Soer-Trondelag became the first province in Norway to bar the purchase of Israeli goods when the provincial board voted on December 16 to impose the boycott.
Torill Skaerseth, a board representative from the far-left Red Electoral Alliance, said she hopes the boycott will spread to other Norwegian provinces.
"We see Israel as an occupying force that could be compared with the apartheid regime in South Africa," she told the regional newspaper Adresseavisen. "We also want to campaign for the people of Soer Trondelag to also boycott."
Although the economic impact would be insignificant, the political signal angered Jewish groups.
In a statement issued in New York on Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League condemned the decision.
"It is shocking and ironic that this one-sided boycott effort comes at a time when Israel is making a series of dramatic steps toward peace, including the recent withdrawal from Gaza," the league's U.S. national director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement.
Norway has been an active mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most notably by secretly negotiating the now-tattered Oslo peace agreement in 1993. It also sought to nurture the process by awarding the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize to Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
The Norwegian national government has not imposed or called for any boycott.
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Halvorsen, who is also leader of the Socialist Left Party, was quoted as telling the major Oslo tabloid Dagbladet that she had stopped buying Israeli products long ago, and that she supports her party's boycott campaign.
"My and the Socialist Left's goal is for Norwegian consumers to decide to drop products and services from Israel, and make other choices in the shops," she was quoted as saying. The interview was given before Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke on Wednesday.
Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, of Labor, immediately responded that a government-backed boycott of Israel "would be unthinkable."
"It is not in the government platform," he said. "It is not Labor's policy. It is not the Center Party's policy. It will not become the government's policy."
Christian Democrat Ingebrigt Soerfon, an opposition politician who leads the Norwegian Parliament's Friends of Israel group, sharply criticized Halvorsen.
"Moves like this do not serve any peace process. Nor does it serve Norway's role," he said on the state radio network NRK. "This is disappointing."
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