RUTHFULLY YOURS

Norway, the home of the Oslo Accords and the Nobel Peace Prize, is proud of its democracy. Every May 17, as the country emerges from its long dark winter, the capital is alive with marching bands and colourful parades of young and old dressed in their elaborate national costumes, to mark the day in 1814 when the country’s constitution was passed. It also signalled the end of 434 years of Danish rule, which by all accounts was so benign that most Norwegians did not seek independence. (Even then, Norway was given as a prize to Sweden, which attacked and defeated Denmark for backing Napoleon, but that’s another story that lasted until 1905.) Ten years ago the bicentenary of the 1814 constitution was a huge affair.Not to let Norway’s political pride fade, in May 2024 an even greater celebration was mounted to commemorate 750 years of the country’s democratic origins. How it jumped from 1814 back to 1274 is a story briefly told on a series of billboards that stand in front of the Parliament (Storting) in Oslo. In this version, the Landslov, Norway’s first nationwide code of law, issued by King Magnus VI between 1274 and 1276, established a centralised authority for the first time over a population of perhaps 500,000, scattered across a land divided by high mountains, deep rivers and long dark winters. Consisting of four regional law books and covering marriage, property and inheritance, as well as the rules of royal succession and Christian laws, the Landslov attempted to exert control over the isolated farms and impoverished hamlets which were still vulnerable to the remnants of Viking overlords whose rule had formally ended in 1066.

How the Landslov is construed as the origin of Norwegian democracy comes down to the notion that everyone was effectively under the same law, which emphasised the qualities of “justice, truth, peace and grace, as opposed to fear, monetary gifts, hostility or alliances”. What is excluded from the narrative erected in front of the Parliament is that the Landslov attributed these virtues to the Christian laws it promulgated, which contained a prologue that emphasised the Christian faith and reflected the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Fourth Lateran Council. The Landslov would be administered through what had been local assemblies that were then turned into courts of law enforcing the new law code.

Why is the Christian heritage erased from this story of democracy, when the intention of the celebrations is to remember that the freedoms upheld by Norway are not a given but were the result of the specific history of the Norse people? Perhaps the President of the Storting, Masud Gharahkhani, a Persian, is keen to downplay Norway’s Christian heritage in order to curry favour with the immigrant minority that makes up less than one quarter of the population. Or maybe he is simply caught up in the secular rewriting of the religious history that gave the West its unique character and unrivalled democratic ethos.

Either way, the meaning of Norway’s democracy was undone by the country’s recognition of “the state of Palestine” on May 30, 2024, little more than six months after Hamas’s barbaric attack on the citizens of the democratic state of Israel. Not only did the kibbutzim and towns targeted by the terrorists receive the full force of butchery, rape, torture and kidnapping, but many of the victims of the ambush had worked hard to foster friendly relations and build economic co-operation with the 17,000 Gazans who crossed the border into Israel for jobs. That trust endured despite Gaza’s continued missile attacks onto Israel, which had been the norm since Hamas took over Gaza after a five-day battle with Fatah in 2007.

Norway’s Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr, condemned the October 7 attack and insisted on the return of the Israeli hostages, yet his firm belief that the recognition of a state of Palestine will miraculously foster moderate Palestinians and bring peace to the Middle East is hard to square with reality. In his words, “Since the Oslo Accords 30 years ago, the general approach has been that the recognition of a Palestinian state would follow a peace agreement. However, we all now see that has proven untenable. We can no longer wait for the Middle East conflict to be resolved first.” This is surely putting the cart before the horse and misreads the reason for the attack.

Gahr claims that his country’s recognition underlines “that Palestinians have a fundamental, independent right to self-determination”, but that has never been in question and has always been the basis of all of Israel’s negotiations and offers of a two-state solution, including in the Oslo Accords. Instead of grasping the opportunities of self-determination and establishing peaceful relations with Israel, Palestinian leaders have rebuffed and rejected all offers and preferred to depend on funds from the European Union, the US, and UN agencies to sustain its “refugee camps”, schools and infrastructure. More crucially, the Palestinians have followed up their repeated rejections of a two-state solution with deadly intifadas and terrorist attacks aimed at “non-normalisation” with Israel. Not even Israel’s relinquishing of Gaza in 2005 brought peace, but the opposite, becoming the launching pad for thousands of missiles aimed at Israeli civilians by the popularly elected Hamas.

With Iran’s help and with one of the highest levels of international aid in the world going to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, amounting to billions of dollars, Hamas built a network of tunnels and amassed a huge arsenal, which it stowed in the tunnels as well as in public buildings such as mosques, hospitals and schools. Meanwhile, its school textbooks and mosque sermons promoted the sacred duty outlined in its charter to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the face of the earth. That the Palestinians outside Gaza, the so-called moderate Palestinian Authority, did next to nothing to stop or condemn the massacre and kidnapping by their jihadi brothers and sisters speaks volumes about the Palestinians’ political reliability.

What has caused Prime Minister Gahr’s impatience to establish the Palestinian state? Is it Hamas’s violence and the Iranian-funded street protests that are designed to intimidate peaceful Western democracies to adopt an anti-Israel agenda which will make it even more difficult for the Jewish state to defend itself from its avowed enemies? The strategy of intimidation has worked well, as we have seen in Australia, where pro-Hamas encampments were given carte blanche by our government-funded universities, and hate-filled rallies and the defacing of the Australian War Memorial and the local offices of Senator Josh Burns and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has fast-tracked our Labor government’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

One cannot deny the noble tenor of the Norwegian Prime Minister’s news release, particularly his expectation of a Palestinian state “functioning in compliance with international law, including the UN Charter and relevant UN resolutions”. However, there are at least two glaring problems with his optimistic vision.

The first is that for many years the UN has made Israel its unique and exclusive whipping boy. The UN Human Rights Council, founded in 2006, has issued ninety-nine resolutions condemning Israel, and by 2024 the number rose to 108, more than a third of the total resolutions adopted by the Council. Not surprisingly, the UN could not bring itself to unequivocally condemn the Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, and, as a result of its “investigation” into the current conflict, has issued a statement that couched the massacre of October 7 in exculpatory language as “a response to Israeli occupation”. That Gaza has not been under Israeli rule since 2005 seems to have escaped the UN.

Nor has the UN investigation acknowledged that the carnage in Gaza is the direct result of Hamas extending the conflict by refusing to return the hostages, embedding its fighters and arsenals in civilian infrastructure and for an extended time forbidding civilians to flee, thereby using its own people as human shields. Indeed, the latest example of the UN’s legitimation of the Palestinians’ modus operandi was plainly evident on August 21 when the International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to Victims of Terrorism, which was commemorated in the UN’s Visitor Centre, made no mention of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians that has claimed at least 1368 lives (excluding soldiers and police) since the Oslo Accords, and approximately 1000 civilian lives since the October 7 attack.

The second problem with Prime Minister Gahr’s optimism is staring him right in the face.

He need only look across the street from the Parliament to the huge installation of tents and placards that form an uneasy counterpoint to Norway’s story of democracy. The signs are clear enough: one warns that “the world will pay” if it does not support Gaza, while another shows a map of Israel coloured entirely green, that is Muslim, with the obvious message that there will be no Jews and no Israel. Another proclaimed “Down with Zionism” which is like telling Norwegians “down with Norway”.

As it happens, Norwegians are sitting pretty, with their five and a half million population enjoying the highest GDP in the world, in a land mass seventeen times the size of the Jewish state, which has a population nearly twice that of Norway. Compared to Israel, which has had to fight defensive wars since it was voted into its modern existence by the United Nations in 1947, Norway’s military history has perhaps the shortest entry in the annals of war. The Nazi takeover in June 1940, to which the Norwegians offered minimal resistance, only ended when the allied forces defeated the Germans on May 8, 1945.

Democracy is clearly precious to Norwegians, with Mr Gharahkhani himself described on his website as giving “clear and vocal support for the demonstrations and the fight for democracy, freedom and human dignity in Iran”. More than most, he would know how Iran’s dictatorial regime is not only an enemy of its own people, but also through its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, is a key player in the destruction of the Middle East’s only democracy. It is a pity therefore that he and his Prime Minister have chosen to support a Palestinian state before its people have demonstrated the desire to accept and the will to live peacefully alongside the democratic state of Israel.

Rachael Kohn contributed the article “The Language of Delusion” in the September issue.