A Holocaust-studies center in Norway, which the government had created as compensation for complicity in the genocide, announced plans to discuss the nakba—the “catastrophe” Palestinian Arabs call the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948—triggering a sharp-worded rebuke this week.
Israel’s embassy in Oslo, a prominent Holocaust scholar in the United States and an influential Norwegian-Jewish pundit responded strongly to a lecture titled “Nakba and Holocaust as cultural traumas,” which is planned to be held on Thursday at the Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities.
Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., called the planned lecture a form of “Holocaust-inversion” and a “shocking desecration of the memory of the 6 million Jews, including Norwegian Jews.”
Contacted by JNS, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Holocaust studies center said the institution was trying to reply to all queries it has received on the matter, though did not reply in time for publication.
The lecture asks, “What meaning does the entanglement of the Holocaust and the ‘Nakba’ gain in the shadow of Oct. 7 and the war on Gaza?” The Center wrote in advertising the event.
Delivering it is Nadim Khoury, a professor at the Department of Law, Philosophy and International Studies of the University of Inland Norway. In November 2023, about a month after thousands of Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 Israelis, Khoury penned an op-ed lamenting Western concerns about Israel’s security.
“This requires arming an already militaristic society to the teeth, providing diplomatic cover for its occupation and aggressions, and offering it unconditional political and moral support,” he wrote of such concerns.
The fact that “this desecration is being undertaken with funds intended to commemorate the Jewish victims makes the center’s partisan agenda all the more offensive,” Medoff added.
The Norwegian Holocaust studies center was established in 2001 “as part of a collective settlement related to the extermination of 230 Jewish families and Jewish institutions during World War II,” the institution’s website says.
The center’s creation accounted for 16% of the 250 million kroner (the equivalent of about $42 million today) that the government had allocated towards this compensation. It is housed in the former residence of Vidkun Quisling, Norway’s Nazi-collaborating ruler, whose last name became synonymous with treachery in the English language.
Israel’s embassy in Oslo wrote in a statement about the event: “A center founded to preserve Holocaust remembrance has chosen political activism over historical responsibility. This is not education. It is moral failure. The planned events should be canceled immediately, and the center must return to its core mission: safeguarding Holocaust remembrance and confronting antisemitism - not legitimizing its modern forms.”
Henrik Beckheim, a Norwegian-Jewish author and podcaster, called the Holocaust studies center “rotten to the core.”
He told JNS: “It’s supposed to be a center to fight against antisemitism and uphold the memory after the Holocaust, so that we never forget. It’s even founded with Jewish money, for exactly that cause. But its leadership is now made up of pro-Palestinian activists working hard to undermine the Jews in Norway and even trivialize the Shoah.”
On Elpeleg, an activist against antisemitism who’s based in Norway, told the Idag newspaper: “Instead of preserving memory and helping educate new generations about the Holocaust, the center distorts, dilutes and trivializes history—a grave betrayal of facts, common sense and the victims of the Holocaust.”
Medoff noted that one of the upcoming events at the Center has as its theme the question: “How can and should we remember the Holocaust in light of the war in Gaza?”
That lecture is to be delivered by Omer Bartov, an Israel-born Holocaust scholar who has accused Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza, an allegation rejected by top historians from the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and others.
The “obvious answer” to the question, Medoff told JNS, “is that Oct. 7 should be remembered as the day on which a Palestinian Arab terrorist army tried to commit another Holocaust, and perpetrated atrocities that were all too similar to those committed by the Nazis. The Norwegian Holocaust Center’s refusal to recognize this basic truth is a betrayal of its own declared mission.”
