Norwegian State Secretary Andreas Kravik has admitted that it was a mistake not to allow the King to express condolences to Israel after October 7.
Two days after the Hamas massacre, the royal family contacted the Foreign Affairs Ministry and asked if Norway could send a personal condolence. Foreign Affairs Minister Espen Barth Eide advised King Harald V not to. While the reasoning was that “it is considered natural that any condolences in the present case come from the government,” the majority of the Jewish community looks upon this incident as a betrayal. Worse still, it took Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre four days to refer to Hamas as a terrorist group.
Rolf Kirschner, the former leader of the Jewish community of Oslo, told The Jerusalem Post last year that the incident was “a stain on Norwegian history.”
However, there may now finally be an apology – over two and a half years later.
On April 22, Kravik appeared as a guest on the show of Jewish Norwegian podcaster Henrik Beckheim.
Beckheim probed Kravik on the double standards of the king not being allowed to console Israel after October 7, whereas he was allowed to send condolences to Christ Church after the mass shootings in 2019, after the Manchester bombing in 2017, and after the attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, in 2024. He was also permitted to send messages after Stockholm, Brussels, Istanbul, Nice, Paris, and London – all of which are locations of high-casualty terrorist attacks between 2015 and 2017.
Kravik said he believed the issue stemmed from the “division of labor,” in which the king typically sends condolences in cases of natural disasters, while the prime minister or the Foreign Affairs minister is in charge of sending condolences following political activity or acts of terror.
The response would have been handled differently today
He acknowledged that some people were upset about this, and said that they “would have obviously handled it differently today.”
“This is something we would not have repeated if the situation had arisen today,” he reiterated.
He stressed that Norway, from the start, was “very clear about not only condemning the terrorist attack from Hamas, which was enormously bestial, and also expressing compassion and empathy and sorrow for what Israel was hit by, so I think the Israeli authorities and the Israeli population know very well where Norway stands in that situation.”
“I understand, Henrik; the point that you raise there looks like a kind of biased treatment, and we cannot be associated with that,” he said. “That is why we have gone through all our routines to look at things, so that something like this won’t happen again.”
Norwegian Jews are considering leaving Norway
Beckheim told the Post on Sunday that it was an admission of error, and not an apology.
“Kravik admits that not allowing the king to send condolences was wrong. But he doesn’t apologize. And the Foreign Ministry didn’t come out and say this on their own. Nor have they sent any formal apology to Israel, as far as I know. Nor have they sent a formal condolence.”
Beckheim said that if the government “really wanted to make up for this moral wrongdoing, they could today both allow and encourage Norway’s king to extend his condolences for October 7 to Israel now.”
“Norway has unfortunately been one of the very worst countries in the world regarding this anti-Israel attitude, with a Labor Party government seemingly more interested in a good friendship with Iran’s regime than with Israel,” Beckheim added.
He also told the Post that many people in Norway’s Jewish community are considering leaving Norway because of the antisemitic atmosphere in the country.