The Israeli government’s disavowal of Palestinian statehood, the Gaza war, West Bank settlements, and the frozen peace process prompted Norway to join Spain and Ireland in unilaterally recognizing Palestinian statehood this week, the country’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
“If this government credibly had said we are ready to negotiate, we need to get this thing over with [the Gaza war] but we are ready to negotiate… I think that would have changed significantly,” he said in a phone interview.
Eide outlined Oslo’s frustration and that of other European countries with the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“What we have seen from this government… is a rapid expansion of government-sponsored settlements that we see as illegal – on top of tolerating the settlements [West Bank outposts] that are illegal even under Israeli law,” he said.
Then there is the use of Jewish extremist and settler violence to help expand Israel’s hold on West Bank territory, Eide said.
“This is very problematic, and that has helped convince some of us, and more to come, that we need to recognize Palestine now,” the foreign minister said.
The dramatic announcement of Palestinian statehood recognition, made Wednesday morning by the prime ministers of these three countries from their respective capitals, outraged Israel.
Netanyahu’s government would always have objected to the move. It felt, however, that the timing here, less than eight months after Hamas’s brutal invasion of Israel and while 128 hostages remained in Gaza, was particularly dangerous.
The recognition does not become official until May 28, but already on Wednesday, Israel recalled its envoys from those three countries.
On Thursday, Israel’s Foreign Ministry Director-General Yaakov Blitshtein severely reprimanded the Irish, Spanish, and Norwegian ambassadors at its office in Jerusalem.
Ambassadors watched footage of Hamas taking hostages
The ministry invited the media to photograph the start of the meeting, where the three envoys were shown the short video released by the Hostage Families Forum this week depicting the moment five of the young female hostages were taken captive from their Nahal Oz military base on October 7.
The five young women can be seen, in some cases, with their hands tied behind their backs and with bloodied faces.
One of the captors appears to be threatening to rape the women. Ambassadors Maria Salomon Perez of Spain and Sonya McGuinness of Ireland are themselves female.
Norwegian Ambassador Per Egil Selvaag had hosted peace activist Vivian Silver less than a week before she was killed in that attack.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who was in Paris on Thursday, sharply criticized the three countries, accusing them of legitimizing an invasion in which 252 people were seized as hostages and at least 1,200 people were killed.
Many of the victims were raped, dismembered, and burned alive.
“Norway, if your goal was to reward terrorism by declaring support for a Palestinian state, you’ve achieved it,” Katz wrote in a post on X, adding, “Hamas thanks you for your service.”
He also posted a short video showing scenes from the October 7 attack.
Eide rejected such claims, explaining that the recognition was an attempt to strengthen moderate Israelis and Palestinians against extremist forces within their society.
Israelis, he said, are in psychological shock over October 7 and
Palestinians are deeply traumatized by the Gaza war. He noted in particular the high fatality count from that conflict. Hamas has reported close to 36,000 deaths, verifying close to 25,000 of them. Israel has said some 14,000 of the Gaza fatalities are combatants.
“I have deep empathy with the state of shock, that so many people in Israel and Israel as a nation is in, after this most terrible attack on Jews since the Holocaust. I get it,” Eide said.
“And I understand that that takes you into survival mode. And I have no problem with empathizing with that,” he said.
“Likewise, I empathize with 35,000 people killed in Gaza, I empathize with ordinary citizens” that “lost families in Gaza,” he said.
“People on both sides are captured by that drama,” Eide said.
But the question now is, “How can we come out of this and look for something that looks more like a political process?”
Norway views the statehood declaration as a friendly and “pro-Israel” one that takes the moderates in “this little piece of land that we so much cherish out of this cycle of violence, which will only stimulate more extremism” on both sides, including within Israel.
Without a two-state resolution to the conflict, he said, “There will only be more [Palestinian] terror in the future; then you will have even more [Israeli] right-wing, more extremist positions in Israel and the cycle will never stop. So we would like to help you out of it,” he said.
Oslo, he said, has a long history of supporting Israel, recalling that it was among those countries that supported the creation of the state in 1948. It voted to grant Israel UN membership a year later, both in the Security Council and then in the General Assembly.
Norway was also instrumental in launching a two-state peace process through the 1993 Oslo Accords, which bears the name of its capital.
That agreement, launched on the White House lawn with much fanfare, normalized the idea of two states, but never led to a final status agreement that turned the vision into a reality.
The purpose of those accords, he said, “was to work towards a peaceful solution, a two-state solution; the establishment of a Palestinian state, living beside Israel with appropriate security guarantees for both.”
The idea was to build Palestinian institutions, including the Palestinian Authority, from the bottom up and to leave some of the central issues of dispute such as Jerusalem, refugees, security and borders, till late in the negotiations,” he said.
One of the tenets of that process was that “bilateral recognition of Palestine would happen at the end,” Eide said.Decades later, and with the last bilateral peace process failing in 2014, Western countries, including Norway, had revised the logic of holding onto the delay in Palestinian statehood recognition, Eide explained.
“Some years ago, a number of countries started to think that maybe recognition could come earlier, not at the end, but a point where it would be supportive of the process,” he said.
Already last year, he explained, the government, led by Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, adopted that position with broad support from parliament.
“This was partly driven by the fact that we saw that no real negotiations were happening and there wasn’t any progress towards the two-state solution,” Eide said; the events since October 7 have only made that worse.
The United Kingdom this year, Eide said, also concurred that statehood did not have to occur at the end of the process.
Countries that wanted to recognize Palestine as a state, like Norway, wanted to do it at a moment when it could be helpful to a peace process.
“The act of recognition of Palestine which, of course, in itself – even by itself – does not change much… But as a contribution to this process, it might help,” he said.
It’s not a policy change, he said, but more a policy update on one specific issue.
Norway’s stance has remained the same: It supports two states based on the pre-1967 borders, with agreed-upon land swaps, Eide said.
Wednesday’s declaration, he said, sent “a strong signal.”
It’s “the kind of card you can play only once and we decided to do it now,” Eide said.
“We have a good reason to believe that more countries will follow in the coming weeks,” he said.
“What remains is that we still need to end up with a Palestinian state that is constructed in such a way that Palestinians can run their own affairs inside Palestine but with strong and credible security guarantees for Israel.”
Eide said he believed that his country’s ties with Israel remained strong.
Israel’s decision to recall its ambassador and the reprimand, he said, “are tools in the diplomatic toolbox.
“When the ambassador one day will come back to after his consultations, I will be the first one to invite him for a coffee in my office.”
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