Features
“Agent Sonya” – the story of the Soviet Union’s most important female spy
Reviewed by BERNIE BELLAN I happened to have the radio on one Saturday afternoon – more as background noise than anything, when Elanor Wachtel’s CBC program on books, “Writers & Company”, came on. Normally I don’t pay attention to Wachtel’s program because it requires paying complete attention to the radio – something which I rarely do unless I’m out for a walk. However, as soon as Wachtel began to introduce her guest, a writer by the name of Ben Macintyre, the subject matter immediately grabbed my interest. Here is how she introduced Macintyre:
“Mrs. Len Beurton of Great Rollright, a tiny village in the Cotswolds, was an apparently ordinary housewife and mother of three, famous for her home-baked scones.
“In reality, she was Agent Sonya, a top Soviet operative, transmitting plans for the atomic bomb from an outhouse in her Oxfordshire garden. Her real name was Ursula Kuczynski and her intelligence work took her from her native Germany to Shanghai, Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Poland, Switzerland and England.
“Ursula’s eventful life is the subject of Ben Macintyre’s compelling new book. The British journalist is known for his bestselling accounts of international espionage — stories of intrigue, romance, betrayal, war, loyalty and conflicted morality. Over the past 30 years, he’s produced a dozen engaging, authoritative studies of high-profile figures ranging from Britain’s famed double agent Kim Philby to Moscow’s Oleg Gordievsky, who spied for Britain. He is also currently a columnist and associate editor for the Times U.K.”
As I listened with rapt interest to Macintyre describing the life of “Agent Sonya” I was determined to read his book – and I did, in less than a week.
Now, while I have somewhat of an interest in spy thrillers, including several I’ve read by Daniel Silva who features an Israeli spymaster by the name of Gabriel Allon (after being turned on to Silva two years ago during one of the meetings of the book club this paper co-sponsors with the Rady JCC, when our brilliant convener Sharon Freed who, unfortunately died much too young, included Silva’s “Rembrandt Affair” on the reading list that year), I much prefer reading non-fiction accounts of espionage, especially when they’re about the Mossad.
So, when Macintyre began to relate the story of an incredibly successful female spy for the Russians whose story has gone relatively unreported – and then happened to remark that she was Jewish to boot – well, he had me hooked.
Sonya Buerton (born Ursula Kuczynski, a.k.a. Sonya Hambuerger) was one of those rare individuals who not only succeeded brilliantly at her craft, she managed to live out her days dying a natural death in Moscow in the 1970s. That she survived the Stalin era in itself is rather extraordinary as Stalin’s paranoia led him to purge the ranks of his spy network on an ongoing basis – including a good many of the agents who had nurtured Sonya’s own career.
The fact that Ursula Kuczynski was born into an upper class Jewish family in Berlin in 1908 is something that I found most intriguing. The often pivotal roles that many Jews played in the spread of communist ideology in the first few decades of the 20th century is something that is widely known, but reading about someone who came from quite a prosperous family and who chose to commit herself to the pursuit of an ideology that was essentially antithetical to her own upbringing – and remained absolutely committed to that vision throughout her life, is not easy to understand.
Having experienced the chaos of the Weimar Republic in Germany one might well comprehend how someone as intelligent and well-educated as Ursula would have been drawn to communism in her late teens – at a time when Germany was being polarized into two camps – fascist and communist. It doesn’t seem, however, that the Kuczynski family’s being Jewish had much to do with what eventually became a thoroughly unquestioning loyalty to Soviet Communist ideology on the part of everyone of its members, including Ursula’s father, brother, and four sisters. That Ursula remained committed to communism throughout her life, however, despite all the betrayals of its goals perpetrated by Stalin and his disciples, is much more difficult to understand.
Macintryre doesn’t spend much time exploring the lure that communism held for Jews, but what I found particularly unsettling is how each member of this family was able to rationalize Stalin’s atrocities. Further, when the Russian Foreign Minister Molotov and his German counterpart Von Ribbentrop signed their non-aggression pact in 1939, the fact that so many communist sympathizers were able to twist themselves into pretzels defending a total betrayal of everything they had been espousing when it came to fighting fascism is really an indication how easily communist sympathizers could justify a 180 degree reversal in thinking without much compunction.
Ursula’s life, as told by Macintyre, was thoroughly documented throughout her lifetime, by her and by others, who kept detailed accounts all through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. It turned out that Ursula was actually an excellent writer and her journals were not only detailed and very readable, when she eventually managed to escape to the Soviet Union shortly after the end of World War II, she managed to turn her fine writing talent into a craft as a writer of spy thrillers under the pen name “Ruth Werner”. (Her books, written in Russian and translated into several languages, actually sold quite well. As Macintyre notes, Ursula was merely one more former spy who was able to use their own experiences in order to turn out masterful spy novels. Included in that group also were Graham Greene and John Le Carré.)
Yet, as much as Ursula’s being Jewish does not play a central role in “Agent Sonya”, consider this: Her first marriage was also to a fellow Jew, an architect by the name of Rudolf Hamburger. Hamburger himself had no interest in Ursula’s communist leanings early on, and he was rather successful as an architect. But, in one of the most surprising twists in the story, once he and Ursula moved to China, where he helped to design some of the famous buildings along Shanghai’s Bund, and Ursula was first approached with the idea of becoming a Russian spy, even all the while that their marriage was falling apart, Hamburger was gradually transforming into a communist himself.
Further, even after Ursula left him – and the child that she bore while married to him, Hamburger became convinced that he too had to become a Russian spy! All the while he still loved Ursula too, even after he learned that she had become pregnant by another man and then again, by yet a third man.
It was in China that Ursula became a full-fledged Russian spy – with a change of name to Sonya. Several characters played key roles in leading to Ursula’s gradual induction into the world of Soviet espionage, including an America writer by the name of Agnes Smedley – a larger than life character who eventually became a leading apologist for Mao Tse Tung’s totalitarian rule.
The cast of characters in “Agent Sonya” is riveting. What Macintryre does so brilliantly is describe how ordinary individuals who would not stand out in any exceptional way possess the key ingredients that it takes to be a successful spy, including, among others: resourcefulness, an exceptional ability to lie one’s way through any situation, and what Ursula Kuczynski apparently possessed in spades: an ability to thoroughly compartmentalize one’s life.
Here we have a woman who, on the one hand, is a capable housewife – and mother – to three different children, by three different men no less! (and the children actually move with her from time to time as she’s relocated by her Soviet spymasters to different locations around the world, including Manchuria, Poland, Switzerland, and finally Britain), at the same time as she is able to insinuate herself into the upper echelons of enemy administrations wherever she is based.
In one passage that I found particularly compelling, “Sonya” describes how difficult it often was for her to sleep – and dream, without finding all the contradictory aspects of her various secret lives running up against one another. All the while she did this without resorting to alcohol or drugs – which is what almost inevitably become the crutches upon which spies lean. That she was also able to move from relationship to relationship with different men – twice at the order of her Soviet spymasters, and actually have honestly warm relationships with them to the point where she did love them yet, when ordered to leave those men, embark on a new assignment, is testament to her total acceptance of her role.
Here’s another interesting note about Sonya: As much as the intelligence she provided about various enemies, including: Chinese Republicans in Shanghai, Japanese occupiers in Manchuria, and German Nazis in Switzerland, was of great value to Russian intelligence, it was when she was able to move to England in 1941 that her greatest espionage coup was to come.
Living in a nondescript farmhouse in an out of the way village not too far from Oxfordshire – and by this time her name was now Sonya Buerton (the last man to whom she was married was also a spy by the name of Len Buerton), she was put in touch with a German-born scientist by the name of Klaus Fuchs. Fuchs was a brilliant physicist who was working on Britain’s own plan to develop an atomic bomb – separate and apart from what the Americans were doing at the same time. He was, however, a devout communist and determined to share whatever secrets he could with the Russians.
Sonya became his intermediary through which he was able to pass along reams of information to the Russians that proved to be of incalculable value in helping the Russians to leap frog what would undoubtedly have taken them years more to acquire on their own. Later, he moved to the U.S. to work on the fabled Manhattan Project. It was while he was in the U.S. that he had a change of heart, however, and turned himself in as a spy to the Americans. At the same time, though, he never betrayed Sonya.
Macintyre asks repeatedly how it was that Sonya was never caught by British intelligence, despite all the evidence that had been pointing for quite some time in her direction. Although he doesn’t arrive at a definitive conclusion, he suggests that more than anything, it was the total incompetence of the head of MI5 (Britain’s internal intelligence service), someone by the name of Roger Hollis, that led to Sonya’s being able to evade arrest.
At the time there was only one woman in a senior position in MI5, whose name was Millicent Bagot. Bagot was a dedicated – and thoroughly competent spychaser, far better qualified in her position than Hollis, who never believed that a woman could be a successful spy. Bagot was actually convinced early on that Sonya was a Russian agent and she bitterly fought to keep her from being allowed to enter Britain in 1941.
There is more than a little irony in the fact that one of Russia’s most successful spies of all time was a woman who was able to carry on her espionage precisely because she was a woman, while the one individual who would undoubtedly have been able to expose Sonya was also a woman but whose abilities were constantly underestimated, just as Sonya’s were, surrounded as she was by thick headed men.
“Agent Sonya” is a thoroughly compelling read. While the fact that Sonya was Jewish may be regarded as largely irrelevant to what became the story of her life since it never seemed to play any role in what ultimately ensued, I’m sure that for Jewish readers of this book the awareness that the person they are reading about was Jewish will lead to one’s wondering whether her being Jewish played a much larger role in her story than perhaps even Sonya herself was aware.
Here’s what Macintrye himself has to say in summing up Ursula’s life toward the end of his book: “If you had visited the quaint English village of Great Rollright in 1945, you might have spotted a thin, dark-haired and unusually elegant woman emerging from a stone farmhouse called The Firs, and climbing on to her bicycle. She had three children and a husband, Len, who worked in the nearby aluminium factory. She was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a faint accent. She baked excellent cakes. Her neighbours in the Cotswolds knew little about her.
“They did not know that the woman they called ‘Mrs Burton’ was really Colonel Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army, a dedicated communist, a decorated Soviet military intelligence officer and a highly-trained spy who had conducted espionage operations in China, Poland and Switzerland, before coming to Britain on Moscow’s orders. They did not know that her three children each had a different father, nor that her husband was also a secret agent. They were unaware that she was a German Jew, a fanatical opponent of Nazism who had spied against the fascists during the Second World War and was now spying on Britain and America in the new Cold War. They did not know that in the outdoor privy behind The Firs, Mrs Burton had constructed a powerful radio transmitter tuned to Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow. The villagers of Great Rollright did not know that in her last mission of the war, Mrs Burton had infiltrated communist spies into a top-secret American operation parachuting anti-Nazi agents into the dying Third Reich. These “Good Germans” were supposedly spying for America; in reality, they were working for Colonel Kuczynski of Great Rollright.
“But Mrs Burton’s most important undercover job was one that would shape the future of the world: she was helping the Soviet Union to build the atom bomb.
“For years, Ursula had run a network of communist spies deep inside Britain’s atomic weapons research programme, passing on information to Moscow that would eventually enable Soviet scientists to assemble their own nuclear device. She was fully engaged in village life; her scones were the envy of Great Rollright. But in her parallel, hidden life she was responsible, in part, for maintaining the balance of power between East and West and (she believed) preventing nuclear war by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from one side to give to the other. When she hopped on to her bike with her ration book and carrier bags, Mrs Burton (or, more precisely, Beurton) was going shopping for lethal secrets.
“Ursula Kuczynski was a mother, housewife, novelist, expert radio technician, spymaster, courier, saboteur, bomb-maker, Cold Warrior and secret agent, all at the same time.”
“Agent Sonya” – the story of the Soviet Union’s most important female spy
“Agent Sonya”
By Ben Macintyre
354 pages
Published Sept., 2020
Available on Amazon
Features
What Attachment Styles Can Reveal About Dating Habits
How many evenings with a stranger does it take before anything reliable is known about them? Most people answer with a number and then ignore their own answer. What actually gets measured across those evenings is the pattern each person carries into every new pairing, and that pattern has been studied under one name since 1987.
Attachment research began with infants and moved into adult romance almost by accident. It now supplies the best available vocabulary for a question most people ask eventually, which is why their dating life keeps taking the same shape.
A Newspaper Quiz in 1987
Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver tested a hunch in 1987 by publishing a quiz in the Rocky Mountain News asking readers about their romantic history. They received 620 replies. Roughly 56% of respondents described themselves in secure terms, about 25% in avoidant terms and around 19% in anxious terms.
Those proportions were close to what Mary Ainsworth had recorded in infants decades earlier. A distribution found in toddlers separated from a parent for 3 minutes in a laboratory had turned up again in adults describing love affairs, and that correspondence is what made the field take notice.
The method had obvious weaknesses. Newspaper readers who answer a quiz about their love lives are not a random sample, and every answer was self-reported by people describing their own behavior in the most favorable terms available. Later work with better samples moved the numbers around without dislodging the structure, and the structure is what has lasted.
Two Axes and Four Positions
Two questions turned out to organize the whole field. Does a person hold a positive or negative view of themselves, and do they hold a positive or negative view of other people? Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz built their 1991 model on exactly that pair.
Crossing those axes produces 4 positions. Secure covers positive views of both. Preoccupied means a negative view of self with a positive view of others, which produces someone who wants closeness and doubts they deserve it. Dismissing means the reverse, a positive self-view paired with low expectations of anyone else. Fearful covers negative views on both axes, which produces wanting closeness and distrusting it at the same time.
Two axes beat a list of 3 types, because the axes explain why 2 people who both avoid intimacy can look nothing alike in practice.
Pacing and the First Month
There is no fixed amount of dates that settles the question of compatibility, and attachment position changes how quickly a person believes they have settled it. Secure people tend to form an assessment gradually and revise it when new information arrives.
Preoccupied people often decide fast and commit to the decision before it is warranted. Dismissing people frequently take longer and still leave with less, since their default is to withhold the information that would let anyone assess them back.
Separating the decision from the feeling by a fixed interval helps the first group. Deciding after a set number of meetings rather than after a strong evening will not make the assessment more accurate. It removes the largest single source of error, which is a conclusion reached inside the honeymoon phase while everything still looks promising.
Hyperactivation and Deactivation
The mechanism underneath all of this has 2 modes. Anxious patterns run on hyperactivation, which means turning up the volume on distress to draw a partner closer. Avoidant patterns run on deactivation, which means suppressing the signal entirely to keep distance manageable.
In early dating this shows up in small behaviors. Hyperactivation shows up as checking your phone every few minutes after an unanswered message, and as the escalation of a minor scheduling conflict into something larger. Researchers call the wider category protest behavior, and it covers everything from pointed silence to deliberately provoking a reaction. Deactivation produces the pleasant evening that goes nowhere and the topic changed each time a real question arrives.
Both patterns are attempts to manage the same discomfort, pointed in opposite directions. The deactivating version accounts for most of what people mean when they call someone emotionally unavailable.
The Anxious-Avoidant Loop
The most documented pairing in the literature puts a hyperactivating person with a deactivating one. Fearful-avoidant attachment complicates the picture further, since one person can run both strategies in sequence and produce the same loop without a partner’s help. Each strategy strengthens the other. Pursuit triggers withdrawal, withdrawal triggers more pursuit, and the loop holds steady for years because neither person is doing anything the other did not provoke.
The reason this pairing is so common is easy to miss. To someone whose nervous system learned early to associate intensity with love, a secure partner can feel flat. The anxious-avoidant cycle produces intensity on demand.
Positions Move
Attachment position is a tendency, and tendencies move. Positions change across the lifespan with relationships, therapy and circumstance, and a single difficult partner can push someone temporarily toward a pattern that is not their baseline.
That matters for how any of this gets applied. A person behaving in a preoccupied way with one partner may be entirely secure with the next, so the category describes the current pairing as much as the individual in it.
It also rules out the most common misuse of the framework, which is deciding early that a new person is avoidant and treating every subsequent behavior as confirmation. Two quiet weeks can mean an avoidant pattern, a demanding job, a sick parent or ordinary early caution, and the categories offer no way to tell those apart from the outside.
Reading the Categories Correctly
There is one more thing the framework cannot do, and it is the thing people most want from it. Nothing in attachment theory tells anyone which partner to choose. It describes how a person is likely to behave once the choosing is over and the uncertainty starts, which is a different and much smaller claim than the one made by most of the writing built on top of it.
An attachment style is a description of a habit. It names what someone tends to do when closeness is on offer and they are uncertain about it, and nothing in the framework predicts what any specific person will do on any specific evening.
Used that way the idea is genuinely worth having. A person who knows their own pattern can catch it while it is running, and a pattern caught mid-run is the only kind that can be interrupted. Noticing that you commit early and regret it a month later teaches you more than any number of verdicts about the people you committed to.
Uncategorized
Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
Features
What Constitutes Genocide, and is Israel Guilty?
By HENRY SREBRNIK Genocide is a grave and exceptional violation of international law, defined and prohibited by the Genocide Convention of 1948. But maybe Raphael Lemkin did us no favour in coining the word during the Holocaust. It is now used by antisemites against Israel.
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish jurist who escaped from Europe when the Nazis occupied Poland. He moved to Washington, DC, in the summer of 1942, and went on to document Nazi atrocities in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In this text, he introduced the word “genocide,” the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, ethnicity or tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).
But it’s not that cut and dried. Even before the antisemites accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, as a way of ridding themselves of any residual guilt about the destruction of European Jewry, the word had become little more than a term used by states and “human rights” groups who for one reason or another want to punish their adversaries.
Most of the time they really are talking about “ethnic cleansing,” pogroms, massacres and war crimes. By such criteria, every participant in World War II committed “genocide.” The mass killings of civilians in Hiroshima and Dresden in 1945 would today qualify. But these were acts against even far worse perpetrators of what we now call genocide, designed to speedily end the war.
What about the American war in Vietnam, and of course the almost numberless conflicts across Africa? The wars that dismembered Yugoslavia involved terrible massacres, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, but did they really meet the criterion for genocide? The numbers killed needn’t be huge. About 8,000 Bosniak Muslims were murdered in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb militias in 1995 during the Bosnian war. In the Western Hemisphere it would — and lately does — refer to the cultural and also physical extinction of pre-contact peoples from the Arctic down to Patagonia.
Are ideological attempts to kill groups of identifiable people within a state — the Holodomor in Ukraine, but also elsewhere in Stalin’s USSR — genocide? What about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia? Should we call this an “auto-genocide,” since it was perpetrated by the nation’s own mad Maoist regime? Was China’s Cultural Revolution a genocide? Millions probably died. Rwanda is an interesting case — obviously a mass murder by one class-cum-ethnic group against another, a giant pogrom involving intertwined peoples, but where the victims have now turned the tables.
Actually, there have been very few ideologically intentional attempts to destroy a powerless and helpless people, in whole or in part. Only a few qualify by that definition, the Holocaust being an obvious one, as well as the Turkish mass murders of Armenians in World War I. The allegations that Israel committed this crime do not meet the established definition and standards of genocide, are unsupported by established facts, nor do they stand up to common sense scrutiny.
A finding of genocide requires evidence of acts that are intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Israel has neither intended to, nor destroyed, Palestinians as a group in Gaza. Israel’s accusers allege genocide mostly because of the supposed number of civilians killed in Gaza. Such claims are rife with flaws. Genocide is not a quantitative crime; there is no specific number of civilian casualties that constitutes genocide.
Israel set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians. What kind of genocide is it when the population of Gaza is larger today than it was three years ago? And how could it be that Israel is trying to kill innocents when the ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties is lower than that of other urban wars fought in even less-difficult conditions?
Dave Rich, an Associate Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism, writes extensively about the intersection of anti-Israel activism, far-left politics, and modern antisemitism. He observes that people respond to the genocide charge through facts and data: Israel’s supporters take the charge of genocide on its face, as an evidence-based allegation of a crime, and try to construct the case for the defence. But there is no defence, because the charge is not made on that basis, or for that purpose, he states.
The term “genocide,” he notes in “From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism After October 7, published in Fathom, October 2026, has shed its legal meaning and become a political label, whose antithesis is “resistance.” These two terms represent two states of being: in a colonial setting, either you are engaging in genocide or you are resisting it. There is no middle ground. “Israel is condemned as genocidal, not by observation, but through logical deduction: Israel is colonial, therefore by definition it is genocidal. It cannot be otherwise. And Gaza represents resistance against the entire Western colonial and capitalist power structure.”
Maia Zelkha, editor-in-chief of Yad Mizrah, a Sephardi and Mizrahi cultural magazine, also contends that the left employs the word “genocide” as an ideological weapon. “Before Israel had even launched its ground invasion of Gaza, and before there was any evidentiary record of Israel’s military campaign,” she writes, in her article “Genocide and Its Jurors,” in Quillette, Sept. 24, 2026, many leftist groups “were already describing Israel’s response as genocide.”
On Oct. 8, just a day after Hamas’s massacre and kidnappings, thousands of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square in an “All Out for Palestine” rally to support “Palestinian resistance.” Within days, other organizations were issuing statements describing Israel’s unfolding military response as genocide, situated within a pre-existing theory of Israel as a colonial project that had produced genocidal dehumanisation. Prominent academics, human-rights organisations, activists, journalists, and public intellectuals described Israel’s conduct as genocidal.
Although the conviction that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is not new, it has garnered ever more strength since the beginning of this war. In March 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report alleging that the Israeli war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In December of the same year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did the same. Then in July 2025 came both Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, followed almost immediately by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. A resolution from the latter organization requires a two-thirds vote of its members, academics in the field of genocide studies, to pass. One would be hard-pressed to find a more reputable source for the libel.
On Sept. 16, 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza; other prominent left-wing organisations and scholars have reached the same conclusion. And finally, on Oct. 9, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 UN commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians while completely ignoring many of the world’s worst human rights abusers, including, of course, Hamas. Pillay’s commission found that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes. Yet it accused Israel of genocide. This is a staggering moral inversion. And now the award of the Nobel; this appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza. The icing on the cake!
But remember this: When a jihadist terrorist organization like Hamas applauds a Nobel Peace Prize, the moral judgment of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee should rightly be called into question.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
