“The Hypocrites of Oslo”: On the Awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize

By Markus Somm

It would be hard to imagine behavior more tasteless than that of the Nobel Committee in Oslo, which—composed of five Norwegians, including a left-wing chairman who is highly critical of Israel— managed, just a few days after October 7, to award the Nobel Peace Prize to a South African woman who is responsible for a UN report that describes Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as “genocide.”

On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists killed around 1,200 Israelis. That triggered the Gaza War—it was not the other way around.

“I couldn’t possibly eat as much as I’d like to throw up,” the great German painter Max Liebermann once said when the Nazis seized power in 1933, and when I think of this latest Norwegian hypocrisy, I feel much the same way—without wanting to compare the self-righteous committee members to the Nazis.

Where does this nausea come from? Norway strikes me as a stronghold of hypocrisy: It’s a country that relies heavily on oil for its economy and at the same time is pushing the transition to electric mobility as if it were a form of absolution that these Lutherans are granting themselves—perhaps because they can’t go to confession. If Norway were to halt its oil production overnight—which it certainly has the power to do—that would be a more effective contribution to curbing the use of fossil fuels.

It is also a country that collaborated quite actively with the Nazis during World War II. The Norwegian Nazi Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling is still remembered today because his last name has become synonymous with the term “collaborator”—which is, of course, no coincidence. According to Norwegian accounts, of course, all Norwegians fought in the resistance, and Quisling ruled entirely on his own with a few German friends.

It’s psychologically easy to understand why a country like this is quick to condemn others. And these days, no one hesitates to use the term “genocide” when it comes to criticizing Israel’s government—though this distinction is rarely made: Israelis are Jews are Zionists are Nazis. The victims of the past are now supposed to be the perpetrators of today. This is how far we Christian Europeans have gone to ease our guilty consciences: We’re tired of apologizing for the crimes of our grandparents, so we turn the grandchildren of the victims into criminals. It’s that simple.

Zum Genozid. Selten ist dieser Begriff so unbekümmert, wenn nicht bösartig von seinem Sinn entkernt worden. Im Gazakrieg sind nach Angaben der Hamas rund 75’000 Palästinenser getötet worden, darunter befanden sich gemäss dem israelischen Militär etwa 25’000 Kämpfer, sprich: Terroristen. Ob die Israelis für alle diese Toten verantwortlich sind, muss offen bleiben, zumal die Hamas berüchtigt dafür ist, angebliche palästinensische Verräter zu Hunderten selber hinzurichten.

75,000 people—including children and women—that is tragic. But this is a war, and in every war innocent people die—this is not unique to Israel: In the U.S. war in Iraq, depending on the study, between 280,000 and 315,000 people were killed, of whom about 50,000 were considered soldiers. The ratio of civilians killed to military personnel killed was 5:1; in Gaza, it is 2:1, meaning that, proportionally, there were fewer civilian casualties in the Israeli attacks than in the American ones. We don’t even want to think about other experts in death—be they Russians, Germans, or Japanese.

75,000 deaths—that’s a lot—but we cannot speak of genocide if we consider what genocide actually means: the systematic extermination of a people. What happened in Gaza? If we compare the population there before October 7, 2023, with the current figure, it has fallen from about 2.2 million to an estimated 2.1 million—a decrease of 100,000 people; overall, this represents a decline of about 5 percent. By way of comparison: In 1939, before the Nazis arrived, there were 3.3 million Jews living in Poland. By 1945, only about 200,000 remained. That is a decrease of 90 percent. That is what is called genocide.

Markus Somm is the editor-in-chief of *Nebelspalter*. This commentary first appeared in the *SonntagsZeitung* on October 12, 2026.