From 2005 to 2013, writes Manfred Gerstenfeld, Norway’s government was the most hostile toward Israel in all of Europe, and both hostility toward Israel and outright anti-Semitism were on the rise in the country as a whole. The situation has improved since 2013, when the Norwegian Conservative party won an electoral victory, ending eight years of the Labor party’s rule. Against most predictions, the recent elections returned the Conservatives to office. Gerstenfeld comments:

[If] the Labor leader, Jonas Gahr Stoere, would have become prime minister, . . . it is likely that Norway would have joined Sweden sooner or later in recognizing a [Palestinian state]. . . .

[The previous Labor prime minister] was not so much an anti-Israeli inciter himself as he was tolerant of such incitement by his party and allies. At several venues where he spoke, there were brutal verbal attacks on Israel while he remained silent. By not confronting these attacks he condoned them. As for his successor Stoere, his anti-Israelism reached an extreme point when he wrote a blurb legitimizing a book by two Norwegian Hamas supporters [who] claimed that Israel entered the Gaza Strip in 2009 to kill women and children.

[But] Stoere always played both sides. In January 2009, the most anti-Semitic riots that ever took place in Norway happened in Oslo. Muslims attacked pro-Israel demonstrators with potentially lethal projectiles. Stoere visited the Oslo synagogue afterward to express his solidarity with the Jewish community. . . .

Many often underestimate the importance of Norway because the country is not a member of the European Union and has only about 5 million inhabitants. Yet its huge gas and oil income has enabled it to make important donations abroad, including to Palestinian causes.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.