From Abu Samir's donkey to the Nobel Peace Prize: the story of Navi Pillay and justice delayed

Writer: Jamal Zaqout

From the house of Sabri Gharib “Abu Samir” in Beit Ijza to the Nobel Peace Prize: a story that summarizes the conflict between the occupying power and the right of man to his land, and between the logic of force and the responsibility of international law.

South African judge Navi Pillay's winning of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize is an event that goes beyond honoring her long legal and judicial career. It carries a political and moral message at a moment when the international law system is under unprecedented pressure, and the gap is widening between the principles on which the international system was founded after World War II, and its inability to protect peoples from wars, occupation, and mass crimes.

The Nobel Committee awarded her the prize in recognition of her efforts to promote peace and international law, and for her role in developing the international justice system and holding those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide accountable. The award gains additional importance in view of her career in confronting the apartheid regime in South Africa, her work as a judge in international courts, her position as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and her presidency of the independent international commission of inquiry concerned with the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, between 2021 and 2025.

But the most important significance of this award does not lie in the biography of an exceptional personality alone, but rather in the question it poses to the world: What is the value of international law if its application remains subject to the balance of power? What is the meaning of peace if it is not accompanied by justice and accountability for those who violate human rights?

From resistance to apartheid to Palestine

Navi Pillay's experience gains meaning from its historical connection to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Because she grew up under that regime, she knew how laws and institutions turn into tools of discrimination and exclusion when stripped of their human content. It then contributed, through its international judicial work, to establishing principles of accountability for international crimes, including the recognition of rape and sexual violence as acts that may constitute part of the crime of genocide, according to its legal terms.

In the Palestinian case, her work gained a special dimension through her chairmanship of the international investigation committee that concluded in its 2025 report that Israel had committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. The report was based on an assessment of the evidence and facts, including the extent of killing, starvation, and destruction of health infrastructure, and statements by Israeli officials.

In this context, the award appears to be a confirmation that defending the rights of Palestinians is not a marginal issue or an exception to the rules of international law, but rather a test of the universality of these rules. If international justice is worth defending when it comes to victims somewhere, it is also worth defending when the victims are Palestinians, regardless of the identity of the accused party or its political and military weight.

When the story of a family sums up the tragedy of a people

Navi Pillai is not linked to these principles through its international location alone. I accompanied former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to the home of Palestinian citizen Sabri Gharib, known as Abu Samir, in the town of Beit Ijza, northwest of Jerusalem, during her visit to the occupied Palestinian territory in February 2011. At that time, I was working with the Prime Minister, and he entrusted me with the arrangements for the visit.

The visit was to a Palestinian house surrounded by a settlement gate separating its owners from their surroundings, in a scene that summarizes how the occupation can turn a person’s daily life into a continuous battle for survival. The house was not just a dwelling for a Palestinian family. Rather, it was a living witness to a policy that targets the land and its owners, and imposes restrictions on them that make the simplest details of life an exceptional burden.

Stay resistant

The visit, like any other field visit, was preceded by identifying the needs of the family or population center, as part of efforts aimed at strengthening their steadfastness and helping them confront the pressures and temptations that aimed to push them to give up their home and land in exchange for huge sums of money estimated at millions of dollars. This was part of a strategy aimed at supporting the ability of Palestinians to remain on their land.

This visit was only one of broader initiatives to strengthen resilience, based on the conviction that remaining on the land, in the face of uprooting policies, constitutes one of the essential forms of resistance to projects of displacement and ethnic cleansing. In this context, more than three thousand small and medium projects were implemented in marginalized areas affected by the settlement project, and threatened by more of it, including areas classified as “C” and those located behind the wall, whose total value, over about six years, amounted to about two billion dollars.

Perhaps the person who most realized the danger of this strategy to the racist Zionist settlement project was Bezalel Smotrich, one of the founders of the “Regavim” settlement association. According to its annual reports published on its website, the association focused its efforts on confronting what was known as the “Fayyad Plan,” which was launched in 2009 with the aim of building state institutions and ending the occupation, by developing infrastructure, expanding the Palestinian presence on the ground, and reducing economic dependency on Israel.

On the other hand, settlement circles portrayed these efforts as a Palestinian attempt to impose facts on the ground and control Area C. Regavim devoted its activity to confronting the development and institutional realities resulting from the plan, using various racist means to target and demolish Palestinian facilities under the pretext of not obtaining Israeli licenses. Smotrich has bragged about policies aimed at limiting the Palestinian presence, vowing to expand them to include the Galilee and the Negev. It is noteworthy that the Israeli parties are competing in their election campaigns today in glorifying their positions rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state, and bragging about the extent of their involvement in thwarting the Fayyad plan, which aimed to prepare the foundations for its establishment.

A donkey helps with steadfastness

But the most ingrained irony in my memory was not in this political conflict, but in Ibn Abi Samir’s request. He did not ask for an alternative home, nor financial compensation, nor a major project. His request was simple and painful: a donkey to help the family transport their needs and plow their land, after they were denied the ability to bring a car or agricultural tractor to the place.

This request was not a passing detail, but rather shortened the distance between the international discourse on human rights and the reality that Palestinians live under occupation. At a time when international institutions were busy drafting resolutions and reports, there was a person who asked for nothing more than a simple means to help him continue his life on his land.

The visit was, in essence, an attempt to transfer this suffering from the borders of the besieged house to the agenda of the international community, and to confirm that protecting the Palestinians is not the responsibility of the owners of the land alone. States parties to the 1949 Geneva Conventions have legal obligations, including respecting and ensuring respect for these conventions. Political and economic relations with Israel must not turn into a cover that perpetuates the practices of the occupation or allows continued impunity.

Recalling this experience today, in light of Navi Pillay winning the Nobel Peace Prize, is not merely a recollection of a memory or a passing event, but rather a reminder that the value of international law is measured by its ability to protect people in their actual lives, not by the integrity of its texts alone. In this context, one of the most important battles of the current stage is to restore the Palestinian ability to isolate Israel internationally, in parallel with strengthening the Palestinians’ ability to survive and withstand their land.

Will justice prevail for the voice of the victims?

Here the danger of the current Palestinian moment becomes clear. The issue is not limited to the scale of the human tragedy that the Palestinians are experiencing, despite its enormity, but rather extends to the test that this tragedy puts before the world: Are there still legal and moral limits that force may not exceed? Can the international community prevent occupation, settlement, displacement, and widespread destruction from becoming permanent realities imposed on the ground, and then victims are required to adapt to them as a fait accompli? Or is the world heading towards a stage in which the law is replaced by the logic of supremacy, and in which the state’s ability to use force becomes the criterion that determines what is permissible and what is not permissible?

It is this question that gives Navi Pillay's struggle for international justice its deepest significance. In this context, it represents the insistence that the law is not a privilege that powerful states grant to whomever they wish, and that human protection is indivisible according to their identity, nationality, or position in the balance of power. However, victory for these principles is not achieved by honoring their adherents alone, regardless of the value of the honor, but rather by transforming them into practical commitments, by protecting the independence of the international judiciary, respecting its decisions, holding perpetrators of crimes accountable, and stopping the policies that make the continuation of the tragedy possible.

Palestine, with what is happening on its land and the contradictions of the international system that its plight reveals, has become a test of the credibility of human justice and the moral values ​​that the world claims to uphold. In it, not only the Palestinians are being tested, but also the meaning of international law itself, and the extent of countries’ readiness to defend the principles they have adopted when they conflict with their political interests or alliances.

Will the world triumph over the logic of justice, or will the law of the jungle persist and let force decide the destinies of peoples? The answer does not lie in slogans or awards, but in the ability to stop crimes, protect the Palestinian people, end the occupation, and preserve their right to freedom and self-determination. This is the distance between the symbolic recognition of justice and the actual triumph of it; It is also the distance at which it is determined whether humanity has learned anything from its history, or whether it is letting it be repeated before its eyes, with new tools and the same victims.

Justice that is not complete without action

There are three basic implications for this victory.

First, justice is not the opposite of peace, but rather a condition for it. A peace that ignores occupation and deprivation of rights, or demands that the victim give up rights in exchange for stopping the violence, is nothing but a postponement of the causes of the conflict. Peace cannot be stabilized in the region without ending the occupation, realizing the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and establishing their independent state, and guaranteeing the rights of refugees in accordance with the relevant international legitimacy resolutions.

Secondly, targeting international judicial institutions and putting pressure on their employees is not limited to a specific case. When an institution is punished for trying to hold the powerful to account, or a judge is vilified for insisting on his or her independence, the idea of ​​justice itself is at risk. The Nobel Committee expressed the importance of defending the rule of law in the face of the primacy of force over right, at a time when the international law system and its institutions are under increasing pressure.

Third, international recognition of figures who stand up for justice offers hope, but it does not absolve states and societies of their duties. The award is neither a judicial ruling, nor a mechanism for implementing international resolutions, nor an alternative to political action that puts an end to violations. Its true value remains linked to its ability to contribute to transforming principles into actual policies and accountability.

For the Palestinians, who have long lived with the gap between international resolutions and the reality of occupation, the challenge is not to celebrate the award alone, but rather to benefit from its implications in strengthening the presence of the Palestinian issue as an issue of national liberation, human rights and international law. This requires organized Palestinian action, sustained legal and political initiatives, and international alliances that go beyond statements of solidarity to practical pressure to end the occupation and hold those responsible for crimes accountable.

Visiting Abu Samir’s house taught us that steadfastness is not a political slogan, but rather a daily life that a person adheres to when his home is besieged, his movement is restricted, and money is offered to him to leave. It also taught us that the task of politics is not just documenting the tragedy, but rather turning it into a public issue that forces the world to face up to its responsibilities.

Therefore, Navi Pillay's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize is an occasion to restore that scene: a house under siege, a family clinging to its land, and a son who only asks for a donkey to help him continue life.

There is a distance between that simple request and the international award that sums up the essence of the Palestinian issue: a people who want to live in freedom and dignity on their land, and a world that is required to prove that the law it established to protect humans applies to everyone, not to the weak alone.

Abu Samir passed away from our world in his steadfast home in Beit Ijza on April 20, 2012, but his resilient spirit remains immortal. His story of defiance and steadfastness remains a lesson and a beacon for generations planted like olive trees in our country, as well as for all free people in the world.