The Nobel Peace Prize for Pillay and the misuse of international law

We must acknowledge the embarrassment. While the Nobel Prize is an award with ambiguous aspects and may be regarded as the pompous gala of the Lutheran ethical state in the self-righteous ball of the Scandinavian monarchies, for us, friends of Israel’s ‘war criminals’, the fact that this year’s honour has been bestowed upon someone like Navi Pillay, under the banner of peace, is something of a mess. Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Foreign Minister, invoked Joseph Goebbels, who, he suggested, might be laughing from hell, and both Sa’ar and Goebbels are entitled to their respective roles. Trump, eagerly awaiting the go-ahead to livestream the execution of the Fort Hood mass murderer, has added fuel to the fire in his own way. A futile obsession. The American president lost any claim to credibility long ago. But this South African lawyer and jurist of venerable age, who emerged from the hell of racism and white colonial supremacy, this friend of Nelson Mandela, enemy of apartheid, and prosecutor of Rwanda’s serial rapists, in her journey spanning almost a century—from the dispossessed province of Natal to the practice of international law across the globe—does not come across as just any run-of-the-mill activist who has run away from home, nor as a morally exhausted spokesperson for the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic crusade; she is not just any Francesca Albanese, nor does she seem the sort to insult the hostages still in the hands of Hamas’s captors. Of course, Hamas has welcomed the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice. And it is easy to see why.

The main weapon in the struggle – indeed, in the war – against Israel today is the accusation of genocide against the Palestinian people. It is an effective weapon because it is not wielded solely by Hamas militants, the mullahs in Tehran, the Lebanese Party of God, or jihadists and terrorists scattered across other fronts. The accusation of genocide has burst through the front door of legitimate criticism, in the name of international law and good conscience; it is wielded by a section of the Jewish dissident community and by the entire Western opinion movement that condemns and demonises Netanyahu. And they must brace themselves for the post-election surprise: whether the hated Bibi wins or loses, nothing substantial will change in the running of the State of Israel. Pillay’s Nobel Prize marks the closing of a circle, the establishment of a fixed point, the declaration that it is ‘courageous’ to condemn Israel, its army, its overwhelmingly majority public opinion, and its entire ruling class, for having responded with war to an act of civil, ethnic and racial extermination of an anti-Semitic nature perpetrated by an organisation of professional assassins governing Gaza, with the broad support of part of the Strip’s population indoctrinated by political Islam, in coordination with various other fronts mobilised for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Pillay, of whom the incomparable Giulio Meotti is in the process of painting a scathing as well as ‘heroic’ portrait, is, in this sense, the perfect embodiment of a colossal and fatal misunderstanding.

Anyone familiar with history – even without extrapolating or stripping away the vague moral sense that resists the ruthless law of realism – knows that legal slogans do not act as a deterrent; they do not defend us against those with malicious intent, racists and fanatics; nor do they safeguard the fundamental conditions for peace and security through rules that lack force and are unenforceable. However, the law – which does not silence weapons nor deter murderers – can itself be a formidable political deception, an armoured intellectual weapon designed to isolate and defeat those fighting a just war. Unfortunately—and this was the crux of the matter—the choice of Navi Pillay has gone in this direction; it has found the actor who fits the script, the weapon misused to play its part in the farce: the law as an ethical tool in the hands of cut-throats to strike at the righteous.