Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay widens Israel's rift with global legal bodies

Navi Pillay's Nobel Peace Prize has triggered a sharp Israeli backlash over her Gaza findings. The honour has deepened the clash between Israel and international legal bodies over accountability.

In Short

• Israel condemned Navi Pillay's Nobel as legitimising anti-Israel prejudice and bias
• Pillay led a UN panel alleging Israel committed genocide in Gaza
• The United States announced sanctions targeting the ICC after the prize

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded this year to veteran jurist Navi Pillay has sharpened the divide between Israel and international bodies tasked with upholding international law, a rift that has widened during the war in Gaza. The award has been seen in Israel as a high-profile rebuke, coming days after the anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war.

Pillay has spent decades in some of the world’s top legal and human rights institutions. As a young lawyer in South Africa, she campaigned against apartheid and for Nelson Mandela’s release, and later helped sentence dozens of people convicted over the 1994 Rwandan genocide. But her leadership of a UN-backed panel that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel strongly denies, has made her a deeply divisive figure in Israel.

Allegations of genocide carry particular weight in Israel, which was founded in part as a refuge for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Israel’s Foreign Ministry said on X, "Awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize isn't a recognition of justice. It's the grotesque weaponisation of an award to legitimise anti-Israel hatred and prejudice." It added, "Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell," referring to the Nazi propagandist. The reaction reflects a widely held view in Israel that the United Nations and other international bodies are biased against it. The United States echoed that criticism and announced a series of sanctions aimed at dismantling the International Criminal Court hours after the Nobel Prize announcement.

Pillay’s findings, however, have largely matched those of major human rights groups and other international bodies, and the facts cited in support of them had been widely reported. Pillay led a three-member expert panel set up by the UN Human Rights Council, which concluded last year that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Its 22-page report cited the death toll, Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid that led to widespread hunger, a policy of "systematically destroying" the healthcare system, the direct targeting of children, and "explicit statements" of intent by Israeli civilian and military authorities. Human rights groups and many genocide experts have reached similar conclusions.

The commission has also issued reports accusing Hamas of war crimes during its October 7, 2023, attack, when militants killed about 1,200 people and abducted 251 others. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government, keeps detailed records that UN agencies and many independent experts generally regard as reliable. Israel has strongly rejected the allegations against it, describing them as an antisemitic blood libel. The Israeli military says it takes extraordinary steps to avoid harming civilians and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it operates in densely populated areas.

The International Court of Justice, the UN’s top court, is investigating genocide allegations brought by South Africa, while the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Pillay is currently serving as an ad hoc judge in the ICJ’s ongoing genocide case against Myanmar and earlier served as an ICC judge from 2003 to 2008.

The commission that Pillay led was created after the 2021 Israel-Hamas war and was the first to have an open-ended mandate. Critics say such permanent scrutiny shows anti-Israel bias, while supporters say it is needed to track injustices faced by Palestinians under decades of Israeli rule. Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission or other UN-backed investigations. It has pointed to the presence of highly repressive countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council and accused it of repeatedly singling out Israel while overlooking violations elsewhere.

The commission itself drew controversy in 2022 when one of its members, Indian jurist Miloon Kothari, referred to a "Jewish lobby" in a media interview and questioned Israel’s UN membership, citing what he said were violations of the obligations of member states. Pillay later said in a letter that Kothari had been misquoted and that the commission does not question Israel’s status or its UN membership. In an interview with The Associated Press last year, after she and the other commissioners resigned citing personal reasons and the need for change, she addressed broader criticism of the panel. They have since been replaced. "We're an independent panel," she said. "People who accuse us of being antisemitic ... they twist the facts, they invent facts, falsify facts. I would like to see them challenge the report: Which of the facts that we have set out are incorrect?"

Even before the latest war, Pillay had repeatedly criticised Israel over its open-ended military rule over millions of Palestinians. In a report issued more than a year before the October 7 attack, the commission accused Israel of de facto annexation of the West Bank, which it captured along with Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want an independent state covering all three territories. The ICJ later issued a landmark ruling that Israel’s occupation of those territories was unlawful.

The commission said Israel’s continued expansion of Jewish settlements, demolition of Palestinian homes and fragmentation of Palestinian life were aimed at securing permanent control over the territory, home to about 3 million Palestinians and 500,000 Israeli settlers. Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military rule, while the Palestinian Authority administers population centres. Settlers have Israeli citizenship, including freedom of movement and the right to vote. Israel’s UN mission rejected the report when it was released, calling it part of an "anti-Israel agenda" at the international body.

Israel’s current government and much of its political class oppose Palestinian statehood, and Netanyahu has repeatedly said Israel will keep permanent control over the territories. Israel sees the West Bank as the biblical and historical cradle of Judaism and says any withdrawal would open the way for a Hamas-run state that would threaten its existence. The last substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2009 after Netanyahu returned to office. Pillay’s commission also raised concerns about possible Israeli annexation of Gaza, saying efforts to create buffer zones and military corridors were "vastly disproportionate to any reasonable military objective". It said calls by Israeli officials for the "voluntary migration" of much of Gaza’s population, if carried out, would amount to forcible transfer, a crime against humanity. Taken together, Pillay’s work and the reaction to her Nobel honour underline the deep dispute between Israel and international institutions over Gaza, accountability and the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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