Norway’s move has been a long time in the making and, in the words of Prime Minister Jonas Gall Storr, this morning’s announcement is a signal to other countries to follow suit.
We know Spain and Ireland will do the same – Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited Norway and Ireland last month to try to coordinate the move.
Norway has long supported a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and mediated the highly secretive negotiations that culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords, which resulted in the Palestinian Authority’s limited autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Last November, Norway’s parliament voted in favor of a move calling on Jonas Gall Storey’s center-left government to “be ready to recognize Palestine” as a state.
Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Bart Eide called the war in Gaza a drama that must be faced with an “irreversible path to a solution.”
But he also said recognition of a Palestinian state “is not an outcome, but a tool to help achieve something.”
“We don’t want a ‘Hamas state,'” he said last month, but a Palestinian state from the Palestinian Authority.
