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Navi Pillay’s 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has drawn fierce criticism from Israel, the US and pro-Israel groups. The writer defends the South African jurist’s record on human rights, Gaza and justice, arguing that the award is richly deserved.
By HASSEN LORGAT
Ignore the naysayers.
When the right call for peace is made, there are always detractors. But the Nobel Committee cannot simply get off this easily.
Last year, in 2025, they awarded the prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who apparently stood against authoritarianism and was a defender of democracy. This is not to blame them for what subsequently happened when the United States invaded Venezuela, killing hundreds including Cuban security detail for Nicolás Maduro, then President of Venezuela, and his partner Cilia Flores, a former Venezuelan lawmaker who also served as Attorney General and as President of the National Assembly. But it is clear that they were drinking the Trump and global right-wing Kool-Aid.
This year the Nobel Committee is on the correct side of history. It made the right call for the Nobel Peace Prize 2026. The winner is a deserved South African jurist, Navanethem “Navi” Pillay.
She has served justice at home and internationally, guided for decades by international human rights law and battling for the marginalised. The young Navi was a fighter for liberation and a member of the Non-European Unity Movement, campaigning for justice.
In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, she, with others, sentenced dozens of people convicted for their participation in gross human rights violations.
What angered the naysayers is Judge Pillay’s leadership of the three-member UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. The other two members were Miloon Kothari from India, and Australian Chris Sidoti.
In late 2025, Sidoti was reappointed, while Srinivasan Muralidhar, also from India, and Florence Mumba from Zambia, were appointed as new members. Muralidhar was appointed the new chair as Judge Pillay’s term came to an end.
The inquiry was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2024, and published a significant report titled: “Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel”.
Some of the key findings of the report include:
That Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. This included using starvation as a method of warfare through a total siege, deliberately attacking civilians and civilian infrastructure, and forcibly transferring Palestinian civilians. It also accused Israeli forces of using sexual violence as an “operating procedure” to humiliate and retaliate against Palestinians.
On the October 7 attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups, it stated that these armed groups intentionally harmed, abused, and took civilians hostage, and committed sexual and gender-based violence, constituting war crimes.
The Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, which was created four years ago, has repeatedly documented alleged human rights abuses and violations by Israel in Gaza since the October 2023.
In 2025, Judge Pillay and her team concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza; a finding that was supported by a number of independent experts and human rights NGOs.
So who are the haters?
Let me start with those whom I think are the most influential and work my way down—but remember the timeline for ease of understanding: the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Judge Pillay on October 9.
1. Israeli government
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on X: “The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass. It has awarded its highest honour to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.
“Navi Pillay’s proudest achievement was to legitimize a corrupt prosecutor who turned to her fabrications against Israel hoping that by joining her bigoted lynch mob, he would beat a rape charge.”
Israel’s foreign ministry said on X: “Awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice. Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell.”
2. The USA
The USA was quick to react and many believe it was not unrelated to the loser, President Donald Trump.
On Friday, October 9, the Trump administration announced sweeping sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) to halt its investigations into the US and its allies, including Israel. Announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the sanctions block the ICC from US-based financial services, technology platforms, and the US dollar, giving US entities six months to wind down business with the court. The ICC has denounced the move as an attack on the rule of law.
Rubio said that the US and its people were not subject to the court’s jurisdiction, adding: “We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us.”
Their goal is to dismantle the tribunal over investigations into the US and its allies, including Israel.
Trump was outraged and on October 10 spoke out. The Washington Post reports that Trump described the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Judge Pillay as “disgraceful and embarrassing” and warned that he would “not forget.”
Speaking at a rally for Republican candidates in Syracuse, New York, The Guardian reported that a visibly angry Trump called the Nobel Committee’s decision “an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.”
Furthermore, he poured insults on the former UN human rights chief: “The Nobel prize was given out today to a liberal person who works at the United Nations, who nobody has ever heard of.”
He added that Judge Pillay was part of a small group of anti-democracy extremists who had permanently ruined the Nobel Peace Prize.
On his social media post Trump added that “she, very obviously, hates Israel.”
3. UN Watch
The anti-Palestinian liberation, pro-Israel pseudo-NGO, on October 9, 2026, condemned the decision to award Judge Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize, citing her long history of anti-Israel activism before leading a UN inquiry.
UN Watch accused her of defending a colleague’s allegedly antisemitic remarks. Executive Director Hillel Neuer argued that honouring Pillay undermines universal human rights, impartiality, and fairness. UN Watch concluded that the award rewards bias rather than advancing peace.
4. The South African Zionist Federation
The South African Zionist Federation condemned Judge Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize, saying her UN inquiry “refused to stand behind the Israeli women raped” on October 7 and ignored evidence “the UN’s own envoy found reasonable grounds to believe it happened.” It argued that “there can be no peace built on the silence of survivors,” and called the award “a disgrace to everything it claims to stand for.”
Discussion
One must try to understand why the fugitive from international law was upset that Trump did not win this time. Netanyahu lobbied for him and dated the nomination letter for Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize July 1, 2025, then posted and shared the announcement on X around July 7–8, 2025, via the Prime Minister of Israel’s account.
Thus, Judge Pillay’s win was a high-profile rebuke to Trump and Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the UN commission she led on Gaza.
In contrast to the venomous hate being spewed for a human rights defender, Judge Pillay showed grace.
Watch when Judge Pillay responded when she received a surprise phone call from Kristian Berg Harpviken, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, informing her that she had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. That is pure class. The video can be seen here.
But as I conclude, I think I must respond upfront to the libellous claims against Judge Pillay ignoring rape claims. As raised above, this accusation emerges from UN Watch and the SAZF. Rape—are they serious?
If they are, they have clearly not been following her work on the subject, as she has a long track record of investigating and ruling on it.
I would rather that others speak on this subject from a Palestinian perspective. In her now uncensored speech at the Oxford Union, Susan Abulhawa (28 November 2024) pointed out the duplicity of elites when it comes to Palestinian suffering. She said, for instance, that there would be no genocidal denial if the roles were reversed between Jewish people and Palestinians, adding:
“If Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh and others;
if Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, or to undergo C-sections or leg amputations without anaesthesia; if we destroyed their children and then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women and then posed in their lingerie…”
The now uncensored full video can be found here.
For this piece, I will reference at some length BettBeat News, which details further the silence surrounding the rape of Palestinians and their worth as humans.
Professor Karim Bettache’s piece, “The Cornell 7, Times a Million, in Palestine. Who Is Talking About Them?”, is highly recommended. It was written against the backdrop of intense Western coverage of an alleged gang rape at Cornell University, and he uses this case to point out the near-total silence on documented sexual violence against Palestinians. His piece is preceded by this content warning: “this piece describes sexual violence, including against children. It is direct and it is graphic because softening the language has itself been part of how the silence is kept. Reader discretion is advised.”
The SAZF’s highlighting of rape is insincere: it valorises Israeli victims while silencing Palestinian ones. While Israeli campaigners speak of rapes allegedly committed by Hamas on October 7, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry formally added Israeli security forces to its list of parties credibly suspected of conflict-related sexual violence—verifying cases affecting men, women, boys, and girls. It concluded that forced public stripping, sexual harassment, threats of rape, and sexual assault “de facto form part of the Israeli Security Forces’ standard operating procedures towards Palestinians.” Named locations include Sde Teiman, Etzion, Megiddo, Ofer, Ramla, Hasharon, Shatta, Nafha, Damon, and Gush Etzion police station.
The New York Times
Even The New York Times broke its usual pliant stance in May 2026, detailing the pattern: a woman shackled naked to a metal table while soldiers raped her over two days, filming it and threatening to publish the photos if she refused to cooperate with intelligence. It described the sexual abuse of children. It described a detainee who said he had been held down, stripped, blindfolded and handcuffed, and that a dog had then been summoned by its handler and encouraged in Hebrew to mount him; when he tried to push the animal off, it penetrated him, while soldiers around him laughed and took photos.
Israel’s response called the column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.”
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Karim notes what the column did not contain: no denial of specific facts, no call for independent investigators, no offer to let the UN into prisons it bars. “Just a rhetorical flourish,” he writes, “reaching for the vocabulary of antisemitism to shield the vocabulary of rape.”
Writing under the sub-heading, “The Right to Rape”, Karim, deals with the official endorsement and impunity that are the norm. Five soldiers indicted over a severe assault at Sde Teiman had charges dropped by March 2026. When soldiers were first detained, mobs including Knesset members stormed two military bases to stop the arrests. Asked in the Knesset whether it was legitimate to penetrate a Palestinian prisoner with a stick, Likud’s Hanoch Milwidsky answered: “Yes, if the prisoner is Nukhba, everything is legitimate. Everything.”
The central testimony deals with the case of one Palestinian woman testified that she was tied naked to a bed, blindfolded, legs spread, waiting—but was not raped because “in the bed next to hers lay an eleven-year-old Palestinian girl, and the soldiers were obsessively busy with her instead.” She said she would rather have been raped herself than listen to the child calling for her parents through the night.
The racial hierarchy of grief
For Karim, the asymmetry is racial: “A Palestinian woman does not register, in the Western moral imagination, as a woman in the full and grievable sense that an American college student does.” The SAZF feeds this racialised framing of who counts as a deserving victim.
If you think Karim only criticises Zionists, you are wrong. He turns his critique into allies and anti-imperialists as well: “We will post about an airstrike… We find it noticeably harder to post the sentence “Palestinian children are being raped in Israeli prisons, systematically, on camera, with impunity, and the men doing it are walking free. Even anti-imperialist YouTube channels avoid the topic—proving the taboo runs deeper than ideology.”
He then turns to the reader: Picture your daughter, sister, or mother in that position—hooded, stripped, raped by uniformed men who film it and laugh, while the state calls reporters antisemites and your government sends the weapons. Karim takes nothing from the Cornell victim; he asks for more. The baseline owed to a woman in New York is owed, undiscounted, to the woman in Gaza, to the eleven-year-old beside her, to the man held down for the dog, to the thousands who will never trend. Until then there is no moral baseline—only a membership scheme, and the fee is paid in skin colour.
Who is talking about them? Let it be you.
Conclusion
I hope that I have shown that Judge Pillay is made of sterner stuff — principled and good-humoured. She was schooled in the South African struggle and, as a woman of substance, brings both lessons: how to beat racism, and how to confront the violence against women and all the people under the sun.
She hails from the poverty-stricken, working-class neighbourhood of Clairwood, south of Durban. From there to the global stage as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Judge Pillay’s journey is a testament to the power of resilience, courage, and an unwavering commitment to justice.
She broke barriers as the first Black woman to open her own law practice in Natal in 1967, defending those who dared to resist apartheid. She helped found Equality Now and served in South Africa’s Women’s National Coalition, championing the rights of women and the marginalised across the world. Through her work on international tribunals and as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, she transformed personal conviction into global impact.
At 85, Judge Pillay stands as a deserved winner — taking the prize for all those who still live in the conditions into which she was born, and who continue to resist in order to make our world better: in South Africa, our beloved continent, and beyond.
Hassen Lorgat is a media activist who has served in the trade union movement.
