The road of the Nobel to Gaza and the immunity Israel has lost

When speaking, on the third anniversary, of the new era that the Al-Aqsa Flood opened in the world, we said that the most important feature of this era was not only a change in political and military balances. The real change was the shaking of the moral hierarchies imposed on the world, of the order that decides who may speak of human rights and who is to be considered guilty and who a victim.

Perhaps one of the most striking signs of this change came just two days after the anniversary. The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the South African jurist Navi Pillay.

I have never attributed any meaning to the Nobel Peace Prize. From the day it began, its choices have rarely truly looked to Peace or to universal human values. The rest have been afflicted by a politicization of their own kind. But the meaning of the prize given to Navi Pillay is that it confirms a process that has influenced even the Nobel. For Pillay was the chair of the international commission of inquiry within the United Nations that reached the conclusion that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

True, the Nobel Committee did not specifically mention Gaza in awarding the prize. Its rationale was Pillay's contributions to strengthening peace and international law. But precisely this choice broadens the meaning of the prize even further. For what Pillay represents, before any advocacy of a political cause, is the idea that it is the law of the one who is right, not of the one who is strong, that must prevail.

Israel's fury at the prize in any case reveals, by itself, the political meaning of this development.

A STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE EXTENDING FROM APARTHEID TO GAZA

Navi Pillay's life story is, in itself, like a summary of the struggles for justice of our age.

She was born in 1941 in South Africa to a family of Indian origin that experienced all the discrimination of the apartheid regime. After completing her legal education she used her profession not to build a privileged life for herself but to struggle against discrimination.

She took part in the defense of Nelson Mandela and of other anti-apartheid activists. Later she served as a judge and president at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She served at the International Criminal Court. She rose to the office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Her struggle, which began against racial discrimination in South Africa, extended from the prosecution of genocide crimes in Rwanda to the investigation of the genocide allegations in Gaza.

There is a notable continuity along this line. In Pillay's understanding of law, what is decisive is not the identity of the victim but the nature of the act to which he was subjected. Whatever their race, religion or nationality, a person's life and dignity deserve the same legal protection.

Is this not, after all, the whole claim of the idea of universal human rights?

But Gaza has shown what a heavy test this claim has gone through.

WHAT THE GENOCIDE REPORT SAYS

In the report it published on 16 September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Pillay, reached the conclusion that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.

The Commission concluded that four of the five acts defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention had been committed. More importantly, the Commission assessed not only the acts but also the intent to destroy behind them.

Of course the report is not the final judgment of an international court. But it is the conclusion reached by a serious and comprehensive investigation in terms of international law. This report dealt one of the heaviest blows to the armor of moral immunity that Israel had long enjoyed.

ISRAEL'S FURY AT THE NOBEL

After the Nobel decision, Netanyahu claimed that the Nobel Committee had lost its moral compass. He accused Pillay of producing slanders against the Jews. The Israeli Foreign Ministry, for its part, argued that the prize legitimizes lies and hatred of Israel. It even concluded its statement with a reference to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

That a jurist who has devoted her life to the struggle against the apartheid regime, to the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide and to international human rights law should be linked to Nazi propaganda merely for investigating Israel's actions in Gaza is of course in itself an expression of desperation.

It is a typical example of Israel's receiving even the evaluation of its own actions by international law as hostility toward itself. Yet the very meaning of international law is that states are not the sole and final judges of their own actions.

CAN THE WEST'S MORAL SUPERIORITY, SHAKEN IN GAZA, BE MADE UP FOR WITH THE NOBEL?

Here the matter has a dimension far wider than Israel. The international order established after the Second World War proclaimed human rights, international law and the prevention of genocide as the basic principles of its own legitimacy. These principles are of course the common achievements of humanity. But the selectivity shown by Western powers in applying them has long been one of the greatest contradictions of the international order. In fact, this year's choice of the Nobel prize can be seen as a reflex aimed at repairing precisely these shaken values and protecting the Nobel's own reputation and claims.

That the United States announced new sanctions against the International Criminal Court on the very day the Nobel Peace Prize was announced for Pillay was also an extremely meaningful coincidence that would give the Nobel a new way out.

On one side, a jurist rewarded for defending international law; on the other, a superpower imposing sanctions on the court that tries to apply international law.

In its decision the Nobel Committee specifically emphasized that the international legal order is under heavy pressure. It drew attention to the fact that the replacement of law by power politics threatens world peace.

This observation shows that the truth Gaza has shown the world has begun to be reflected in the language of international institutions too.

THE DEBT GAZA DOES NOT IMPOSE ON THE WORLD

There was a point I insisted on in my October 7 articles. Starting from the injustice it has suffered, the people of Gaza do not impose on the world an infinite moral debt owed to them. They do not turn their own victimhood into a justification for subjugating others. On the contrary, in the midst of all this destruction, they appeal to the common conscience of humanity.

What Gaza has shown the world is that victimhood need not produce a new right to domination. The injustice suffered by one people cannot justify other peoples suffering the same injustice. Respect for the victims of the so-called Holocaust does not make the lives of the children in Gaza any less valuable. The law that condemns the genocide in Rwanda must investigate the genocide allegations in Gaza with the same seriousness.

Pillay's Nobel prize shows that along this line there is at least a revival. This prize is not a court ruling on Israel's guilt. But it is the honoring, with the world's best-known peace prize, of the chair of an international inquiry that characterized Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, for her services to international law.

This alone carries a historic meaning. And Israel's reaction makes that meaning more visible. For Israel's real objection is less to whom a prize was given than to the fact that its own actions can be evaluated by universal legal standards.

This is one of the most important features of the new era opened by the Al-Aqsa Flood: the moral immunity claims of the holders of power no longer meet with acceptance as easily as before.

In return for all the heavy prices it has paid, the revealing questions Gaza has put to the world can no longer be postponed. Are human rights truly for everyone? Does international law truly bind all states? Does the prevention of genocide consist only of condemning the crimes of the past, or does it also require intervening in what is happening today?

Navi Pillay's Nobel is a sign that these questions are now being asked at the center of the world.

Thus another meaning of the horizon of freedom that Gaza has opened to humanity becomes fully apparent: justice is not a favor that the powerful bestow on others, but a universal principle before which the holders of power too must give account.