ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Norwegian social democratic representations of Israel from the 1956 Suez Crisis until the 1961 Eichmann trial. According to one previous account, Norwegian responses to Suez were largely shaped by a 1956 campaign initiated by the Israeli government and undertaken by its collaborators within the Norwegian Labour Party, to persuade the Norwegian public to support Israel and the Norwegian government to supply Israel with military aid. The chapter finds these claims to be largely unsubstantiated. It finds that representations of Israel continued to be shaped by the same philo-Zionist ideas that had shaped them since 1949. This is also relevant in regards to a claim that has been made in much research on ideas about Israel: that the rise of anti-Zionism from the late 1960s occurred because the 1967 Six-Day War revealed some actual but previously hidden truth about Israel. This chapter refutes such claims, based on an analysis of responses to the Suez war.
