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David Horovitz: The Oslo Discords
David Horovitz

Two months before Irene Levin was born, her pregnant mother was forced to flee her homeland, Norway, for neighboring Sweden. Norway had been conquered in 1940 by the Germans -- beneficiaries of the energetic preparations of local fascist leader Vidkun Quisling, who was later installed as prime minister -- and now the Nazis were intensifying the roundup of the Jews. Of the 1,800-strong prewar community, barely half survived; hundreds, including Irene�s grandfather, great-grandmother and numerous aunts and uncles, perished in Auschwitz. But Irene�s mother made good her escape, and she, her baby daughter and much of the family were able to return after the war and start rebuilding their lives, reopening the family�s clothes store in Oslo. Quisling was tried for high treason and shot. (His name, a byword for "traitor," is said to be one of the two words Norway has contributed to the English vocabulary; the other is "ski.")

Doubtless in part because of that wartime trauma, Norway has since tried to do right by its Jews, readily paying restitution and, last year, allocating more than $5 million for the conversion of Quisling�s four-story wartime mansion into the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Norway, which is set to open in 2005. Located on prime real estate on a peninsula in the southwest of Oslo, the vast building bears a certain eerie resemblance to the railway-line entrance way at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with a peaked tower rising from the center of its upper floor. (It also features a newly rediscovered bunker, complete with "Heil Hitler" sign.)

Doubtless in part because of that wartime trauma, too, "occupation" is an especially dirty word in Norwegian, which goes some way to explaining the profound sympathy for the Palestinians and the unusually low esteem, even by European standards, in which Israel is held these days. Our depressing reality is anything but black and white, and Israel is certainly not perfect: Heaven knows, the recent upsurge in civilian Palestinian deaths is deeply disquieting, as is the concomitant sense that genuine opportunities are being missed to encourage a moderation of the Fatah mindset.

But in the generally accepted Norwegian version of the past two years� conflict, things couldn�t be clearer: Yasser Arafat is the hero, Israel the villain. Arafat sought peace, Israel slapped him away. Arafat is the worthy Nobel laureate, Shimon Peres should hand back his prize. Norway gave the name of its capital to a viable peace process, Israel ensured its collapse. And thus, most crucially, the Palestinians are powerless, Israel holds the key to peace -- and it should be pressured into turning it.

Norway�s opinion-shapers don�t merely deride the consensual Israeli argument that has Ehud Barak attempting to end the occupation at Camp David and Arafat rejecting his terms and launching a terrorist war. Rather, they barely acknowledge that argument. When former Palestinian Authority Parliamentary Affairs Minister Nabil Amr last month castigated Arafat for having spurned President Clinton�s bridging proposals for a peace accord, that wasn�t reported. When Amnesty International castigated the Palestinians for deliberately targeting settlers, that was barely reported either, in stark contrast to the prominent coverage of previous Amnesty reports slamming Israel. When Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior was asked, during a recent visit to the country where he formally remains chief rabbi, why Israel doesn�t simply put an end to the occupation, and he replied that Israel had tried to do so at Camp David, the state TV interviewer responded by inquiring, with deep cynicism, as to how much longer the rabbi would be attempting to pass off that empty "mantra."

Blithe analogies are frequently drawn between Jewish suffering under the Nazis and Palestinian suffering under Israel; a concentration camp survivor, invited by Norwegian TV documentary-makers to revisit the site of his persecution, was asked how he felt about Israel doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to him. Israeli goods are on sale in the supermarkets, but no thanks to a trade union movement that has made energetic efforts to impose a boycott.

On a visit to Oslo, a few days ago, I discussed the Israeli and Palestinian narratives in several meetings with Norwegian journalists. At a well-attended and generally good-natured evening event for Oslo journalists, after a Syrian-born fellow-panelist from the Al-Jazeera satellite network had outlined Arab grievances at the "pro-Israeli" nature of the Western media, and especially his competitors at CNN, I mentioned that most Israelis consider parts of the Western media, including CNN, to be somewhat anti-Israeli � an observation that prompted a light gale of laughter. When it had subsided, I mildly suggested that if most Israelis believe something that they plainly find hilariously unthinkable, perhaps their journalistic alarm bells should be ringing. And that perhaps, too, in a country with a smaller population than Israel but many times as much land, colossal oil revenues and a singular absence of rapidly arming hostile neighbors, they might want to reexamine some of their preconceptions regarding our conflict. To their credit, these journalists, indeed most of those I met, were friendly and gave the impression, at least, of being open-minded.

My visit coincided with the September 19 suicide bombing on Tel Aviv�s No. 4 bus, and when I got back to Israel the next day, I was told that those murders had been reported with unusual sensitivity in the Norwegian media. I�d like to hope a fairer picture will continue to be painted in the future. Along with so much of Europe, Norway owes that to itself, and especially to its Jewish community, members of whom say they can no longer dare walk in the streets wearing T-shirts with Hebrew lettering for fear of being verbally, or physically, abused. It owes as much to Irene Levin, whose mother would have been forgiven for thinking that the dark days for Norway�s Jews were over, soon after the war, when Maria Quisling walked into her reopened clothes store and she was able to tell the disgraced wife of the man who welcomed the Nazis: "I�m sorry, but I won�t serve you in my shop."