{"id":8018,"date":"2026-02-25T13:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T12:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/?p=8018"},"modified":"2026-02-25T13:59:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T12:59:13","slug":"how-norway-betrayed-the-oslo-accords-and-the-palestinian-leaders-did-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/news-en\/how-norway-betrayed-the-oslo-accords-and-the-palestinian-leaders-did-too\/","title":{"rendered":"How Norway betrayed the Oslo Accords \u2013 and the Palestinian leaders did too"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Norway helped write the Oslo Accords. Then it betrayed their underlying principle of impartiality and sided with the Palestinians.<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Jan Kapusnak<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On February 11, 2026, Mahmoud Abbas \u2013 the longtime head of the Palestinian Authority and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) \u2013 arrived in Oslo. It was not just another European capital, but the one that lent its name to the most famous diplomatic experiment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirty-three years earlier, Norway\u2019s Labour establishment had midwifed the secret channel. Driven by sociologist Terje R\u00f8d-Larsen and diplomat Mona Juul, and later taken up at ministerial level by Foreign Minister Johan J\u00f8rgen Holst it had produced the 1993 Declaration of Principles (Oslo I) and the 1995 Interim Agreement (Oslo II). The process helped earn Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oslo\u2019s premise was historically daring. Instead of ending the conflict in one grand leap, the parties would build habits of coexistence through reciprocal obligations: security cooperation, institution-building, and a mutual pledge to settle final-status issues only through direct negotiations. That reciprocity is precisely what has quietly evaporated from Norway\u2019s custodianship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Government Guest House, Jonas Gahr St\u00f8re, Norway\u2019s prime minister and Labour Party leader, now received Abbas in the familiar register of Norwegian peacemaking. The two-state solution, he said, remains \u201cthe political vision we have to strive for.\u201d He described Palestinians as living under \u201cextraordinarily difficult conditions,\u201d highlighted Israel\u2019s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza as \u201cmilitary pressure,\u201d and urged Israel to respect \u201cfundamental rules and regulations under international law.\u201d The effect was to cast Israeli military operations primarily as punitive pressure rather than self-defence, while leaving Palestinian violence \u2013 and the security issues driving Israeli action \u2013 unmentioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

St\u00f8re also said Norway wants Palestinians to be \u201cgoverned by democratic institutions.\u201d Yet standing beside Abbas, he did not mention the PA\u2019s glaring democratic deficit, entrenched corruption, or its flagrant violations of the Oslo Accords. If Oslo is a contract, one side\u2019s obligations cannot be treated as optional etiquette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Oslo Accords  rested on a straightforward bargain: Israel would transfer land and authority, and the Palestinian leadership would dismantle terror infrastructure and disarm armed factions by enforcing a real monopoly on force. Oslo II is explicit: both sides must take \u201call measures necessary\u201d to prevent \u201cacts of terrorism, crime and hostilities\u201d against the other side, and act against offenders. Palestinian self-government was never meant to become a safe haven for militias, or a grey zone where violence continues under different banners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is, undeniably, a serious and worsening problem of Jewish settler violence in the West Bank. Israel \u2013 especially under recent governments \u2013 has too often failed to confront it with the consistency and severity it demands. But this is not the same phenomenon as organized Palestinian terrorism, which did not end under Oslo and, in many periods, intensified rather than receded. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multiple factions under the broader PLO umbrella never truly abandoned armed struggle. That includes Fatah\u2019s armed offshoots\u2014most notably the Al-Aqsa Martyrs\u2019 Brigades (and Abbas is Fatah\u2019s chairman)\u2014and the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In Gaza, such factions have at times fought alongside Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which openly reject Oslo\u2019s premises. At times, even PA security personnel \u2013 including members of the Palestinian Police \u2013 have been implicated in attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another way the PA has violated Oslo\u2019s spirit is by maintaining financial rewards linked to terrorism through the prisoner-and-\u201cmartyr\u201d fund system dubbed \u201cpay-for-slay.\u201d The system provides monthly payments to Palestinians imprisoned for terrorist attacks on Israelis and to families of attackers killed while carrying out assaults. It functions as an incentive because payouts have traditionally been scaled with sentence length: the most serious offenders receive the highest benefits. The PA defends it as social support for \u201cprisoners\u201d and \u201cmartyrs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. and EU have tried repeatedly to pressure Ramallah to end the stipends. Abbas has repeatedly found ways to reassure donors he would do so \u2013 without dismantling the system. Under Donald Trump, the Taylor Force Act (2018) conditioned certain U.S. aid on ending the payments. Under Joe Biden, the pressure continued. In February 2025, Abbas issued a decree reported as ending the \u201cmartyrs fund\u201d and shifting stipends into a new framework; the EU welcomed the move. In April 2025, the EU unveiled a support package of up to \u20ac1.6 billion for the PA while insisting none of its funds be used for \u201cmartyrs\u201d payments. But in February 2026, Palestinian Media Watch alleged the reform was largely cosmetic: roughly $315 million still reaching 23,000+ beneficiaries, reclassified as civil servants, security personnel, and pensioners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another Oslo violation is the PA\u2019s tolerance and sponsorship of hostile propaganda, incitement, and the glorification of violence. Oslo II requires legal measures to stop incitement. Instead, the PA has nurtured a public culture that celebrates attackers: schools, streets, squares, camps, and tournaments named for perpetrators; messaging that delegitimizes Israel; and a civic ideal of \u201cmartyrdom\u201d against \u201coccupation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PA schooling is one of the clearest arenas where Oslo\u2019s ban on \u201chostile propaganda\u201d is treated as optional. Multiple monitoring reports describe recurring patterns: maps that erase Israel, civics and history taught in zero-sum terms, and language that elevates \u201cresistance\u201d as civic virtue. Even without explicit calls to violence, the cumulative effect is to delegitimize Israel\u2019s permanence, normalize confrontation, and frame compromise as surrender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norway has, specially under Conservative-led governments, given the impression as if it grasped what Oslo forbids. The clearest example is the Dalal Mughrabi episode. In 2017, a girls\u2019 centre inaugurated by the Women\u2019s Affairs Technical Committee (WATC), a Ramallah-based NGO, was named for Mughrabi, a Fatah-linked terrorist associated with the 1978 Coastal Road massacre that killed 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children. Norway condemned the glorification. Foreign Minister B\u00f8rge Brende called it \u201ccompletely unacceptable\u201d and moved to freeze funding linked to the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when Norway\u2019s Labour government returned, the instinct to draw bright red lines blurred into a fund-first, enforcement-later posture. Through the Foreign Ministry and NORAD (Norway\u2019s state development-aid agency), Norway, via direct grants and indirect funding pipelines, channels tens of millions of dollars to politicized NGOs operating in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Including groups active in BDS (boycott campaigns targeting Israel) and \u201clawfare\u201d at the International Criminal Court (using international prosecutions as a political strategy against Israel). In 2024, Norway committed more than NOK 267 million (about $26 million; CHF 20 million) to NGOs involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. A number of these grantees are flagged for links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist organization in the US, EU, Canada, and Israel. A state that claims to be Oslo\u2019s guardian cannot dismiss systemic glorification of violence as a PR problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another Oslo violation is unilateral internationalization. Oslo II bars either side from changing the status of the West Bank and Gaza before final-status talks. Yet for more than a decade the Palestinian leadership has pursued statehood-by-institutions through international bodies and legal forums, pressuring Israel while bypassing negotiations. The asymmetry is now routine: Israel is condemned for status-changing moves, while the PA\u2019s status-changing end-runs are hailed as diplomacy and often actively supported. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The milestones are clear\u2014and Norway endorsed the trajectory early. It voted to admit \u201cPalestine\u201d to UNESCO on October 31, 2011, and voted for the UN General Assembly upgrade to \u201cnon-member observer State\u201d on November 29, 2012. In 2024 Norway, following the same logic, recognized a Palestinian state. This recognition was a unilateral shortcut around Oslo\u2019s core premise: final-status questions were meant to be settled by direct negotiations, not external conferral. Coming so soon after October 7, the move read less like a diplomatic adjustment than a reward delivered in terrorism\u2019s aftermath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Norway also keeps the PA solvent. By chairing the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC) \u2013 the main donor forum created after Oslo to coordinate aid to the PA \u2013 Norway helps sustain an often inept authority even when \u201creform\u201d remains largely rhetorical. After October 7, when Israel withheld parts of the Palestinian tax revenues it collects on the PA\u2019s behalf, Norway helped broker a workaround that unlocked a tranche. In July 2025, it added NOK 200 million (about $20 million) in direct budget support to help cover PA public-sector salaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even after strong evidence that some UNRWA staff in Gaza were involved in the October 7 attacks \u2013 and many donors froze funding \u2013 Norway chose the opposite course. It said it would keep supporting UNRWA, increase its funding, and urge others to resume. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In March 2024, Norway’s Foreign Ministry said it was working to counter \u201cperceptions in many countries in the Global South that Western countries have double standards\u201d\u2014but then seemed ironically to confirm them, albeit in reverse. The report declared Israel\u2019s Gaza campaign a clear breach of international humanitarian law and argued that it fails to distinguish between civilians and combatants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, it relegated Hamas\u2019s systematic war crimes \u2013 including the October 7 mass murder, indiscriminate rocket fire, and the use of human shields to maximize casualties \u2013 to a secondary note rather than the engine of the battlefield. The result is a familiar Norwegian pattern: maximal moral certainty when reprimanding Israel, and a striking reluctance to hold Palestinian actors consistently accountable. Abbas\u2019s visit to Oslo made the symbolism unavoidable: Oslo\u2019s \u201cspirit\u201d is being buried in Oslo, by the country that claims to guard it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—————————————<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jan Kapusnak is a political analyst and author. He lives in Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norway helped write the Oslo Accords. Then it betrayed their underlying principle of impartiality and sided with the Palestinians. By Jan Kapusnak On February 11, 2026, Mahmoud Abbas \u2013 the longtime head of the Palestinian Authority and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) \u2013 arrived in Oslo. It was not just another European capital, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_socialbar":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[823],"tags":[2821,2825,2826,2820,2828,2831,2829,2716,697,1799,643,2830,654,2810,2816,2811,2813,1299,2812,2819,2827,2809,2832,2808,1168,2822,699,675,2817,2823,2814,2491,2824,661,2818,2815],"class_list":["post-8018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en","tag-abu-ali-mustafa-brigades","tag-ad-hoc-liaison-committee","tag-ahlc","tag-al-aqsa-martyrs-brigades","tag-bds-movement","tag-borge-brende","tag-dalal-mughrabi","tag-european-union","tag-fatah-en","tag-gaza-war","tag-hamas-en","tag-international-criminal-court","tag-israel-en","tag-israeli-palestinian-conflict","tag-johan-jorgen-holst","tag-jonas-gahr-store","tag-labour-party-norway","tag-mahmoud-abbas","tag-mona-juul","tag-nobel-peace-prize-1994","tag-norad","tag-norway","tag-october-7-2023-2","tag-oslo-accords","tag-palestinian-authority","tag-pay-for-slay","tag-pflp-en","tag-plo-en","tag-shimon-peres","tag-taylor-force-act","tag-terje-rod-larsen","tag-un-general-assembly","tag-unesco","tag-unrwa-en","tag-yasser-arafat","tag-yitzhak-rabin"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8021,"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8018\/revisions\/8021"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fokusisrael.ch\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}