Our Wednesday News Analysis | Navi Pillay, head of UN commission that accused Israel of genocide, wins Nobel Peace Prize

South African-born jurist and former UN human rights chief Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay sits at the Nuremberg Forum in Nuremberg, Germany, on October 9, 2026, after being awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. (Daniel Karmann/dpa via AP)

OSLO, Norway — The South African-born jurist and former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, who presided over a commission that declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for what the committee described as her efforts to promote peace and international law.

Her win is sure to be seen as a stinging, high-profile rebuke to US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of a UN commission she led that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Both leaders also have been highly critical of the institutions where Pillay has worked, with Israel previously accusing her of being a “Hamas proxy” with a long history of vehemently anti-Israeli and antisemitic positions.

"The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee said it sought to strengthen international law amid conflict.

… the award was a message to those seeking to undermine “the international rules-based system and the institutions.”

At a time when the number of wars and conflicts is rising, and when judges and institutions of international law are under political attack,
the Nobel Committee wishes to issue a reminder that the ability to resolve conflicts without force or violence is dependent on the international rule of law ...

'An international legal system in which war criminals are held to account, and the victims of abuse see justice served is a precondition for a peaceful world.'

Pillay is currently serving as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the United Nations, in the ongoing genocide case against Myanmar."

Pillay’s work “is a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world,” said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in announcing her win in Oslo, Norway. She is currently an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice.

Israel slammed the decision as a “grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”

Pillay, 85, received the news while attending the Nuremberg Forum, a gathering to discuss international law in Nuremberg, Germany, the location of the trials of Nazi war criminals that helped lay the foundations of international law.

“Firstly, at this venue, your applause means a great deal to me,” she said to a standing ovation. “You know, you don’t want to receive an award, prize or anything unless the public agrees that you deserve this.”

And joking, she added: “But being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify this information.”...

Read more: Navi Pillay, head of UN commission that accused Israel of genocide, wins Nobel Peace Prize

___________________

NO STATE HAS A ‘RIGHT’ TO EXIST – LEAST OF ALL AN APARTHEID, GENOCIDAL STATE LIKE ISRAEL

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2026-10-12/state-right-exist-apartheid-israel/

By Jonathan Cook
Published October 12, 2026

After the Greens passed a motion declaring ‘Zionism is racism’, every establishment journalist is suddenly playing dumb about the most elementary of issues in international law

Israel has no right to exist. That’s the position in international law. It has nothing to do with hatred of Israel or antisemitism.

In fact, no state — none — has a “right” to exist, including states busy extolling their democratic credentials.

"Israelis have a right to exist – they have a right not to be oppressed, ethnically cleansed, genocided – and the state that represents them is legitimate
so long as its role is to protect them from these kinds of threats. So long as it provides them with a degree of dignity and security.

But Israelis lose the right to maintain their state as it is if that state is used to oppress, ethnically cleanse, or commit genocide against another people, like the Palestinians.
Then it becomes an illegitimate state, just like apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany. It must be reconstituted in ways that regain its legitimacy."

That is not “singling out” Israel.

If the UK had a “right” to exist, for example, it would mean that Scotland could not be allowed to vote for independence. Why? Because such a vote would break up the UK. It would be a violation of the UK’s supposed “right” to exist as the UK.

Which is precisely why the UK has no “right” to exist.

Peoples have a right to exist. When that right is abused, it invariably involves very serious violations of international law – often through crimes such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide.

States, by contrast, don’t have a “right” to exist. They simply do exist as a matter of fact – until they suddenly don’t. Like apartheid South Africa. Like Rhodesia. Like Czechoslovakia. Like Yugoslavia. Like Nazi Germany.

This is so obvious it should not even need stating.

Were states to have a “right” to exist, completely arbitrary factors such as their borders, demographic make-up and political institutions would be sacrosanct. Inviolable. It would be impossible for minorities to secede, for territories to be transferred, for apartheid structures to be overturned . Any such change would be a transgression of the state’s “right to exist” as it is.

And yet every single journalist employed by an establishment media outlet is suddenly playing dumb on this most elementary of issues. They’ve all suddenly had a collective lobotomy. They insist Israel must be the exception to the rule that no state has a “right” to exist.

Watch, for example, the BBC’s Nick Robinson berating Green party leader Zack Polanski for refusing to affirm Israel’s “right to exist”. Polanksi correctly argues instead that Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in equality...

Read more: No state has a ‘right’ to exist – least of all an apartheid, genocidal state like Israel

___________________

‘BY THE WAY, THE WORLD IS NOT STOPPING US’: THE SECRET OF ISRAEL’S ‘SUCCESS’

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/by-the-way-the-world-is-not-stopping-us-the-secret-of-israels-success/

By Jeremy Salt
Published October 10, 2026

Having tried and failed twice so far to destroy Iran, the US and Israel can be relied upon to throw everything into the next attack.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Design: PC)

As the slaughter continues across Palestine, Smotrich threatens Egypt. If it dares attack Israel, there will be no Sinai, by which he means it will suffer the same fate as Gaza.

"Thousands of Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza since 2006 before Hamas launched its response on October 7, 2023.
If civilians were killed on that day, it is because, in the interplay between occupation and resistance,
civilians are always killed and always in far greater numbers on the side of the oppressed.

Had a multinational military force been sent to Gaza to protect the Palestinians, Israel would have had to choose between confrontation and withdrawal,
but this option wasn’t even considered by an ‘international community’ committed to upholding the international law Israel was smashing.
If direct action had been taken to stop this openly flaunted genocide, tens of thousands of Palestinian lives could have been saved.

As the murderous fanatic Smotrich says, ‘and by the way, the world is not stopping us.’
At some time in the future, that could be the epitaph on Israel’s tombstone: the world did not stop us, and look where we are now."

In the same speech, he refers to the clearing above and below the ground of south Lebanon.

‘They ’-the ethnically cleansed Lebanese – won’t be coming back, and in the end it will be ours, Smotrich said. “And by the way, the world is not stopping us,” he crowed.

Herein lies the reason why the wrongly named ‘Palestine problem’ (the problem is and always was Zionism and Israel) has metastasized to such a catastrophic level. The world is not stopping Israel and never did stop it. Only now, decades too late, is it waking up to the menace it has let loose at the heart of West Asia.

It is not just Egypt but Turkiye that Israel now threatens. The overthrow of the Syrian government in 2024 brought Turkey and Israel together as occupying forces in the same country, Turkey in the northwest and Israel in the south.

The final triumph of the ‘West ’, its regional allies and their Syrian proxies in 2024 was an opportunity Israel quickly grasped. It reoccupied that part of the occupied Golan Heights it had returned to Syria in 1974 and went on to seize more strategic territory along Lebanon’s eastern border as well as other parts of southern Syria...

Read more: ‘By the Way, the World is Not Stopping Us’: The Secret of Israel’s ‘Success’