Oslo has divested from some Israeli companies but its $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund remains heavily invested in arms companies supplying Israel’s military
Andrew Feinstein is a former ANC MP. He served under Nelson Mandela in South Africa’s first democratic parliament following a period in exile fighting apartheid.
Jack Cinamon is a Researcher at Shadow World Investigations and Research-Coordinator at Corruption Tracker
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Norges Bank headquarters
Creative Commons: I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, long celebrated as a model of ethical investment, was praised earlier this year for divesting from a handful of Israeli firms.
This Friday, the Scandinavian country will take centre stage as the latest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, which has long honoured those who have pursued the causes of disarmament, arms control, and conflict resolution, is announced in Oslo, as it has been since the award’s conception in 1901.
Although of Swedish origin, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, chose to have the Peace Prize awarded by a Norwegian committee, unlike his other eponymous prizes which are based in Stockholm.
An educated guess behind Nobel’s possible motivations points to the fact that “he might have in fact, considered Norway a more peace-oriented and more democratic country than Sweden” at a time when the two countries were united under a common monarchy – an arrangement that was dissolved in 1905.
In the same year, the Peace Prize was awarded to Baroness Bertha von Suttner, an Austro-Bohemian aristocrat, author and disarmament campaigner who was honoured “for her audacity to oppose the horrors of war”.
Yet beyond the headlines, and Norway’s reputation as a purveyor of soft-power pacifism, lies a contradiction.
New research by Shadow World Investigations for Middle East Eye shows the government-owned fund is deeply invested in the very industry fuelling Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The Norwegian Oil Fund, officially known as the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), is the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, holding assets worth more than $2 trillion.
Built on the windfalls from Norway’s decades-old oil and gas industry, its scale dwarfs that of equivalent funds such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, or the Kuwait Investment Authority, each of which holds assets worth around $1 trillion.
Its current investments include more than £20bn ($26bn) in shares in 49 of the world’s top 100 arms companies, the majority of which are either directly or indirectly supplying Israel.
These holdings appear to conflict with the fund’s own ethical guidelines which require it to exclude companies based on a number of criteria including serious or systemic violations of human rights, and serious violations of individuals’ rights in situations of war or conflict.
For instance, Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons company, has been excluded from the fund since 2009, based on its supply of a surveillance system deployed along the separation barrier built in the West Bank.
The fund’s Council on Ethics, which makes recommendations on exclusions to the managers of the fund and the Norwegian government, advised that investment in Elbit would constitute “ an unacceptable risk of complicity in serious violations of fundamental ethical norms”.
Investments in arms companies linked to Israel also appear at odds with Norway’s support for Palestinian rights and statehood, and its longstanding role as a stakeholder in the Oslo Accords, the landmark agreements signed between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the early 1990s.
Widely hailed at the time as a step towards peace, the signing of the first accord led to Arafat and his Israeli counterparts across the negotiating tables, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, sharing the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
The prize has periodically been awarded to those seen as pursuing peace in the Middle East.
Other past recipients include Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in recognition of the 1978 peace agreement between the two countries, and Ralph Bunche, the American diplomat credited with arranging a ceasefire between Israel and Arab states in 1948.
The naming of this year’s winner at Oslo’s City Hall is set to take place in the shadow of ongoing efforts to end the two-year war in Gaza and the announcement by US President Donald Trump on Wednesday that Israel and Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire as part of the first phase of a peace deal.
Recent divestments
Against the backdrop of Israel’s devastation of Gaza, Norway has aligned closer to states and movements backing Palestinian rights.
Along with Spain and Ireland, Norway formally recognised the state of Palestine in May 2024, with Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store declaring that “the Palestinian people have a fundamental, independent right to self-determination”.
In May, Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andreas Motzfeldt Kravik told MEE that Israel’s siege on Gaza was “unconscionable and deeply illegal”.
But while parts of Norwegian civil society have embraced the global BDS campaign, the government in Oslo has stopped short of endorsing it.
Instead, it has focused on targeted measures, such as excluding from the fund companies found to be complicit in violations of international law.
In August, the fund announced divestments from six firms it said were implicated in land dispossession and war crimes in Palestine.
These included US construction giant Caterpillar, and five firms in Israel’s banking sector: FIBI Holdings, First International Bank of Israel, Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, Bank Hapoalim and Bank Leumi. Earlier in May, they also decided to exclude the country’s largest energy provider, Paz Retail and Energy Ltd.
These decisions followed a series of earlier exclusions, as the government called on Norges Bank, Norway’s central bank which manages the fund, to review its Israeli investments, citing the “deteriorating situation” in Gaza and the West Bank.
In mid-August, the fund said it had reduced its investments in Israel to 38 companies, down from 61, having divested from 23 since the end of June.
These measures appeared to underscore how the fund’s Council on Ethics, which makes recommendations about divestments, and Norges Bank’s executive board at times have been willing to act in accordance with its ethical guidelines.
Yet the picture is far from consistent.
Concerns under international law
In April, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, wrote to Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian finance minister, to warn him that the fund’s investments in Israeli companies and arms manufacturers supplying Israel risked putting Norway in breach of international law.
Albanese’s letter accused the fund of being “one of the leading European investors in a number of weapons manufacturers, for which we have reasonable grounds to believe they are supplying Israel”.
A month later, Albanese wrote again to Stoltenberg, calling for the fund to “fully and unconditionally divest from all entities linked to Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory”.
Albanese told Stoltenberg that Palestinian self-determination had “never faced greater peril”, warning that the existence of Palestinian life “hangs in the balance”.
“Norway represents a lighthouse for so many and has the power to make an historical difference,” she wrote.
“Never has this power been so real; today the Norwegian people and their political leaders are called to decide how they will use it and ensure that accountability helps unlock the titanium cage of Israel’s forever occupation.”
Albanese’s concerns are widely echoed by civil society groups in Norway who are also calling for the fund to divest from the arms industry.
Rami Samandar, spokesperson for Aksjonsgruppa for Palestina (Action Group for Palestine), part of a coalition of around 55 organisations applying pressure on the fund’s executives to divest, told Middle East Eye: “Investing in companies that arm and sustain Israel is not just bad ethics – it makes Norway complicit in genocide and erodes the very foundation of international law.”
He went further, stressing that, “every dollar the Oil Fund puts into arms companies sends a message: that profit is worth more than Palestinian lives. This is unacceptable and must end.”
Mads Harlem, a lawyer and adviser on international law at Save the Children Norway, told MEE: “The Norwegian Oil Fund’s investments in the arms industry are not in accordance with Norway’s obligations under international law to prevent serious violations in conflict zones.”
Why invest in weapons?
Norway’s Oil Fund invests in the arms sector for two key reasons.
The first is profitability: arms companies offer steady demand, predictable returns and relatively low risk because of their government backing.
The second reason is strategic. Such investments align with geopolitical interests and help reinforce international relationships. Norway and its Scandinavian neighbours, all now Nato members and pressed up close against Russia, are all reviewing their own defensive needs in light of the war in Ukraine.
Periods of war often drive demand even higher, boosting profits, though they can complicate these strategic relationships.
It is this profitability and geopolitical balancing act that makes this divestment campaign so challenging. Against these, the fund is also supposed to consider mounting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) pressures and the ethical dilemma of profiting from conflict, or, in the case of Gaza, genocide.
In response to Albanese’s letters, Stoltenberg affirmed that “according to the information available to the Council on Ethics last year, there were no companies in the Fund with ongoing deliveries of relevant types of weapons to Israel, and some companies with ongoing deliveries were supplying military equipment that does not fall under the exclusion criterion”.
In the context of direct licences of exports to Israel, this may be partially true, since many European governments have pledged not to export arms to Israel that could be used in Gaza, but the claim that these companies are not indirectly supplying Israel through other means as part of the global supply chain does not stand up to scrutiny.
Arms company investments
The fund’s largest arms investments are, unsurprisingly, in the United States, where Norway owns holdings worth over £13.2bn in 27 arms companies.
The rapidly expanding Palantir Technologies, a recent entry in the list of the top 100 arms companies, has received the most investment, at $3.56bn.
Palantir entered into a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s Ministry of Defense in early 2024 to provide AI-powered tools and technology for “war-related missions”. Its systems are crucial to Israel’s much-criticised targeting practices. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp has consistently reiterated that “Palantir stands with Israel”.
Palantir, in response to previous reporting on its relationship with the Israeli military, has said it has “no involvement” in Israeli targeting systems.
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