Norwegian Holocaust Center Defends Decision to Host Event Drawing Parallels Between Holocaust, Palestinian ‘Nakba’
One of the most famous pictures of Jews being rounded up by Nazi Germans during the Holocaust, this from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in May 1943. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies on Wednesday responded to backlash over its decision to host a discussion this week in which parallels will be drawn between the Holocaust and the Palestinian “Nakba” as two “cultural traumas.”
The event on Thursday will focus on the Holocaust, the so-called “Nakba,” and the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as the ensuing war in Gaza.
“Nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” is used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Activists often invoke the term when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Thursday’s event will feature Nadim Khoury, an associate professor at the University of Inland Norway, who will explore how the Holocaust and “Nakba” are “traumas [that] have shaped Israeli and Palestinian national narratives and how they have functioned as competing cultural traumas,” according to a description of the event.
“[Khoury] will trace their trajectories since 1948 and explore how they are intertwined and how the tensions between them are shaping the path forward in Israeli and Palestinian lives,” the description further states. “What meaning, he asks, does the entanglement of the Holocaust and the Nakba gain in the shadow of October 7 and the war on Gaza?”
The event is part of the lecture series, “In the Shadow of War – the Way Forward,” which is a collaboration between the Norwegian Holocaust Center and the University of Oslo.
In a written statement to The Algemeiner on Wednesday, Jan Heiret, director of the Norwegian Holocaust Center, claimed the event will make no attempts to equate the Holocaust to the “Nakba,” despite the event’s description stating the contrary.
“The question of how the Holocaust and the Nakba as historical traumas can be understood, acknowledged, and remembered, without thereby constructing a kind of competition between trauma and victimhood, is crucial for any path to future peace and reconciliation,” he said. “To find a way out of a destructive spiral of hatred, dehumanization, and violence, we must understand the long-lasting ‘shadows’ of historical traumas. Without equating, or even putting up, the Holocaust with the Nakba – which would be a historical distortion given the events are so different in nature, course, and scope – we acknowledge that the consequences for the individuals and collectives traumatized by them are interconnected, and that the denial of the trauma of the other lies at the core of the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
The Israeli embassy in Norway said on Tuesday that the center’s decision to host the event is a “grotesque distortion of Holocaust memory.”
“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,” the embassy wrote in a post on X. “A center founded to preserve Holocaust remembrance has chosen political activism over historical responsibility. This is not education. It is moral failure. The planned events should be canceled immediately, and the center must return to its core mission: safeguarding Holocaust remembrance and confronting antisemitism – not legitimizing its modern forms.”
Israel’s official X account in French published the same statement on Tuesday.
Khoury teaches classes at the University of Inland Norway about the history of political thought and international relations. He has published literature that repeatedly accuses Israel of committing a “genocide in Gaza,” a “genocidal war,” and a “second Nakba” in Gaza during its war with the Hamas terror group. He has also written articles accusing Israel of “occupation” and “apartheid.”
When asked about Khoury’s anti-Israel comments, Heiret told The Algemeiner that he is invited to speak at Thursday’s event as “an independent scholar” and does “not speak on the behalf of” the institution. “This is a principle that guides all our events and should be well known,” he added.
Heiret added that as part of the center’s lecture series, it hosts speakers “who shed light on important aspects of what may be the consequences of the Gaza war, but also: whether there are ways out of the destructive spirals of violence, oppression, and hatred.”
As part of the series, the institution was scheduled to hold an event titled “Recognizing and Denying the Trauma of the Others,” which was set to take place on March 10 but was pushed to May 7 and then ultimately canceled. Martin Auerbach, former clinical director of the National Israeli Center for Psychosocial Support of Survivors of the Holocaust and the Second Generation (AMCHA) in Jerusalem, was invited to be a speaker at the event but had trouble traveling out of Israel due to the war with Iran, according to Heiret. The center will try to reschedule the event for the fall, he added.