From 2005 to 2013, writes Manfred Gerstenfeld, Norway’s government was the most hostile toward Israel in all of Europe, and both hostility toward Israel and outright anti-Semitism were on the rise in the country as a whole. The situation has improved since 2013, when the Norwegian Conservative party won an electoral victory, ending eight years of the Labor party’s rule. Against most predictions, the recent elections returned the Conservatives to office. Gerstenfeld comments:
[If] the Labor leader, Jonas Gahr Stoere, would have become prime minister, (...) it is likely that Norway would have joined Sweden sooner or later in recognizing a [Palestinian state]. (...)
[The previous Labor prime minister] was not so much an anti-Israeli inciter himself as he was tolerant of such incitement by his party and allies. At several venues where he spoke, there were brutal verbal attacks on Israel while he remained silent. By not confronting these attacks he condoned them. As for his successor Stoere, his anti-Israelism reached an extreme point when he wrote a blurb legitimizing a book by two Norwegian Hamas supporters [who] claimed that Israel entered the Gaza Strip in 2009 to kill women and children.
[But] Stoere always played both sides. In January 2009, the most anti-Semitic riots that ever took place in Norway happened in Oslo. Muslims attacked pro-Israel demonstrators with potentially lethal projectiles. Stoere visited the Oslo synagogue afterward to express his solidarity with the Jewish community. (...)
Many often underestimate the importance of Norway because the country is not a member of the European Union and has only about 5 million inhabitants. Yet its huge gas and oil income has enabled it to make important donations abroad, including to Palestinian causes.
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