According to the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies, 32% of Norwegians think it is correct or somewhat correct that “Israel treats the Palestinians as badly as the Jews were treated during World War II”. About 37% think it's a question that is “impossible to answer.” Only 31% have sufficient knowledge about the Middle East and World War II to reject this outrageous claim.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) points out that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is a contemporary example of antisemitism. Why is it that such a large part of the Norwegian population is ready to accept that Israelis are as bad as Nazis?
One major explanation for this concerning phenomenon is that the Norwegian population is misinformed. False images and narratives are created, not only by Norway's public broadcaster (NRK), its largest news agency (NTB) and other big mainstream media, but sadly also by the public school system.
In the last two years, I have analyzed 5 different schoolbooks for 10th and 13th grades (including one online), and I have found evidence of multiple errors and omissions that are geared to put Israel in a negative light.
A schoolbook for the 10th grade describes "a lot of war and unrest" in the Middle East, but the whole chapter of 11 pages is only about conflicts that Israel has been involved in. A schoolbook for the 13th grade claims that "in addition to the struggle for oil, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 has been the main source of conflict in the Middle East."
After World War II, there have been numerous wars in the Middle East, many of these wars have seen more lives lost, than all the wars involving Israel combined.
A new online schoolbook for 10th graders, published by Norway’s largest publisher Cappelen Damm, is full of errors as well. One of the many biased opinions accuses Israel of the "ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Israel." This is a baseless accusation that again demonizes Israel and is not based on any fact. What these tenth graders aren’t told is that the Palestinians have one of the fastest growing populations in the world.
This obsessive one-sided focus on conflicts involving Israel is the same for all the other schoolbooks that we examined, cultivating the conspiracy lie that 21% of all Norwegians believe in, that "as long as the State of Israel exists, there can be no peace".
It is telling what the schoolbooks fail to explain to the Norwegian students. For example, that Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries are not mentioned, even though they were more numerous than Palestinian refugees. There is no mention of Iran’s role in the conflict, nor is the “absolute and categorical” rejection by the Palestinian Authority to accept Israel as a Jewish state.
The online schoolbook is updated with several paragraphs about the Gaza war in May 2021, but not a hint about the Abraham Peace Accords made with four Arab countries in 2020.
You get the picture. This school curriculum is educating the next generation to hate Israel, with biased “facts”, skewing the truth and demonizing the Jewish State.
This phenomenon is not only dangerous for Israel, but also for the small Jewish community in Norway. 11.7% of the general Norwegian population, and 20.4% of Norwegian Muslims, think that “harassment and violence against Jews can be defended, when you think about how Israel treats the Palestinians."
Media bias and fake news can be fought in the public sphere with the truth. However, fighting fake history lessons in the classrooms is almost impossible. We must ensure that the publishers see how dangerous it is to feed myths and disputed claims to teenagers while presenting them as facts. For the sake of Norway's future, this miseducation and these lies must end now.
Conrad Myrland is the CEO of Med Israel for fred (MIFF, With Israel for peace), a pro-Israel group in Norway. MIFF is also active in Sweden, Denmark and Iceland.
This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by Adam Milstein.