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.
Bottom of Form
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.
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.”
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?”
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 X: @MarikaSboros
Subscribe on Substack: Marika Sboros
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).