August 30, 2026 displays the current U.S. National debt at 40 trillion dollars. How long before it plunges not only the US but the world into a depression?

A HOUSE DIVIDED CANNOT STAND
(Click on the blue title)



(3)

THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE OFFENSIVE

Hardly in pursuance of “peace” when an Islamist death cult applauds the announcement of the 2026 South African winner.
By Craig Snoyman

Humanitarian or Political? Awarding the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay following her longstanding anti-Israel bias and defending antisemitic rhetoric, does raise serious ethical and legal questions.

THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE OFFENSIVE
(Click on the blue title)



LOTL Cofounders David E. Kaplan (Editor), Rolene Marks and Yair Chelouche

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While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE OFFENSIVE

Hardly in pursuance of “peace” when an Islamist death cult applauds the announcement of the 2026 South African winner.

By Craig Snoyman

On 9 October 2026, the Norwegian Nobel Committee (“the committee”) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Navanethem (Navi) Pillay for:

– her efforts to promote peace and international law”,

and announced that:

– “Peace requires justice”.

Humanitarian or Political? The decision to award the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay sparked fierce backlash from U.N. watchdogs for her longstanding anti-Israel bias and defending antisemitic rhetoric. (Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Image)

In Nuremberg, ironically, Pillay told a crowd celebrating her award: “The last thing I did is the delivery of the report on Gaza, naming what’s happening there as genocide.” In Oslo the committee said that it was “not taking a stance” on genocide, as “it’s her report”. Perhaps the committee should have made its announcement on 7 October, the day of the worst genocide of Jews since the Second World War, rather than two days later.

On 9 October 2009, seventeen years earlier to the day, the committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. Obama’s response, as his memoir records, was a question: “For what?” In 2015 the committee’s secretary disclosed that the committee chose Obama because it believed the prize would help him achieve his goals.

The will of Alfred Nobel’s will is quite clear what the requirements for the Peace Prize are. It is for those who, “during the preceding year”, have “conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”. It is for the person who has done “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

The records of the favoured candidates were clear. Vanessa Nakate campaigned for the vulnerable communities affected by climate change. The volunteers of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms were bringing food, medical help and evacuation to civilians in Sudan’s civil war. Yulia Navalnaya became the political voice of her husband, Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian Arctic prison colony.

Pillay’s record was not as impressive. Having signed South African  BDS petition to “Sanction Apartheid Israel” she had no qualms in chairing the singularly inappropriately named “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel”  She proceeded to conduct an investigation in which Israel refused the commission entry and the commission acquired its information from second-hand sources.

Ten weeks after she tendered her resignation, the commission published its results and conclusions, finding that the State of Israel was responsible for committing genocide, for failing to prevent it and for failing to punish it. In September 2024, it had recorded that  Hamas was  guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In its 2025 report to the General Assembly it absolved Hamas, mentioning it once, in a quotation from an Israeli minister. It declared that Israel had the intent to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza, as this was “the only reasonable inference”. It traced that intent back to “decades of unlawful occupation and unlawful settlement, with racial segregation or apartheid”. When asked whether the states that still supplied arms to Israel were complicit in genocide, Pillay answered: “Yes.”

Jaundiced Judgment. And how did judge Navi Pilay (center) react when fellow UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict member, Miloon Kothari  (right) expressed that social media was “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby,” she defended him saying he had been “deliberately decontextualized.” (Photo: Luke Tress/Times of Israel)

Her record as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (“the tribunal”) is equally chequered. When the defence in the Media case applied for Pillay’s recusal, because she had already expressly pronounced on the guilt of the radio station RTLM in an earlier case, the chamber in which she sat dismissed the application. When a press report accused three judges of the tribunal of laughing while defence counsel cross-examined a rape survivor about how her attackers had undressed her, Pillay, as president of the tribunal, called the report “a mischaracterisation of the scene”, and in the same statement declared that it would not be appropriate for her to discuss the conduct of other judges in an ongoing trial. The survivors’ organisations Ibuka and Avega suspended their cooperation with the tribunal.

Her attitude has remained constant. When her fellow commissioner, Miloon Kothari, told an interviewer that the “Jewish lobby” largely controlled social media, Pillay stated that he had been “deliberately misquoted”, without saying how. Kothari subsequently apologised and wrote that it had been “completely wrong” for him to describe social media in that way. Pillay was not as forthcoming.

In the Rwanda tribunal, the Appeals Chamber annulled and replaced various decisions over which Pillay presided, because of her misdirection concerning conduct outside the tribunal’s temporal jurisdiction. In the Palestine commission matter it was easier. Her commission was to investigate violations “leading up to and since 13 April 2021” and was not limited by time issues. During the investigation, Pillay stated: “The occupation is as non-ending as our mandate.” This followed earlier prejudicial remarks, when Pillay told the General Assembly that “Israel’s occupation is now unlawful”. The evidence of her bias, and her (lack of) regard for natural justice, did not prevent her from sitting on either the tribunal or the commission.

The Appeals Chamber in the Rwanda tribunal reversed Pillay’s Media case decision on the basis that a reasonable trier of fact could not find conspiracy to commit genocide to be “the only reasonable inference” from the evidence. Pillay, not a great historian, repeated her conclusion when deciding on Israel’s conduct, with a greater paucity of evidence. But then, a report to the UN General Assembly has no Appeals Chamber above it that can set aside such a legal conclusion.

In September 2022, when the United Nations Association of Germany proposed to present her with its Otto Hahn Peace Medal, Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador in Berlin said:

“To have Navi Pillay investigate Israel is like asking Putin to chair a commission of inquiry into Ukraine.”

Proser on Pilay. “To have Navi Pillay investigate Israel is like asking Putin to chair a commission of inquiry into Ukraine,” said Ron Prosor, Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor. as Ambassador to the UN (courtesy)

The ceremony did not take place. In November 2025, when Sydney gave her its peace prize, the Premier of New South Wales declined to attend, and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry had said that the prize went to recipients “for having the ‘correct’ opinions, rather than for making a real contribution to peace.”

The Nobel committee wanted Obama to achieve in 2009, and it paid him in advance. In 2026 it wants Pillay’s report to achieve the definition of Gaza as genocide before any court has ruled, and it has paid her in advance as well. She is well positioned to pay it back, as she sits as an ad hoc judge in the Gambia v Myanmar genocide case and will no doubt work hard to change the definition of genocide.

The function of the Nobel Peace Prize committee was to ask what Pillay did in the preceding year for fraternity between nations, and what she did for fewer standing armies and for peace congresses. She ticks none of those boxes. She incites friction and animosity. She accused one nation of genocide and called the nations that arm it complicit. Nobody punished the committee for the Obama Peace Prize, and now the committee has taken another step further. It is no longer an award for anticipated fraternity; it is now an advance to persuade political opinion. Again, the committee goes unpunished. But this time the sin is more egregious. A political finding on genocide lets the committee ignore its own principles, and lets its members’ antipathy toward Israel translate the big lie of Israeli genocide into a Nobel medal.

Pilay’s Prize. By awarding to a recipient with an agenda of endangering Jews worldwide, has the Nobel Peace Prize -one of the five original Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel – been irreparably tarnished?

So, to you Ms Nakate, to you, the volunteers of Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, and to you Ms Navalnaya: speaking for the vulnerable, feeding civilians under fire or defying the Kremlin will not win you this prize. Better luck next year. President Obama asked “For what?”

The committee has now answered: the correct opinion, not peace.



About the writer:

Craig Snoyman is a practicing Advocate in Johannesburg.





While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

THE ISRAEL BRIEF – 12-15 October 2026

12 October 2026 – President Herzog to award FlyDubai hero pilot highest honour, US military generals reject genocide accusation and more on The Israel Brief.


13 October 2026 – School trip ends tragically and security scare regarding a Delta flight – your top stories on The Israel Brief.



14 October 2026 – We told you so, UK, France, Canada and Australia! Who is suing Bibi and more on The Israel Brief.



15 October 2026 (1) – Sderot police station memorial on the Israel Brief.



15 October 2026 (2) – Danny from kibbutz Beeri shares his story on The Israel Brief.





While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).