There is a rising and troubling consensus that the Jewish state may be guilty of the very crime that led in part to its establishment: “genocide,” a term and concept originally introduced in 1944 to describe the industrial-scale murder of the European Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
The explosive allegation achieved a significant victory last week, with the awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to the South African jurist Navi Pillay, the head of a United Nations commission that concluded in a 2025 report that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.
The trouble with the 2026 Peace Nobel is not that Pillay is sharply critical of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war; it is that the U.N. report in question, which shockingly failed even to address, let alone condemn, the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, is rooted in such an extreme anti-Israel bias as to render her an apologist for Hamas’s terrorism and disqualify her as an honest broker.
Pillay’s award puts her in line with multiple human rights organizations and genocide scholars that have reached the same conclusion, and the allegation has significant traction in public opinion. About three in 10 American voters now believe that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, as does about half of the British public, according to recent polls.
The fierce battle over the term “genocide” is far more than a fight over the specific nature of alleged war crimes in a particular military campaign. It is nothing less than a fight for the memory...
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