Unimaginable nightmare

Norway woke up from the naive dream of an idyllic social-democratic world and found itself in a nightmare. Perhaps this is the end of the age of innocence. The walls here in the Nesodden peninsula, some eight kilometers from Oslo, trembled on Friday. I felt the explosion clearly, as did our cat, who awoke from a nap on the couch and perked up his ears.

Sometimes they blow up boulders here, to clear the ground for new houses, so I continued my daily routine. Two hours later I received a worried phone call from my father-in-law, who told me, his voice excited and trembling, that Norway had just won its own September 11. Did I know what had happened, he asked me. He told me a government building had been attacked and I should turn on the television right away.

In that moment, Norway changed. Armed, helmeted soldiers now guard public buildings and maintain order in the disaster-stricken capital, even though the city's streets are empty right now, as all civilians have been asked to stay in their homes. The media is broadcasting updates constantly. After the fearsome massacre, perpetrated in cold blood, they are still searching for the bodies of missing youths. They are careful not to broadcast images from the island on television because they are too gruesome. The hardest thing to process is the idea that a lone man could spend years coldly planning such an attack. A man who turns into an animal, like other known fascists from the previous century. Witnesses are saying that two people were involved in the shooting of Labor party youth on the island, and the search is on for the additional suspect. More than 12,000 people are using social media to call for the death penalty for the killer, who has been apprehended.

It is clear that the mourning and the shock are sinking in deeply and slowly. Clergy members are making themselves available and the churches are full of lost and shaken people. The nation feels like it has been attacked from within – the foundations of this open society have been cracked.

In a country where you can cross the border from Sweden in a car without anyone checking your passport, where government offices are located in the city center with unhindered access to them, where no one checks your bag when you walk into buildings, where lofty figures and political personalities rub shoulders with the public without bodyguards – there can be no doubt that a fundamental change is about to take place.

As for the open society, the facts that the perpetrator is a pure Nordic terrorist and that this was a political crime, directed at the Labor government through a political party summer camp for teenagers, is certainly hard to swallow. Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has given a clear message, however, that the harm caused by this murder will not affect the openness of Norwegian democracy.

The desire and need for routine will apparently return wealthy Norway to normalcy quickly, though the national debate will continue for some time to come. It is obvious that there is a certain helplessness here when it comes to intelligence relating to extreme Norwegians, a problem that also existed in the U.S. before the Oklahoma attack, as well as in Israel before the 1995 murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In Norway we speak of incorrectly reading the political map and concentrating only on the proliferation of Islamic terror. There is still no clear picture of what the motivating factors are: how the attack was planned and carried out and, with this, how one person could do all this on his own. It is evident that the security establishment prepared for such scenarios and carried out its duties with the utmost professionalism. The names of those injured and killed have not yet been released as they are close family members of government workers and almost all teenagers.

On Saturday, a friend from our half of the island, a reporter from the newspaper VG, appeared on television. She had been close to the attack, close enough that her building suffered light damage. The paper moved its operations to a hotel, and she was interviewed in a hotel room. She looked a bit scratched and excited. The interviewer’s final question was why she was here and not at home, as if it was a kind of personal therapy. The reporter nodded, looked down and then answered, “Norway has been injured at its heart.”

The writer is an Israeli director who has been living in Norway for the past six years.