Goebbels Isn't Applauding Navi Pillay – but What Israel Has Become - Opinion

Goebbels Isn't Applauding Navi Pillay – but What Israel Has Become - Opinion



Goebbels Isn't Applauding Navi Pillay – but What Israel Has Become

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South African-born jurist and former UN human rights chief Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, sits at the Nuremberg Forum following the announcement that she had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, in Nuremberg, Germany, Friday. Credit: Daniel Karmann/dpa via AP


The foreign minister's Nazi reference insults a rights advocate who condemned Hamas and Israel's actions in Gaza. His response reflects Israel's denial

Gideon Levy
FollowOctober 10, 2026



Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar did not like the estimable choice of Navi Pillay as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Like another propaganda minister, the minister, through his spokesman, issued an announcement saying that "Joseph Goebbels is probably applauding in hell."

The committee chose a model person who has devoted her life to the struggle for human rights, and Goebbels is applauding in hell, according to Sa'ar.

A woman who has fought to enforce international law, a set of laws that rose from the ruin and annihilation sown by Goebbels and his associates, receives a revolting reaction from the foreign minister of the country of Goebbels' survivors. When it comes to vile propaganda, Goebbels and Sa'ar have much in common, despite all the differences.

After all, how did Goebbels and his ilk act at the time? In 1936, Adolf Hitler and Goebbels assailed another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who received the prize in 1935 and was placed under detention. Historian Adam Raz relates how Hitler announced that Germans would no longer be allowed to receive that prize, and his propaganda minister gave orders for an alternative prize to be awarded.

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Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar attends a press conference at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, September. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi

Hitler and Goebbels claimed that Jews were behind the decision to grant the prize to Ossietzky. Ninety years later, Israel argues that antisemites are behind the choice of Pillay as laureate.

No, Sa'ar, Goebbels is not applauding. He is turning in his grave when he sees that a woman like Pillay, a determined Tamil Indian woman from South Africa, and a judge who tried people accused of crimes against humanity, and a champion against racism in her country and around the world, receives this prize.

If Goebbels has a reason to applaud, it is upon seeing what has happened to the country that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust. When Goebbels sees how the world sees similarities between what happened in Germany in the 1930s and what is happening in Israel in the 2020s, he delights in the abashed irony of history.

From hell, Goebbels is applauding perpetrators of genocide around the world, particularly the one in Gaza, that was carried out by the descendants of his victims. Pillay was the first to describe it as such at the United Nations. She also came out forcefully against the war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7. Pillay is not an antisemite, and is not even anti-Israeli. She is a woman of conscience which the world is lauding now, justifiably so.



Mourners gather around the flag-draped remains of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes after they were recovered from the rubble, during their funeral in Gaza City, last week. Credit: Yousef Al Zanoun/AP

Sa'ar's response reflects mainly on him, on his baseness and the level of his arguments. The world heard his reaction and was bolstered in its sense that Israel excludes itself from the family of nations. Sa'ar also cheapens the Holocaust. Israel, which is justifiably shocked by any comparison between its actions and the Holocaust, dares see a fighter for justice as the darling of Nazis.

But the problem is much deeper and broader. After three years of blood and ruin in the Gaza Strip, given the wide sweep of global consensus that Israel crossed the line in its vindictive campaign, Israel still recognizes only one way of responding to its critics: unbridled aggressiveness, accusations of antisemitism hurled at the entire world, assailing the messengers without casting one honest and fair look at itself.

How can one look at Gaza and what Israel has done to it without feeling a heavy sense of blame, without taking even a shred of responsibility and accepting even a tiny bit of responsibility? For Israel, the genocide it perpetrated is the fault of antisemitism and of the world, not its own.

Like a child who can't take criticism, always accusing everyone else except himself, Israel is accusing the entire world. It's not only childish – it's destructive. As long as Israel is not willing to look at what it has wrought and admit, at least partially, to its crimes, it will never change.

As long as it continues to rudely condemn, as Sa'ar has done, anyone who criticizes it, it will be ostracized. How beautiful and graceful a different reaction by Israel could have been. For example: We congratulate Pillay, we bow our heads in respect to her work, even if with regard to Israel she judged too harshly.

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