Norway has been on my mind lately.

Recently, my daughter, who works for the Israeli branch of an international medical technology company, told me about an encounter with a potential Norwegian customer. The customer wanted a declaration that the company did not do business in what it called the “occupied territories.” The company’s Norwegian branch responded with a carefully worded assurance that the Israeli operation was not located in territory considered occupied.

There was nothing dramatic about the exchange. Perhaps that is what disturbed me. A potential customer considering a medical product from an Israeli company apparently regarded the company’s relationship to disputed territory as something requiring a formal declaration before moving forward.

Around the same time, I listened to a long debate between Norway’s deputy foreign minister, Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik, and British barrister Natasha Hausdorff over Norway’s proposed prohibition on trade connected to Israeli settlements. Hausdorff challenged Kravik on the legal premises behind Norway’s policy: the status of the territories, the relevance of the Oslo Accords, the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and whether a trade prohibition would itself conflict with Norway’s treaty obligations.

What struck me was how often Kravik returned to the breadth of international agreement. The International Court of Justice had concluded in a 2024 advisory opinion that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful, a position overwhelmingly accepted by European governments.  Serious governments did not accept Hausdorff’s argument that the conventional description of the West Bank as occupied Palestinian territory fails to account for the territory’s unusual legal and historical status, including the absence of a prior sovereign Palestinian state. At one point, Kravik suggested that the probability that her legal analysis was sound when virtually everyone else had reached the opposite conclusion was not very great. 

Perhaps none of this would have affected me quite so personally if Norway were merely another European country to me.

When our children were young, we had three Norwegian au pairs in succession. The first, Gerd, became so close to our family that the second was her best friend and the third her cousin. We loved them, and they remained part of our family’s story long after our children no longer needed au pairs. Today, in another Norwegian connection, a lovely Norwegian family is renting our home in Massachusetts.

I have always felt warmly toward Norway. That is one reason its increasingly punitive posture toward Israel leaves me with something approaching a sense of betrayal.

And it brought back something Gerd told me more than thirty years ago.

She liked America, she said, because Americans seemed more accepting of people who didn’t conform. In Norway, as she experienced it, there was tremendous pressure to think and behave as others did.

I don’t know whether Gerd’s observation was representative of Norway then, much less Norway today. And I certainly don’t believe that one former au pair’s impression explains Norwegian foreign policy. But listening to Kravik repeatedly invoke the overwhelming agreement of governments and international institutions, I found myself remembering her words.

And then I began thinking about one of my favorite books as a child, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. It was once a fixture of the children’s literary canon,........

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