Harvard Celebrates Its Boycott-Israel, Blood Libel Nobel Laureate

Harvard University is cheering a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is being widely denounced elsewhere as a bigot.

The Nobel award to Navi Pillay was met with fury by the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who called her "a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state."

"The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass," Netanyahu said. "The misguided members of the Nobel Committee are honoring the woman who propagated this demonization of the Jews."

The executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, noted that in June 2020, she signed a manifesto calling on governments to "Sanction Apartheid Israel." Subsequently, she accepted a position chairing "a Pakistani-sponsored UN Commission of Inquiry into alleged Israeli crimes," violating the principle of impartiality.

"Navi Pillay deserves the Nobel Peace Prize like the Ayatollah deserved to be elected to the U.N. women’s rights commission," Neuer said.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations strongly condemned the prize, which it called "disgraceful."

"Pillay helped transform the ancient blood libel into a modern accusation of genocide against the Jewish state. Her commission twisted the language of human rights into a weapon of political warfare, trivializing the crime of genocide while demonizing Israel. The Nobel Committee gave the genocide blood libel a Nobel Peace Prize. Rather than reward a peacemaker, it rewarded a purveyor of prejudice," the conference said in a statement.

How did Harvard handle the news? The Harvard Gazette, the university’s owned-and-operated in-house newsletter, sent an email to all students, staff, faculty, and lots of alumni, with a subject line that read in part, "Nobel goes to alum." It links to a gushy profile of Pillay that describes her as "a seasoned advocate and a trailblazer" who "earned a reputation as a tough but fair-minded judge." Also, "in addition to being an adept lawyer, Pillay proved to be a skilled diplomat." Pillay earned an LLM from Harvard Law School in 1982 and an SJD in 1988.

The Harvard profile also includes, at the end, a promotion for, and embedded video of, a December 2022 appearance by Pillay at Harvard Law School. In the video, she blames Israel for trying to defund human rights at the U.N., and looks back on the 2001 Durban conference—the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance—as a success, mocking what she called "this huge propaganda that it was anti-Israel." The Anti-Defamation League notes that Holocaust survivor and U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos—founder and longtime co-chair of the congressional human rights caucus—called the Durban Conference "the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period."

A humbler, less self-congratulatory Harvard might be embarrassed for having produced someone like Pillay and conduct some sort of review of what went wrong in her education that it failed to avert her becoming an anti-Israel bigot. At a minimum, a Harvard that claims it wants more intellectual vitality and civil disagreement on campus might at least share with its community members the news that there is real disagreement about whether Pillay is praiseworthy or whether she is, as the Jewish organizations called her, a "purveyor of prejudice." Instead Harvard renders the Israeli and Jewish concerns invisible and kvells over its Nobel laureate graduate.

Harvard is in the middle of high-stakes litigation over billions in federal funding that turns in fact on whether the university has adequately addressed the pervasive bias on campus that caused one federal judge to rule that "Harvard has failed its Jewish students" and another federal judge to rule that "It is clear, even based solely on Harvard’s own admissions, that Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and could (and should) have done a better job of dealing with the issue ... Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did." Given that context, you’d think the university might consider being a little more careful. Maybe Harvard president Alan Garber is too distracted with his duties as a corporate director at the Vertex pharmaceutical company—where, according to the most recent proxy statement, he was paid $545,247 in total compensation in 2025 and owned 37,626 shares of stock, valued today at $19.2 million—to pay adequate attention to the matter.

Previous recipients of the Nobel peace award include terrorist Yasser Arafat and also Barack Obama. Obama provided a $700 billion subsidy to Iran, a terror-sponsoring nation that has vowed to wipe Israel off the map, in exchange for unverifiable short-term promises of a pause in work on nuclear weapons. Obama also failed to stop the Syrian war that killed upwards of half a million people and displaced more than ten million.

A 2021 Nobel peace laureate, Maria Ressa, received an honorary degree from Harvard  and spoke at the 2024 Harvard Commencement, where she "delivered off-the-cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power," according to the report of Harvard’s own task force on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, which described them as "seemingly antisemitic remarks" and observed, "In the Harvard audience she addressed, it may have seemed there was no cost to offending Jews."

Harvard, its expensive lawyers, and Garber, who is scheduled to appear at Harvard Hillel on Sunday, claim the situation has improved since 2024, but almost each week there seems to be another incident that casts doubt on such claims.

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