Following Nazi Germany’s 1940 invasion of Norway, former Norwegian Defense Minister Vidkun Quisling agreed to serve as Norway’s minister-president under German tutelage. He was arrested in May 1945. After a three-week trial, a jury convicted Quisling of murder and conspiring with Nazi Germany. He was executed that October.
While Quisling insisted history would vindicate him, it has not. Contemporaries noted how Quisling served the Nazis while Danes from all walks of life helped evacuate the country’s Jews. Denmark’s King Christian X led resistance, even reportedly wearing a Jewish star to rebuff the Nazis. Decades after his death, Quisling’s moral compromise to the forces of evil was so great, his name entered the English lexicon as a collaborator who prioritized his own power over any moral standard.
World War II was humanity’s moral nadir. Germany and Japan confronted their guilt and decisively turned their backs to it. Neo-Nazis might exist in Germany and imperial fanatics in Japan, but the stigma of what they stand for is unyielding, and society isolates them.
Norwegians may believe that they, too, have turned their back on the age of Quisling and assert that he was an aberration rather than an archetype, but Norway never had a true reckoning. Norwegians were allowed the conceit that responsibility for the deaths of more than one-third of Norway’s Jews lay with Quisling, and not broader Norwegian society. Current events show the danger of lessons unlearned.
As Norway promotes a self-image of progressive virtue, its leadership fans antisemitism by denying its links to anti-Zionism and pro-Hamas activism. While Norway prides itself on initiating the Oslo Accords in which Israel agreed to negotiate a path to Palestinian statehood in exchange for the Palestinian leadership’s abandonment of terrorism, in 2024, Norway both recognized Palestinian independence absent any negotiated agreement. In effect, while Oslo lectures on the primacy of diplomacy, it signaled forswearing terrorism was a commitment no one needed to keep so long as the victims were Jews.
Norway later joined the Qatar-funded International Criminal Court case against Israel that made a mockery of international law and smeared Israel with a “genocide” blood libel that rests on polemic rather than fact. Completing the moral inversion is the fact that the Norwegian government simultaneously seeks to normalize Hamas, a group whose covenant calls for genocide.
Now, Oslo appears to take its Jew-hatred a step further. It seeks to criminalize any financial dealings with Jews in the West Bank or the Old City of Jerusalem. In effect, Norway’s position is that Israel must embrace anyone claiming Palestinian heritage, yet a future Palestinian state should be Judenrein. Historically, this is ignorant for two reasons.
First, Arabs flooded into historic Palestine in the early 20th century. In 1938, Winston Churchill noted, “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country [Palestine] and multiplied till their population has increased.” The following year, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed, “[T]he Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during this whole period.” Second, those Arab immigrants helped spark the pogroms that slaughtered Jews in Hebron and Jerusalem. Jordan completed the ethnic cleansing when it occupied the Old City. Essentially, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre purposely draws the line to legitimize the ethnic cleansing and, given the relationship between the Grand Mufti and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the Nazi-inspired slaughter of Jews.
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The notion that Jews do not belong in the Old City of Jerusalem and should not have access to their holiest sites is particularly galling, given the 1905 restoration of Norway’s independence after centuries of Swedish and Danish domination. What Støre does is akin to demanding that Norwegians should not live in Oslo.
Quisling went to his death believing history would vindicate him. With Støre’s ignorance of history, his rationalization of the murder of Jews, and his cavalier declarations of what should and should not be Judenrein, he shows that the more things change in Norway, the more they stay the same.
Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum, a distinguished fellow at India’s Usanas Foundation and a contributor to Beltway Confidential.