Støre needed to go to Berlin first and have a meeting with Abbas, but today he finally provided a very brief response.
These are the crucial phrases of his answer, outlining the Norwegian policy toward Israel and the Palestinian authorities.
The government has been – and continues to be – positive to all steps that over time will unite the Palestinian population on the West Bank and Gaza under one rule … when Norway in 2007 chose to cooperate with the coalition government at the time, it was based on a government platform that had adequate references to and respected committed agreements and agreement parties. This platform was based on a continuation of the principle of armistice … the government sees no reason to repeat this if we consider that these principles are reflected in the new coalition government’s platform. If it doesn’t a new Palestinian government will have difficulty continuing the work with the political, security, and institutional reforms.
In this year’s Yassir Arafat Prize for Irresponsibly Elusive Rhetoric, this is an entry that is sure to win.
What he is
trying to say, of course, is:
We will look for any excuse, any pretext, to continue sucking up to anybody who has power among the Palestinians. If they just murmur the word “armistice” under their breath, it will be acceptable to us.
The question isn’t what Norwegian policy is, it’s what it would take to change it. A future Palestinian government can shoot rockets at Israeli civilian targets, teach antisemitism to their children, refuse to accept the existence of the state of Israel, give refuge to international terrorists who want to destroy Europe, steal humanitarian supplies, and obviously impose misogynistic, homophobic “sharia” laws on its citizens. As long as they occasionally make vague reference to something that sort of resembles conciliation and armistice.
They can count on Norway. This is what you call unconditional love.
Morten Høglund in the Progress Party posed a perfectly reasonable question to foreign minister Støre, namely whether the Norwegian government would demand from both the provisional Hamas-Fatah government, and a future Palestinian government, that it comply with the quartet requirement to a) recognize the state of Israel, b) renounce political violence, and c) commit to earlier agreements.
