The Dalai Lama has praised and congratulated Navi Pillay for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. “You have devoted your life to the cause of people around the world who are denied their rights…. As a Tibetan, I deeply appreciate your efforts, during your tenure as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to call on China to address the underlying issues in Tibet” (DalaiLama.com, October 10, 2026).
Others think that awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize is a travesty given the fact that she has “presided over a UN commission which accused Israel of genocide in Gaza”—for waging war on Hamas in response to its horrific October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.
John Hayward writes (Breitbart, October 9, 2026):
Critics blasted the award as a purely political move intended to “send a message” to President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, since Pillay has denounced Israel for “genocide” in Gaza without corresponding criticism of the October 7 atrocities or the terrorists of Hamas.
If the Nobel committee was trying to infuriate the Israelis by giving the Peace Prize to a “Gaza genocide” activist just two days after the anniversary of the 10/7 attack, it succeeded.
“If there were an award for lies, hatred, and blood libels, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender. She’d be a frontrunner,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in response to the announcement….
“The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass. It has awarded its highest honor to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state,” said the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu….
U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer was “shocked” at the award to Pillay, given her “troubling record on antisemitism and gross breach of ethics in presiding over a notorious U.N. commission.”
Neuer reports that Pillay (shown above) was biased against Israel well before the “finding” that Israel has committed genocide by retaliating against the October 7 attack by Hamas.
In July 2021, Ms. Pillay accepted to chair a Pakistani-sponsored UN Commission of Inquiry into alleged Israeli crimes. The rules of due process require that fact-finders in the human rights field be impartial. Yet prior to accepting this post, Pillay had publicly pronounced herself, in extreme terms, on the very issues that her inquiry is mandated to investigate.
In June 2020, she signed a manifesto calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” In June 2021, a month before heading the inquiry, Pillay wrote a letter to President Biden calling to punish Israel for the May 2021 war with Hamas. She has made many more prior prejudicial pronouncements.
Can both the Dalai Lama and the Israeli Foreign Ministry and other critics of Pillay be correct about what she espouses? Yes, sort of, since compartmentalization is among our human capacities. But grateful as he may be for Pillay’s statements in support of Tibet, the Dalai Lama omitted considerations that he should not have altogether omitted in his public remarks about her.
