This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Navi Pillay, a South African woman of Indian descent, played a key role in her home country’s anti-apartheid movement and served as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. But most recently, she led the U.N. commission that concluded Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Her colleagues at the United Nations cheered Pillay’s selection. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres praised Pillay as a “steadfast, independent voice of justice.”
Hamas, meanwhile, hailed the award as an important step toward “international justice,” specifically applauding her commission’s accusations against Israel. Iranian state media were only too happy to amplify Hamas’s congratulations.
France also hailed the decision, stating, “Her career is a reminder that there is no lasting peace without justice.”
That word kept coming up: justice. But what does Pillay mean by justice?
Watchdog groups have spent years documenting Pillay’s singular focus on Israel, even while some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships escaped comparable scrutiny.
While Pillay served as U.N. high commissioner for human rights from 2008 to 2014, she empaneled four fact-finding missions targeting Israel, more than any other country. Pillay oversaw the now-discredited Goldstone Report, whose primary author later walked back its central allegation that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians as a matter of policy. Pillay also participated in the 2009 Durban II conference, which was boycotted by several democracies and provided Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a prominent platform to disseminate antisemitic vitriol.
In 2022, while chairing a U.N. commission of inquiry, Pillay rejected calls by the U.S. government for accountability after fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari questioned Israel’s membership in the U.N. and complained about the “Jewish lobby.”
UN Watch, an organization dedicated to monitoring the U.N., has long documented Pillay’s lopsided record on Israel. The organization went so far as to submit a 35-page request calling on Pillay to recuse herself from the commission of inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council because of her inherent, well-documented bias.
UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer told the Washington Free Beacon, “Navi Pillay deserves the Nobel Peace Prize like the Ayatollah deserved to be elected to the U.N. women’s rights commission.”
Pillay’s focus on Israel has come at the expense of suffering people across the region and around the world. Even Palestinian women were ill-served by her Israel obsession. In 2005, Pillay affirmed a special rapporteur analysis that concluded that “occupation pressures” made Palestinian men more violent by stripping them of their ability to provide and protect, turning wives into targets of domestic violence.
Translated: Israel was being blamed for Palestinian men beating their wives.
UN Watch found that Pillay, while serving as U.N. human rights chief, stayed silent on abuses in Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Belarus, and Syria during her first two years in office.
Pillay has also repeatedly shown a willingness to accommodate the demands of Islamists. In 2008, while serving as U.N. high commissioner for human rights, she advised the Danish government to address “defamation of religion” as Islamic states pushed for restrictions on speech deemed offensive to religion.
Several years later, in 2012, Pillay criticized the French cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo for being “malicious and provocative” in their depictions of Muhammad.
Those cartoonists would be massacred by Islamists just a few years later.
But it is Pillay’s accusation of genocide against Israel that makes this Nobel especially consequential.
Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined the word “genocide,” lost most of his family in the Holocaust. He spent the rest of his life giving the world a word — and eventually a legal framework — for the deliberate destruction of a people.
Now some of the world’s most powerful institutions are using their muscle to lend legitimacy to activists who have weaponized Lemkin’s word against the world’s only Jewish state.
The Nobel Prize does more than honor Pillay. It lends the Nobel Committee’s prestige to her accusation. It tells the world that calling Israel’s war against Hamas a genocide is not merely one deeply contested interpretation of international law, but work worthy of the world’s most famous peace prize.
Lemkin’s own family has been warning about exactly this transformation.
Earlier this year, I wrote about their fight with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, an organization that has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide while using Raphael Lemkin’s name to give those accusations moral and historical authority.
Joseph Lemkin, a relative of Raphael Lemkin, told the Washington Examiner:
“Calling Israel’s war against Hamas ‘genocide’ while dismissing evidence of efforts to warn civilians, facilitate evacuations and provide aid is a terrible choice with consequences far beyond this conflict. Civilian suffering demands compassion and accountability. But the legal accusation of genocide requires evidence of an intent to destroy a protected group, and that standard cannot be replaced by outrage or political conviction.”
The definition of genocide does not have to be formally rewritten to render it meaningless. Activists can stretch its application, international bodies can endorse that application, and prestigious institutions can reward the people doing it. Eventually, the accusation itself acquires the imprimatur of authority.
That is what makes the Nobel Committee’s decision so significant.
“Raphael Lemkin devoted his life to ensuring the world could identify and confront genocide,” Joseph Lemkin said. “When his name is used to lend authority to accusations that disregard that definition, our family has a responsibility to speak out.”
Elisha Wiesel, son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, sees the same danger. He told the Washington Examiner:
“My father knew what genocide meant. He survived a regime determined to erase the Jewish people and devoted his life to ensuring the world would never forget where that hatred leads,” Wiesel said.
“Genocide requires an intent to destroy a people. Israel’s efforts to warn civilians, facilitate evacuations and deliver aid cannot simply be ignored because they contradict an accusation.”
The historical inversion is grotesque. A word created by a Jew who lost most of his family in the Holocaust to describe the intentional destruction of a people is increasingly being weaponized against the only Jewish state, with some of the most prestigious institutions in the world helping confer legitimacy on the charge.
And there are consequences to redefining genocide far beyond the damage done to the word itself.
Hamas has spent years fighting from a densely populated civilian environment and operating military infrastructure in civilian areas. The more successfully civilian casualties can be transformed into evidence of genocide, the greater the incentive for terrorist organizations to place civilians in harm’s way.
Instead of promoting peace, this prize risks rewarding Hamas’s civilian-shield tactics. More innocents will die, not fewer.
Nor will Israel be the last democracy to confront this problem. American troops have fought — and will fight again — enemies who hide among civilians, operate from civilian infrastructure, and exploit civilian deaths for propaganda purposes. This is how Islamists operate, and watching Hamas be rewarded will only encourage the practice more.
ISRAEL CUTS TIES WITH UN SECRETARY-GENERAL AFTER GUTERRES ADDED COUNTRY TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE BLACKLIST
There are reasons international law distinguishes among civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide. Now that the enemies of Israel and the West have erased those distinctions, Israel will not be the last country accused of trying to destroy a people when it is fighting a terrorist army embedded among them.
The next country and military to face these false accusations will inevitably be ours.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
