A Nobel Prize in Anti-Zionism

“Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell,” is how the Israeli foreign ministry described today’s decision of the Nobel committee to award South Africa’s Navanethem “Navi” Pillay its once-coveted peace prize. Did accusations that the 85-year-old South African’s life work is driven by hatred of Israel and Jews lead anyone in the Oslo committee to have second thoughts? Or was it the actual reason for making her a star for a day?As our Benny Avni writes, betting sites predicted yesterday that the leading candidate to win the prize would be Sudan Emergency Response Rooms. A Nobel to that group would turn attention to the world’s most devastating war, which since 2023 has exacted up to 400,000 deaths. Yet foreign ministries, the press, and the United Nations are focused on Gaza. Ms. Pillay is a poster girl for a myopic cabal claiming Israel is committing “genocide” there. As a Nobelist, Ms. Pillay now has a larger megaphone than she did before for her non-judicial opinions of Israel and Jews. She rose to infamy as chairwoman of the 2001 Durban conference against racism. America, Israel, and a host of European countries walked out when it became clear that the parley had become a venue for attacking the Jewish state. When the UN last month commemorated Durban, a majority of countries declined to participate.Last year Ms. Pillay resigned as chairwoman of a three-person Human Rights Council commission that was uniquely tasked with documenting Israel’s “crimes” in “occupied Palestine.” She cited age, but her younger fellow committee members also quit. The likely real reason: Fear of American retaliation. A fellow UN pro-Hamas activist, Francesca Albanese, was earlier sanctioned by Secretary of State Marco Rubio over antisemitic outbursts.Prior to resigning, one member of Ms. Pillay’s anti-Israel committee, Miloon Kothari, claimed that the group is criticized because a “Jewish lobby” controls the internet. “Some of my best friends are Jews” is a classic defense against accusations of antisemitism. As a young anti-apartheid activist, Ms. Pillay said she stood shoulder to shoulder with Jewish lawyers. So how could anyone accuse her of antisemitism?How about a long career dedicated to painting the Jewish state as uniquely evil among nations? “Poisonous venom” is how President Biden’s tsar of opposition to antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, called Ms. Pillay’s committee. The five-member Nobel awarding group disagrees, citing “a common thread” from Navi Pillay’s anti-apartheid activism in South Africa to her work in “some of the key international court cases of our time.”Established by a chemist who invented the most lethal weapon of his time, dynamite, the Alfred Nobel prize was once a prestigious claim to fame. From Le Duc Tho to Yasser Arafat, some awardees were a miss. Yet they acted in a way that could loosely be described as a contribution to peace. By fêting Ms. Pillay, the Nobel committee doesn’t even pretend. Instead, it promotes something completely different — a global assault on Jews.

A Nobel Prize in Anti-Zionism

A Nobel Prize in Anti-Zionism

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