More on Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize, from Natan Sharansky at Tablet Magazine. Is the Whole World Wrong?
This morning the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 U.N. commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. This appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza.
As Jews around the world react with despair, I am reminded of an excellent article by Ahad Ha’am, written in 1892 and titled “Half Solace.” Observing the renewal of the ancient blood libel in his own time, the great cultural Zionist notes that “philosophers know that there is no lie and no evil that cannot obtain ‘general agreement’ if only the conditions of existence are suitable to it.” Unfortunately, however, “only philosophers know this, and in the eyes of the masses, even now there is no greater authority than ‘consensus.’”
It was a general consensus for hundreds of years that Jews killed Christian children to collect their blood for the Passover Seder. In Russia, for example, in the so-called Velizh affair of 1823, 43 Jews were arrested and interrogated over a period of 12 years on charges of killing a 3-year-old Russian boy. Many spent almost a decade in prison, and some died there. Of course, the accusation was a lie, and those who survived were eventually released without guilt. But what is particularly interesting about this episode is that even the Tsar Nicholas I, who personally signed their release, remarked in a postscript to his signature that he was not fully convinced these men were innocent, because there were so many similar Jewish crimes throughout history. How could all of these reports be wrong, he asked?
Or take another example, from a very intelligent Christian activist whom I met in a Soviet labor camp and who would become my best friend. He told me that while he knew Jews no longer used Christian blood, they must have done so a few hundred years earlier. Otherwise, how could such a widespread belief have come to be?
Ahad Ha’am concludes his essay with the same question. Is it really possible, he asks, that the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right? “It is possible,” he answers, “and the blood libel proves it.” It is therefore precisely here, he says, that Jews can find a useful lesson and some consolation. We can free ourselves from the power of false prejudices and find strength in the conviction of our own moral cause.
As I write, Israelis and Jews around the world are marking the genocidal campaign waged against us on Oct. 7, 2023, and mourning the thousands of innocent lives taken that day. A genocide, according to the legal definition, comprises acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This is exactly what the sadistic terrorists who rampaged our communities, raping, burning, torturing, and murdering everyone they could reach, intended to do that day.
Yet at this very moment, the masses are busy accusing us of genocide against our enemies. On university campuses and in the streets of capital cities, protesters used our day of somber remembrance to amplify the growing consensus that we are the ones committing unspeakable atrocities.
Although the conviction that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is not new, it has garnered strength and legitimacy since the beginning of this war. In March 2024, the U.N. special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report alleging that the Israeli war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In December of the same year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did the same. Then in July 2025 came both Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, followed almost immediately by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. A resolution from the latter organization requires a two-thirds vote of its members, academics in the field of genocide studies, to pass. One would be hard-pressed to find a more reputable source for the libel.
The charge gained even more momentum in September 2025, with the conclusion of an independent commission of inquiry of the United Nations, chaired by this year’s Nobel laureate, and has continued since, with the leaders of Brazil, Turkey, Colombia, Spain, and even some American politicians joining the chorus.
To understand what is going on, we need only recall Ahad Ha’am’s observation that there is no lie that cannot obtain universal acceptance if the circumstances favor it. In our time, it was the combination of Islamism, neo-Marxist ideology, Western apathy and appeasement, and primitive antisemitism—combined with Israel’s need to fight for its very existence—that created the perfect soil in which the new blood libel could grow.
So here we are again. No, the original blood libel was not true. No, the new “genocide” blood libel is not true – even if the rest of the world seems to have lost its senses. Once again, the Jews are right.
See also, in Tablet, Howard Jacobson’s powerful essay The Big Lie, which seems to be an extension of his shorter piece in the Telegraph last week
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