By Rima Najjar
Author’s Note
This essay argues that the Nobel Peace Prize, in its current form, rewards imperial alignment while erasing anti-colonial resistance. Through recent examples — including the sidelining of Palestinian figures and the elevation of Western-aligned dissent — it exposes the Prize’s structural complicity and calls for a renaming that centers justice alongside peace.
— -
I. The Illusion of Neutrality
Established in Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will to honor those advancing “fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the holding and promotion of peace congresses,” the Nobel Peace Prize was meant to champion genuine reconciliation.
Yet its history with Palestine exposes a stark contradiction: a selective benevolence rooted in Western realpolitik, where awards legitimize elite diplomats and state actors while marginalizing grassroots resistors—imprisoned Palestinian dissidents, martyred civilians, literary figures like Ghassan Kanafani, and humanitarian activists on flotillas like the Mavi Marmara. It is a ritual that endorses “peace efforts” divorced from justice, sustaining narratives of harmony amid occupation, displacement, apartheid, and systemic violence.
II. A Legacy of Stabilizing Injustice
This pattern repeats in the prize’s fault lines, rewarding gestures that contain rather than dismantle conflict.
- Henry Kissinger’s 1973 award celebrated Vietnam ceasefire talks while bolstering U.S. support for Israeli military dominance.
- Jimmy Carter’s 1978 honor for the Camp David Accords normalized Egypt-Israel ties but sidelined Palestinian statehood, leaving millions stateless.
- Barack Obama’s 2009 prize arrived amid surging U.S. military aid to Israel and vetoes of UN resolutions against settlement expansion.
These laureates exemplify peace as pacification—stabilizing power imbalances without addressing root inequities.
Donald Trump’s 2025 nomination fits this mold precisely. Backed by Benjamin Netanyahu and allies for his role in Israel-Hamas ceasefires and hostage exchanges, Trump’s bid ignored Palestinian calls for sovereignty, reparations, and recognition. Though rejected, it underscored the Committee’s tolerance for nominations that prioritize containment over liberation, echoing a pattern where imperial narratives masquerade as neutrality.
III. Selective Solidarity in 2025: Machado’s Award and Palestine’s Erasure
Nowhere is this clearer than in this year’s announcement: the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights.” Hiding from regime threats, Machado dedicated the honor to “the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support,” hailing him as a “courageous visionary,” even though it is U.S. sanctions that have crippled Venezuela’s economy by restricting its oil exports and access to global markets.
Her ascent, fueled by her positioning as a recognizable opposition figure, aligns with forms of dissent that are legible to Western institutions — those framed as pro-democracy, market-friendly, and compatible with U.S. foreign policy interests.
Yet her vocal solidarity with Israel — backing Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party through a 2020 cooperation agreement on politics, ideology, and security, and expressing support post-October 7 — exposes the irony: a “peace” laureate who champions the very forces fueling Gaza’s siege and genocide.
Global backlash ignited, decrying the award as a “Kissinger-level farce” that rewards conservative, Western-aligned figures while erasing anti-colonial resistance — from Venezuelan analysts slamming her calls for U.S. military intervention to X users labeling it proof “peace has lost its meaning.”
This echoes the Committee’s silence on Palestine: elevating struggles that reinforce U.S. interests, like Machado’s sanctions-backed “democracy,” while ignoring those threatening its foundations, such as Gaza’s aid flotillas, and cloaking both in peace rhetoric.
To starkly illustrate this bias, consider the following contrast:
On the one hand, María Corina Machado’s elevation reflects a broader pattern in which Western-aligned dissent is celebrated while anti-colonial resistance is systematically erased. Her advocacy for U.S. sanctions and military intervention in Venezuela, coupled with her alignment with Likud and praise for Trump, rendered her legible to dominant media narratives as a “heroic” figure.
On the other hand, Palestinian activists who confront U.S.-backed Israeli policies do so at immense personal risk, often enduring solitary confinement, targeted surveillance, and assassination. Figures like Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by Mossad in 1972 for narrating dispossession through literature, and the passengers of the Mavi Marmara flotilla, killed in 2010 while attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, exemplify resistance that is punished rather than recognized.
Educational activists like Sireen Fraijeh, who opposed occupation in Nablus and survived military confinement, remain illegible to Western institutions. Even symbolic nominations — such as that of six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by an Israeli tank shell while pleading for rescue — are buried under lobbying pressure, dismissed as politicized or “biased.”
These individuals and their legacies are not just overlooked; they are actively suppressed by mechanisms that reward imperial alignment and erase anti-colonial struggle from the global stage.
This disparity reveals not a neutral standard of peace, but a choreography of recognition that rewards imperial alignment and silences those who resist its violence.
Machado’s “peace” is imperial choreography, Palestinian resistance is inconvenient truth.
IV. Nominations as a Battleground of Narratives
The nomination process lays bare these inequities, turning symbolic recognition into a weapon.
Liberal Israeli-Palestinian NGOs, like the Parents Circle-Families Forum — which fosters joint bereavement workshops — are routinely spotlighted for “coexistence” efforts. Humane as they are, critics argue they humanize personal tragedies without confronting occupation’s structures, depoliticizing Palestinian suffering.
In visceral contrast, pro-Palestine icons languish: the posthumous nomination of six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by an Israeli tank shell in Gaza City in January 2024 while pleading for rescue on a desperate phone call to paramedics — “I’m so scared, please come” — stands as a gut-wrenching symbol. Arizona State University Law Professor Khaled Beydoun, in consultation with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, submitted her bid to honor “every Palestinian child whose life has been stolen,” yet it fades amid the 338 candidates, overshadowed by Machado’s polished dissent.
This sidelining is not isolated.
UNRWA and UN Secretary-General António Guterres were also nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize — UNRWA for its humanitarian work amid the Gaza siege, and Guterres for his leadership in defending multilateral diplomacy and refugee rights. Yet both faced intense backlash from pro-Israel lobbying groups, who accused them of bias and called for their removal from consideration. Their nominations, like Hind’s, were not just overlooked —Pro-Israel lobbying groups targeted their nominations to suppress recognition of Palestinian suffering.
These patterns reveal a system where symbolic gestures are tolerated only when they align with dominant power structures, while voices that challenge those structures are buried under pressure.
V. Norway’s Parliament: A Mirror of Ideological Fault Lines
Norway’s Parliament, which appoints the Nobel Committee, embodies the ideological fault lines that shape the Prize’s selections.
In May 2024, the Norwegian government formally recognized the State of Palestine, joining Ireland and Spain in endorsing a two-state solution based on pre-1967 borders — a decisive shift away from the euphemistic legacy of the Oslo Accords toward a clearer global consensus on Palestinian sovereignty.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide framed the move as support for “moderate forces” and a necessary step toward peace, emphasizing that both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in secure, independent states.
This recognition was backed by a parliamentary majority, with strong support from left-leaning and centrist factions, labor unions, and civil society groups.
The Norwegian Labour Party, under pressure from its base, amplified calls for decolonization and human rights, aligning with the EU and Saudi Arabia in the Global Alliance for the so-called “two-state solution.”
May Day demonstrations across Oslo echoed this sentiment, with union leaders demanding an end to Israeli occupation and full recognition of Palestinian statehood.
Yet this momentum is countered by the Progress Party, Norway’s largest opposition bloc, which chairs the Israel Allies Caucus and maintains close ties to groups like the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem.
These affiliations reflect a theological and geopolitical alignment with Israeli settler narratives, and the party routinely frames pro-Palestinian solidarity as anti-democratic or extremist.
This internal polarization — between restorative justice and geopolitical fealty — renders the Nobel Committee not a neutral arbiter, but an extension of Norway’s domestic contest over empire, recognition, and resistance.
VI. Fractures from Gaza: Emerging Moral Reckonings
The Gaza genocide has shattered the Nobel Committee’s veneer of neutrality.
By July 2025, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had documented at least 186 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza and the West Bank since October 2023 — over 70% of them Palestinian — in what CPJ calls the deadliest and most deliberate assault on press freedom in its history.
These deaths include targeted strikes such as the August 2025 killing of Al Jazeera journalists outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, where seven people — including three Al Jazeera correspondents — were deliberately attacked while sheltering in a media tent.
The toll averages three journalists per week, a staggering rate that underscores not only Nordic unease but a deeper moral abdication.
Despite this, the Nobel Committee refused to honor figures like UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, whose nomination was backed by over a million signatures through Avaaz and Change.org campaigns.
Albanese’s tireless documentation of human rights violations in Gaza, and her outspoken condemnation of Israeli war crimes, drew political backlash — including U.S. sanctions — but also widespread support.
Albanese’s exclusion from the laureate list sparked global rebuke, especially as the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), a key intellectual guide for the Committee, shortlisted CPJ for its documentation of these atrocities.
This dissonance has galvanized younger parliamentarians and civil society actors across Europe, particularly in Norway, where protests surged in response to the Committee’s silence on Gaza.
Demonstrators demanded laureates who embody justice, intersectionality, and decolonization — not sanitized diplomacy.
Their calls reflect a shifting ethical landscape, one that rejects peace devoid of equity and transparency.
In this context, Donald Trump’s nomination — once framed as a stabilizing gesture for his role in ceasefire negotiations — now appears as a relic of eroding consensus, mistaking complicity for peace.
Similarly, Machado’s laurels, awarded despite her alignment with Likud and support for U.S. intervention, mask colonial complicity under the guise of democratic virtue.
The cracks are no longer symbolic — they are seismic, evidenced by mass civil society mobilizations across Europe, deepening splits within Norway’s Parliament over Palestine recognition, and global backlash against the Nobel Committee’s nomination choices.
These ruptures signal not just discomfort, but a structural reckoning with the Prize’s complicity in sustaining geopolitical hierarchies.
VII. Toward a Prize for Justice
To restore moral clarity and confront the Prize’s complicity in imperial hierarchies, I propose renaming it the Nobel Prize for Peace and Justice.
This change is not only necessary — it is entirely doable, with historic precedent: in 1968, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences was added to the original five Nobel categories, demonstrating that the Nobel framework is flexible when institutions deem it ethically urgent or structurally necessary.
Renaming the award to the Nobel Prize for Peace and Justice would mark a paradigm shift in the Committee’s values — recognizing that peace without justice is hollow, and that true laureateship demands confrontation with structural violence, not mere diplomatic restraint. Far from a cosmetic gesture, this change would redefine how global institutions understand moral courage, resistance, and repair, expanding the criteria to include decolonial struggle, human rights advocacy, and institutional courage. It would signal that peace, to be worthy of recognition, must be inseparable from justice, and that strategic moderation alone is no longer sufficient grounds for honor.
Such a revision would reshape the nomination landscape, inviting figures and movements whose legacies have been historically suppressed or rendered illegible by imperial frameworks.
Consider the following hypothetical laureates:
- Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli tank shell while pleading for rescue, whose posthumous nomination honored “every Palestinian child whose life has been stolen.”
Her recognition would affirm that innocence amid atrocity is not apolitical, and that bearing witness to suffering is itself a form of resistance. - Ghassan Kanafani, assassinated by Mossad in 1972 for narrating Palestinian dispossession through literature, whose work fused artistic brilliance with revolutionary clarity.
A justice-oriented Prize would acknowledge that storytelling under siege is not peripheral, it is foundational to liberation. - UNRWA, relentlessly attacked for its humanitarian work amid the Gaza siege, would be honored not for neutrality, but for steadfastness in the face of geopolitical vilification.
Its nomination would reflect a commitment to institutional courage, not just diplomatic decorum.
In contrast, past recipients like Barack Obama (awarded in 2009 for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy”) or Juan Manuel Santos (honored for negotiating peace with FARC) were celebrated for strategic restraint, ceasefire diplomacy, and alignment with Western interests — not for confronting the structural roots of violence.
Their legibility hinged on geopolitical convenience, not principled confrontation.
A renamed Prize would reorient the Committee’s compass toward those who challenge empire, not accommodate it.
It would elevate intersectional justice, decolonial resistance, and grassroots courage — not just statecraft or symbolic gestures.
It would also respond to growing global demands for ethical consistency, especially in light of recent controversies surrounding laureates whose actions reinforce geopolitical hierarchies rather than dismantle them — from Barack Obama’s drone warfare to Juan Manuel Santos’s post-accord paramilitarism, from Donald Trump’s ceasefire theatrics to Aung San Suu Kyi’s defense of military atrocities against the Rohingya.
In short, renaming the Prize would not rewrite its history — but it could reshape its future.
It would affirm that peace, to be meaningful, must be anchored in justice, and that recognition must extend to those who resist violence, not just those who negotiate its terms.
Note: First published in Medium
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
11 October 2025
Source: countercurrents.org