The Nordic Rift: How Scandinavia Estranged Israel |
The Postwar Consensus and Shared Idealism In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the nations of the Nordic world viewed the nascent State of Israel not with suspicion, but with a profound and genuine affinity. This was a relationship rooted in recent history and shared values. Norway was quick to recognize the Jewish State in February 1949, championing its admission to the United Nations only months later. In Denmark, the heroic wartime rescue of nearly the entire Danish Jewish community had already forged an unbreakable moral bond.
For Swedish and Norwegian social democrats, Israel represented something deeply familiar: the kibbutzim movement and the dominance of Israeli Labor were viewed as a parallel experiment in democratic socialism, remarkably forged under intense existential pressure. Even after the 1967 Six-Day War, public opinion polls in the region still reflected overwhelming sympathy for the Israeli cause. This solidarity was underpinned by a powerful combination of shared vulnerabilities, a Protestant familiarity with the Hebrew Bible, and the natural instincts of small democracies that had themselves recently endured the trauma of wartime occupation or a precarious, fragile neutrality.
The Post-1967 Ideological Pivot The early Nordic affinity was a product of historical contingency rather than inevitability. Following the watershed events of 1967, the intellectual climate of the Nordic left underwent a radical transformation. Israel’s swift and decisive military victory inverted its global image: the embattled refuge of a persecuted people was suddenly recast as a dominant occupying power. The vocabulary of anti-colonial liberation, which European intellectuals had routinely applied to conflicts in Vietnam and Algeria, was now transferred to the Middle East with a highly selective intensity.
Within this new framework, Palestinian nationalism assumed central moral gravity. Conversely, Arab rejectionism and the persistent reality of anti-Israel terrorism were treated with far softer analytical scrutiny. The universalist framework of social democracy, which had once readily accommodated Jewish national aspirations, increasingly viewed Jewish particularism as an uncomfortable anomaly within modern progressive........