Norway will recognize Palestine as an independent state on May 28, in a highly symbolic geopolitical move agreed with Spain and Ireland. “There can be no peace in the Middle East without Israel and Palestine having their own State; it is the only real solution to the conflict”, said the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, at a press conference in Oslo yesterday. Støre stated that the recognition of a Palestinian state is a sign of “support for the moderate forces, which are in decline in a horrible and protracted conflict; recognition can no longer wait for a peaceful solution to be reached”, he affirmed.
The path that has led the kingdom of Norway to take this step has to do not only with the brutal evolution of the war in the Middle East since the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7 and the forceful military response Israeli, which has caused thousands of Palestinian deaths, most of them civilians, but with the same nature of its particular foreign policy.
Norway, a European country that is not a member of the EU – as its citizens decided in a referendum in 1994 – is deeply Atlanticist – it was one of the twelve founding countries of NATO in 1949 – and is a close ally of the States united
In the case of Norway, there are attempts to help negotiate a peace between Israelis and Palestinians decades ago, through the so-called Oslo agreements, which are nevertheless considered to have failed. They were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and there were two agreements: one initialed in Washington in 1993 and another in Taba (Egypt) in 1995. Norway promoted the secret talks between the two sides in search of a peace process, and the agreements led to the creation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to exercise Palestinian self-government limited to the West Bank and Gaza.
Also the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prizes – which are decided and awarded in Oslo, while the other Nobel Prizes are held in neighboring Sweden – has confirmed in Norway a tradition of commitment to peace and human rights. In fact, in 1994, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Israelis Yitzhak Rabin (Prime Minister) and Shimon Peres (Foreign Minister) received the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East”. However, the Oslo Accords failed due to opposing sectors on both sides, some violently – Rabin was assassinated for this in 1995 – which led to the rise of Hamas and the rise of of Israeli colonization in Gaza and the West Bank.
Until now, only two EU countries had recognized Palestine as a state, already being members of the EU: Cyprus in 2011 and Sweden in 2014. Norway will therefore be the second Nordic country to take this step.