Israel and Sweden's War of Words

Israelis protest the anti-Semitic article outside the Swedish embassy in Tel Aviv.

The war of words between the Swedish and Israeli governments seems to be over for now. Whatever follows, one thing is clear: The tensions will not disappear anytime soon.

On Aug. 17, the left-leaning Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet ran an exposé with the headline "They Plunder the Organs of Our Sons" in its culture pages. It made a series of bizarre and unfounded allegations about the Israeli Defense Forces harvesting organs from killed and gutted Palestinians. It was a guilt-by-association hit piece, with a dark undercurrent of anti-Semitism.

Naturally, the article set off some criticism in Sweden and Israel, two countries whose relations at the moment are best characterized as uneasy. But the Aftonbladet affair ultimately is not a case of prejudiced journalism. It reveals deeper politics: the widening rift between Israel -- with its current right-wing government -- and Sweden and the European Union, where sympathies in the Middle East conflict have drifted to the Palestinian side.

The Aftonbladet article, at first, didn't make much of a rumble. As a Swedish Jewish leader told Haaretz, "No one even noticed [it]." But then, two days later, the Swedish ambassador in Tel Aviv, Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, made an official statement, published on the embassy's Web site, calling the article "shocking and appalling." The Swedish Foreign Ministry immediately backtracked, calling the statement a "local initiative," not the official view of the Swedish government.

This in turn angered the Israelis, and the affair became a foreign-policy concern writ large. The government in Jerusalem publicly demanded a condemnation from the Swedish government. Stockholm's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said he would not do so because Sweden has freedom of the press and the government does not condemn newspaper articles.

By then, the conversation in Sweden had already shifted to legality and freedom of speech, rather than the prejudices behind the article. Jan Helin, Aftonbladet's editor in chief, must have been grateful for the change in focus -- and so, presumably, was much of the Swedish public, which would prefer not to think about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in its own country and in the rest of Europe.

But the Israeli government would not let it go. On Aug. 20, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman released a statement saying: "It is a shame that the Swedish Foreign Ministry does not get involved when speaking about blood libels against Jews, something that is reminiscent of Sweden's position during World War II, when it also did not intervene."

Many in Sweden considered Lieberman's words over the top, and they were. However, they were also a key part of Lieberman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to get the upper hand on the Swedish government, especially as Sweden at the moment chairs the 27-member European Union.

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