Israel’s embassy in Norway has condemned the Norwegian Holocaust Center’s decision to host events drawing parallels between the Holocaust, the “Nakba,” and the war in Gaza.
This is in reference to two upcoming events: one titled ‘Nakba and Holocaust as cultural traumas’ on April 30 and one titled ‘Holocaust memory after Gaza,’ set to take place on June 3.
Both form part of a series named ‘In the shadow of the war – the way forward,’ which is a collaboration between the Norwegian Holocaust Center and the University of Oslo.
The Holocaust and Nakba are both framed as “defining historical events for respectively Israeli and Palestinian societies.”
It will feature a lecture by Professor Nadim Khoury on how these traumas have shaped Israeli and Palestinian national narratives.
The memory of the Holocaust has been seriously drawn into contemporary politics since the war in Gaza.
Khoury is set to explore the question: “What meaning does the entanglement of the Holocaust and the Nakba gain in the shadow of October 7 and the war on Gaza?”
The 'Holocaust memory after Gaza' event is focused on how “the memory of the Holocaust has been seriously drawn into contemporary politics since the war in Gaza.”
The lecture will be given by Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University in the United States.
He calls Israel “a regime of apartheid” and in April 2025 said, “This is an occupation by the IDF designed to take over Gaza. There will, of course, be resistance, but it will be guerrilla resistance.”
“[This] is a grotesque distortion of Holocaust memory,” wrote the Israeli embassy.
“It dishonors the memory of more than 750 Norwegian Jews murdered by the Nazis and their Norwegian collaborators, and betrays the very purpose for which this institution was established.
“A center founded to preserve Holocaust remembrance has chosen political activism over historical responsibility. It is a moral failure.”
The embassy called for the planned events to be canceled immediately and asked the center to return to its core mission: safeguarding Holocaust remembrance and confronting antisemitism.
The Holocaust Center has a pattern of inviting fringe figures – such as Dick Moses – to give speeches on Israel and antisemitism. Its own director, Jan Heiret, said last year that it is likely Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
The Jerusalem Post raised this issue in a visit to the Holocaust Center last year. At the time, Heiret told the Post that it is his duty under the center’s mandate to discuss modern genocide and modern risks of genocide.
“Some parts of the Jewish community don’t think that I should criticize the Israeli government in any way, but that’s impossible. The escalation of the war in May and June, what’s happening in Gaza now – it’s so obvious that the Israeli government is breaking humanitarian laws.”
Heiret said he did not claim Israel is committing genocide but that it’s “important for the international community now to try to stop what’s going on in Gaza.” He did, however, accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza.
“We’re not doing a comparison with the Holocaust in that we are not saying that the Israeli government is doing the same as the Nazis, but there are some parts of the policies or in warfare that are comparable, such as ethnic cleansing and dehumanizing language.”
The center’s actions have sparked significant outcry from the Jewish community, especially as it receives funding from the Norwegian government under the Action Plan Against Antisemitism.
Members of the Jewish community told the Post that several of the organizations receiving money to combat antisemitism – including the center – have instead helped to propagate it.
Whether by providing a platform only for anti-Zionist Jews, accusing Israel of genocide, or not combating hate against Jewish individuals, the organizations that are supposed to fight antisemitism have instead fueled the fire.
“This is creating a lot of problems for me, for us, for the generation to come,” Robert Hercz, the head of B’nai B’rith Norway, told the Post. “The Holocaust Center is now whitewashing; it’s legitimizing everyone shouting genocide.”