“The goal was to win entire parties and organizations for Palestine”

Norway’s perceptions of Israel were not build in a day. Many intellingent and hardworking people have been burning the midnight oil for a good, long while. One of them is Nils Butenschøn, a Middle East expert whom the press often call upon for commentary and analysis. You can read about his younger years here.

The text below is an unauthorized translation of Tarjei Johannessen Vågstøl’s master’s thesis on the Norwegian Palestine-movement, page 63-64. The contents of this thesis speaks for themselves. For the entire thesis, go here.  The text below deals with how the Palestinefront identifies a strategy for its future work.

One argument – of/in favour of – Nils Butenschøn when he accepted to become leader of the Palestinefront in 1976, was that now was the time to win support for the Palestinian cause outside of the far-left-of-centre.  Already from the start they set up a plan to achieve this. Individual activists were important, but the goal was to win entire parties and organizations for Palestine. The strategy was to start “to the left” with NKP (Communist Party of Norway) and SV (Socialist Left), and then move towards the union movement and Arbeiderpartiet (Labor).  NKP they won over quite easily, and the work with SV commenced in 1977. Nils Butenschøn was elected into SV’s Foreign Politics Committee, and worked from the “inside”. At the national SV meeting the same year they pushed for support to the PLO through an impromptu motion, and Berge Furre (who originally had been against the proposal) did what he could to “entrench the perspective in the organization”.

The largest obstacle was however to win through in the “social democracy”, which was regarded as the key to changing Norwegian politics.   As mentioned earlier LO (Main Norwegian Union Confederacy) and Labor had for some time been closely connected to their Israeli sister organizations and many in their upper echelons were warm friends of Israel. The best form of attack was to begin outside of the party: “When all comes to all, the social democracy must be reached through the labor movement and the youth movement”, it said in an introduction on strategy Odd Kristian Reme held during a national executive committee meeting on Septmeber 10^th, 1978. Here one drew upon experiences from the solidarity-work for Vietnam, where it had provided results when one managed to build pressure from the local chapters in the labor movement, and identified a match in the Chile-action, where the labor movement was represented. The slow work with the local chapters in the labor movement commenced in the summer of 1978, when a delegation from The Palestinian Worker’s Union (PWU/GUPW) visited Norway, but since the summit for this work was reached in the early 1980-ies, I will elaborate upon this in more detail in the next chapter.

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Nils Butenschøn, November 28th 2006

Kjell Bygstad, August 23rd 2006

Odd Kristian (Kian) Reme, Octover 9th 2006, 1.

Medlemsblad, “Innrettinga på solidaritetsarbeidet. Notat fra sentralstyret til LM”, 1979, nr.1:6. (Member’s magazine, “Arrangement of the solidarity work. Note from executive committee to the Landsmeet”)

Medlemsblad, “Politisk oppsummering etter Beirut-opphold”, 1978, nr.4 (Member’s magazine, “Political conclusion after Beirut-stay)

Medlemsblad, “Noen tanker om PWU-delegasjonen i juni ved Kristian/Hadeland”, 1978, nr.6 (Member’s magazine, “Some thoughts on tre PWU-delegation in June by Kristian/Hadeland”)