A Nobel Prize for Hating Israel

How about parking the Gerald Ford Carrier Group outside Oslo. I've had just about enough of this sheet!

A Nobel Prize for Hating Israel

The last thing the award to Navi Pillay will do is promote the cause of peace.

By The Editorial Board, WSJ

Oct. 9, 2026 5:54 pm ET

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 Oslo worthies this year have honored an 85-year-old South African whose career has been marked above all by hatred for Israel and the Jews who support it.

Ms. Pillay began her life’s work as an attorney defending opponents of apartheid, but that cruelty was defeated two generations ago. The Nobel committee is honoring her career since then devoted to attacking the Jewish state and twisting international law to distort the meaning of “genocide” toward that end.

She made her reputation as a judge on various United Nations-linked courts, including the international court that adjudicated war crimes in Rwanda (1995-2003) and the International Criminal Court (2003-08). The latter, created in 2002, fast became a vehicle for transnational bureaucrats to accuse the U.S. and Israel of imagined crimes. This is the reason the U.S. on Friday sanctioned the entire ICC, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said he wants to “dismantle” it (see nearby).

Ms. Pillay served as the U.N.’s High Commissioner for human rights from 2008 to 2014 and so might be expected to know the difference between genocide and a defensive military campaign against a homicidal adversary that hid behind civilians in mosques, schools and hospitals. No such luck. In 2025 a U.N. committee chaired by Ms. Pillay issued a report claiming Israel had committed genocide in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis.

Her 2025 report offered no evidence of genocide or genocidal intent and ignored mountains of contrary evidence. It made the accusation anyway. But her report treated Hamas’s massacre as a quasi-justifiable response. Terrorism is peace, while defending against it is genocide. George Orwell saw this coming.

In her concurrent role as an International Court of Justice judge presiding over claims of war crimes in Myanmar, Ms. Pillay, as these columns noted last month, has lobbied to lower the threshold for claims of genocide. Why? Because a looser standard would allow Ms. Pillay’s South Africa, which hosted Hamas delegations in the weeks after Oct. 7, to pursue more easily its vendetta against Israel.

It’s especially ironic that the Nobel Committee cited Ms. Pillay for having “significantly enlarged the scope and impact of international law.” Authoritarians around the globe are on the march in open defiance of international law. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and harasses Western Europe with drones.

China repudiated its treaty with Britain to allow autonomy for Hong Kong, and it sniffed at the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 ruling against Beijing’s lawless claims in the South China Sea. The Nobel Committee might have honored publisher Jimmy Lai, who languishes in a Hong Kong prison for supporting democracy.

Yet the Norwegians decided instead that this is the moment to honor a bureaucrat bent on punishing an Israeli democracy that does its best to follow the rule of law. By rewarding such moral confusion, the Nobel Committee has shown again why its once formidable prestige is degraded. The last thing this prize will do is promote the cause of peace.