The founder of Tromsø’s partnership with Palestine is Dr Mads Gilbert, 76, a professor at Tromsø’s University Hospital and former member of Norway’s far-Left Red Party. He has received numerous plaudits for his medical work in Gaza over the years, although he makes no secret of his radicalism. He once defended the 9/11 attacks as an act “of the oppressed” (remarks he later retracted), and has often accused the Israeli military of targeting Palestinian civilians. In 2014 Israel banned him from visiting the country as a “security risk”.
Speaking from Jordan, where he is working on relief efforts for Gaza, he tells The Telegraph: “There is a clear distinction between people-to-people co-operation and political co-operation, and at the end of the day, we all need to understand each other.”
Under Dr Gilbert’s stewardship, Tromsø (population 70,000) has sent more medics to Palestine than any other city, while city hall has hosted a youth cultural programme under which thousands of Tromsø youngsters have done courses on Palestinian film, literature and art. Two Palestinian youngsters who participated in the programme have died in the recent invasion, according to Dr Peder Joakimsen, another volunteer medic and Red Party member.
“All organisations working in Gaza have to have some relationship with Hamas, it’s just a pill we swallow,” says Dr Joakimsen, who sports a red keffiyeh and sits on Tromsø’s Palestine Committee, a local solidarity group. “They’re a conservative, religious, suppressive movement and we don’t support them.”
While critics say that Tromsø is effectively conducting its own foreign policy, it is not that different from Norway’s national Labour government, which brokered the landmark Oslo peace accords in the 1990s. The current Labour prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, has offered to mediate in the current crisis, but has accused Israel of using “disproportionate” force in Gaza. Like the BBC, he has also refrained from describing Hamas as a “terrorist organisation”.
The row in Tromsø comes amid wider disagreements across Scandinavia over how to accommodate Muslim immigrants, and attitudes to Islamic militancy. While the debate in Norway is less heated than in Sweden, where gang crime in migrant areas is now a major issue, it takes place in the shadow of the 2011 massacre by Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik. He shot dead 69 people at a Labour party summer retreat on Utøya island, enraged at the party’s multiculturalist policies.
For that reason, the Labour Party argues that it needs no lectures on the horrors of terrorism. Indeed, when Tromsø city hall flew the Palestinian flag on November 29 – marking the UN-sponsored International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People – the flag was raised by Labour councillor Marta Hofsøy, who was at Utøya when Brevik attacked. She survived by escaping into the nearby lake, swimming for an hour as he raked the water with bullets.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
