“I will never accept a world in which Jews feel unsafe.”
— Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide
Norway’s Foreign Ministry has put out a bill for consultation, expected this fall before its parliament, the Storting in the capital of Oslo, that would send Norwegian citizens and companies to prison—up to three years—for buying from, selling to, building for or investing in businesses owned by Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, including in the most ancient, revered, Jewishly significant parts of Jerusalem. Negligent violators get six months.
Norway’s law purports to address what it refers to as Israel’s “colonization policy.”
As they say in Norway: dritprat.
Set aside borders and sovereignty. Set aside self-determination and statehood. Set aside “occupation” and “settlements.” Set aside every position you may hold on Israel or its policies or even on its very “right to exist.” The proposed law addresses none of those.
It does not, in fact, address or impact the State of Israel. It focuses exclusively on trying to destroy the private lives of roughly 850,000 Jews for the apparent crime of living where Norway has decided Jews shouldn’t be allowed to live.
That is the entire law. Everything else—every Norwegian excuse, explanation and rationalization—is gaslighting. As the foreign ministry explained in its official press release: Norwegians “must not profit from or support” anything connected to Jews who live or work in Judea and Samaria.
That’s not foreign policy; that’s a twisted antisemitic purity test imposed on Norwegians.
In Judea and Samaria, of course, it isn’t only Jews who pay for this. Tens of thousands of Arabs depend for their livelihoods on Jewish-owned businesses, earning wages that run two to five times what’s available in the Palestinian Arab economy and accounting for a meaningful share of its GDP. The law’s supporters don’t particularly care about that since their purpose is not to help Arabs but to punish Jews.
Oslo wants the same thing the Nazis wanted: Judenrein territory, achieved by expulsion or, preferably, worse.
And Judenrein is the right word. What Norway is proposing is not merely comparable to what the German Nazis did. It is precisely what they did: criminalization of commerce with Jews because they’re Jews—undesirables whose very presence is intolerable.
Of course, the Nazis only exercised that power inside territory they actually controlled. Norway wants to exercise it over land which isn’t Norway’s, in a dispute it isn’t a party to, for the sole purpose of making sure Jews aren’t allowed to live in, of all places, Judea—the undisputed indigenous homeland of the Jews.
If, after the mass killings and expulsions that emptied Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East of their Jews, the refugee remnant has no right to live in the most historically Jewish place on Earth, regardless of which political entity controls it, then Jews have no right to live anywhere. No right, in other words, to live at all.
It may seem extreme to accuse Norway of being more grotesquely antisemitic than Nazi Germany, until you pay attention. From its inception, modern-day Norway has treated Jews as “undesirables.” Ethnic cleansing, defined as the eradication of Jewish life, was one of the country’s foundational beliefs well before Nazism.
Its celebrated 1814 constitution—explicitly modeled on the American and French examples, and still taught as one of the most liberal founding documents of its age—contained this doozy: Jøder ere fremdeles udelukkede fra Adgang til Riget. “Jews are still excluded from admission to the kingdom.”
“Still,” because this was a proud continuation of the ban Christian V imposed in 1687. This wasn’t a mob’s or a monarch’s whim. It was Oslo’s constitutional convention debating whether Jews were, as one of the very few dissenters argued, “human beings after all.” His colleagues, describing Jews instead as “crude, corrosive vermin,” prevailed.
By 1814, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Austria and the Netherlands had all been liberalizing their own restrictions on Jews for a generation. Norway formally incorporated its Jew ban into its foundational DNA at the precise moment its neighbors were dismantling theirs.
What Norway is proposing is not merely comparable to what the German Nazis did. It is precisely what they did.
Norway’s founding document is even more antisemitic than the Nazi Party’s founding platform, which stripped Jews of citizenship but did not ban their presence outright. Norway was Judenrein—a Jew-free polity—well over a century before Hitler’s regime existed to even coin the word. No wonder Norway claims to love the “Palestinian” cause: Both eagerly treat Arabs as cannon fodder in pursuit of their ambitions to dehumanize and demonize Jews.
Henrik Wergeland, who became Norway’s national poet, spent his final years fighting to repeal what he called “the clause of shame” and died in 1845 without seeing it done. His blind, 82-year-old father picked up the fight. The Storting finally repealed it in 1851.
Norway got a second chance, however, and seized it eagerly.
In March 1942, reinstating the Jew ban was one of Quisling’s first acts as head of his new government—not as a German mandate, but as a Norwegian initiative. Norway’s Holocaust-era laws classified full, half- and quarter-Jews so thoroughly that it went further than the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. Of Norway’s tiny Jewish community, about 770 were rounded up (by Norwegian officials, not German soldiers) and deported to Auschwitz. Thirty-four survived.
Hitler didn’t need to import or impose Jew-hatred in Norway. It has always been essential to the country’s DNA.
The crime the Scandinavian country now wants to create also has a parallel. The Palestinian Authority has spent decades treating land sales to Jews as a capital offense; in 1997, its justice minister announced the death penalty for it. “Palestinian” land dealers were murdered within weeks. A P.A. military court sentenced a man to death by hanging in 2009 for selling land to Jews in Judea and Samaria. Official P.A.-funded religious authorities have ruled that anyone who sells to a Jew forfeits burial in Muslim soil. A “Palestinian”-American was sentenced to life in hard labor for it in 2018.
But Norway didn’t need this precedent now any more than it needed Hitler’s then. Norway is offering the P.A.’s stance of ethnic-cleansing legitimacy: The same underlying offense, punishing people for doing business with Jews, now available with the imprimatur of a Western parliament.
Eide has told the U.N. Human Rights Council that “human rights and human dignity is universal” and that “every person has equal and inherent rights that no government can take away.”
Really? Israel, the state Eide condemns in this conflict, extends full and equal citizenship to 2 million Arabs who vote, hold seats in its parliament and sit on its Supreme Court. The P.A., which demands that its territory be entirely free of Jews, is the one Eide wants to reward by ethnically cleansing the Jews of Judea and Samaria right now. Apparently, he agrees with Norway’s founding fathers that Jews are not “human beings after all.”
After the decimation and expulsion of Jews from Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East, and after Jews found refuge in the tiny sliver left of their indigenous homeland, Norway wants to export its psychotic Jew hate to Judea and Samaria—the most Jewish place on the planet, where Jews have lived, often under conquest and abuse, but indigenous and without interruption for more than 3,000 years.
Norway tries to make it fashionable, invoking the new language of international law, wielding the new excuses of “colonization” (as though Jews can be colonizers of their own homeland), but the law itself makes abundantly clear that it is about none of that. Norway is attacking Jews—private citizens, individuals and families—and businesses to deprive them of their livelihoods, to make them unsafe.
Its clause of shame may soon be its laws of shame.
