President Trump may never have heard of the new Nobel Peace Prize winner, but in international law circles, Navi Pillay has helmed the global enterprise that contorts law in the service of antisemitism. The award announces that demonizing Jews and the Jewish state can be a spectacularly successful legal career strategy.
Hamas terrorists celebrated. Ghastly rights violators congratulated Pillay for “defending human rights.” Those dedicated to rejecting international law called the award a “recognition of her career …upholding international law.”
As UN high commissioner for human rights from 2008 to 2014 and chair of a permanent UN Commission of Inquiry on Israel (COI) from 2021 to 2025, Pillay spent a decade spreading blood libels globally.
Asked about signing apartheid-Israel and pro-boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) petitions — before being chosen for a UN post demanding “independence, impartiality and objectivity” — she denied signing them. Shown video of a fellow COI member alleging the Jewish lobby controlled social media, she said he had been “misquoted.” He apologized. She didn’t.
Her dishonesty extended to the genocide libel. After a February 2024 International Court of Justice preliminary ruling, Pillay said: “the highest judicial organ of the United Nations has ruled decisively on the matter, finding genocidal intent.” The ICJ president took the highly unusual step of repudiating that claim on the BBC.
Her final COI report in fall 2025 accused Israel of genocide, drawing on her cadre of Hamas-connected stooges and partisans ignorant of the planning and factual basis of Israeli defense operations.
Her COI reports put “terror” and “terrorist” and “terrorism” in quotation marks, name no Palestinian terrorist organization, and belittle Israel for “labelling them as ‘terrorists’.”
Whenever Israel fought back, Pillay pounced. In 2008 and 2009, after Israel finally responded to years of rocket attacks, she pushed the Goldstone Report alleging Israel targeted civilians. Goldstone recanted. Pillay didn’t. In 2014, she described three kidnapped (later murdered) Israeli teens as having gone “missing” and claimed Israel targeted and murdered Palestinian children.
She led the push to “reaffirm” the 2001 Durban Declaration’s Zionism-is-racism slander. As secretary-general of a 2009 “Durban Review” Conference, she gave the microphone to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who disputed the Holocaust and decried the “ugly faces” of Zionists. She had his speech beforehand and refused to join diplomats’ mass walkout.
Having got the COI job because of her bias, she broke every rule in the rule of law book. Hearings were restricted to anti-Israel advocates; submissions were used provided they weren’t “pro-Israel” (to use her lingo).
After Oct. 7, 2023, the worst calamity to befall Jews since the Holocaust, Pillay’s COI issued an obscene Oct. 10 statement portraying “an explosion of violence in Israel and Gaza,” rather than an invasion and slaughter of Israelis. Her COI was collecting “evidence” of Israeli “war crimes” “since 7 Oct.” — as Israeli civilians were raped, burned alive, and beheaded. As hostages were dragged to torture and death in Gaza, she denied Israel’s right of self-defense and demanded it “cease all forms of violence.” She blamed the victim, alleging the “illegal occupation” was the “root cause of the conflict.”
Pillay has met charges of antisemitism with more of the same: “antisemitism is always raised as a diversion.” Concerned Jews have “narrow” and “parochial interests” — opposed to the “greater common good.” She trades in antisemitic tropes about shadowy “lobbies supporting Israel” and “the extremist Israel lobby.”
This Nobel will inspire an army of lawyers to warp international law to empower genocidaires. The Nobel Committee has yet to say whether Hamas leaders will be invited to the ceremony.
