'Adverse' Impact on Ties: Israel Slams Norway's 'Occupied Territories' Label on West Bank Goods

In November 2021, Belgium slapped a similar label on products coming from Palestinian territories controlled by Israeli settlers. A year before that, the United States moved in the opposite direction, labelling exports from West Bank settlements as Israeli.

Norway’s decision to label goods manufactured in Israeli settler-controlled Palestinian territories will harm relations, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has warned.

“This is a decision that will not contribute to the promotion of Israeli-Palestinian relations. It will adversely affect the bilateral relations between Israel and Norway and impact the relevance of Norway’s role in the advancement of Israeli-Palestinian relations”, the ministry said in a statement late Saturday.

The Norwegian Foreign Ministry announced Friday that it would be labelling wine, olive oil, fruit, vegetables, potatoes, and other goods coming from settler-controlled areas as products made in “occupied territories”, specifying that Oslo does not recognise Israeli sovereignty beyond the pre-1967 borders, including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, as well as Gaza.

“Foodstuffs originating in areas occupied by Israel must be marked with the area from which the product comes, and that it comes from an Israeli settlement if that is the case”, the ministry said in a statement. “Norway considers the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories to be contrary to international law”, Oslo added.

Norway said its decision would bring the country into accord with a 2019 ruling by the European Court of Justice, which called on EU nations to specify the origin of Israeli products when they come from lands which were not part of Israel before the 1967 Six-Day War. The European Commission made similar recommendations in 2015.

Norway is not a member of the European Union, but does participate in its common market via the European Single Market agreement of 1993. It is also a member of the European Free Trade Organisation, a four-nation bloc consisting of Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, which signed a free trade deal with Tel Aviv in 1992.

The spat follows Norwegian pension fund KLP’s decision last year to halt investment in over a dozen major transnational corporations on “ethical” grounds over their alleged links to Israeli West Bank settlements. The companies include US telecoms giant Motorola, as well as firms in the banking, energy, and construction sectors.

Norway’s labelling move follows a similar move by Belgium in November 2021. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said Brussels’ decision was a move “in the right direction”, and called on other countries to “follow in the footsteps of Belgium by labeling the Israeli settlements’ products, condemn settlement expansion and act on putting pressure to halt the growing settlers’ assaults on the Palestinians”. Israel slammed the move at the time, and cancelled planned diplomatic meetings between Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll and his Belgian counterparts.

Palestinian officials have yet to comment on Norway’s Friday ruling.

Israel has at least 250 settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, with 700,000 or more settlers estimated to reside there.

Tel Aviv’s policy of encouraging settlement in internationally-recognised Palestinian lands is one of the key reasons for the collapse of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in 2014. The Trump administration added fuel to the fire by recognising Israeli claims to sovereignty over the contested territories. In 2020, when the administration unveiled a "Peace Plan" which would enshrine the Israeli-claimed areas of Palestine into law, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called it the “slap of the century” and said it belonged in the “garbage can of history”. Israeli media have reported that the Biden administration may be considering walking back its predecessor’s decisions on the matter. President Biden is expected to visit Israel in July as part of a wider trip to the region.

Norway played an important role in efforts to resolve the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and hosted a series of secret meetings of negotiators from the two sides in Oslo in the early 1990s, culminating in the signature of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords – a plan for the creation of a future Palestinian state. The Oslo process ended in failure in the early 2000s after the outbreak of the Second Intifada – a five-year-long Palestinian uprising triggered by the failure of the 2000 Camp David Summit to reach a final agreement on the proposed peace plan.