by Rafael Medoff
The Norwegian capital of Oslo, where the accords between Israel and the Palestinian Arab leadership were negotiated thirty-three years ago, this week became their burial site.
Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas visited Oslo this week, where he met with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and other officials of the Labour Party-led government.
A previous Norwegian Labour government shepherded the talks that led to the Oslo accords in 1993. Yet Prime Minister Store did not say anything this week about the PA’s decades of flagrant violations of the accords, including its failure to outlaw or disarm terrorist groups; its refusal to honor Israel’s 36 requests for the extradition of terrorists; its payment of salaries to imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead terrorists; or the torrent of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda in the PA’s news media, schools, and summer camps.
The PA’s hostile propaganda—which is explicitly prohibited by the Oslo accords—includes its notorious policy of naming institutions after terrorists.
Yet that did not stop the Norwegian government from contributing 500 million kroner ($52-million) or more each year to the Palestinian Authority.
In 2013, Norwegians elected a Conservative Party government, and in 2017 it suspended Norway’s $16-million annual grant to UN Women because that agency’s “Palestine” branch gave Norwegian funds to a PA women’s center that was named after mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi.
Mughrabi was the leader of the terrorist gang that slaughtered 37 Jews in the Tel Aviv Highway bus hijacking in 1978. Among Mughrabi’s victims was American Jewish nature photographer Gail Rubin, the niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-Connecticut).
At the trial of one of Mughrabi’s accomplices, a survivor of the attack testified that when the bus caught fire, Mughrabi “grabbed a baby and threw it on a burning [seat].”
In October 2021, four years after the Norwegian funding of UN Women was suspended, Norway’s Labor Party returned to power. The new government soon announced it would contribute 9 million kroner (about $1-million) to UN Women’s projects in PA territory. The announcement said nothing about whether Mughrabi’s name was ever removed from that PA women’s center.
Mughrabi’s name also adorns numerous schools, streets, parks and sports tournaments in the PA territories. Both her birthday and the anniversary of the massacre she led are celebrated by PA officials and media. She is presented as a hero in the textbooks used in PA schools.
Yet such blatant violations of the Oslo agreements appear to be of no interest to the international community, not even to the very government in Oslo that helped engineer the accords in the first place.
The visit to Oslo this week by the serial violator of the Oslo accords was an opportunity to uphold the integrity of those agreements. Instead, Oslo’s leaders remained silent, and in doing so symbolically presided over the funeral of their own handiwork.
Dr. Medoff is the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.