Constructive ambiguity

Constructive ambiguity is the strategy of leaving a contested issue open or phrasing an agreement without settling its ultimate meaning, so negotiations can continue despite unresolved claims. In the play, it is both a stated rationale for compromise and a practical way to move the Oslo Channel toward agreement: its most consequential use comes when Shimon Peres agrees that Jerusalem’s future will be addressed in a later stage of negotiations, allowing Ahmed Qurie to accept the document without the sovereignty dispute being resolved.

The Principle and the Secret Channel

The play sets constructive ambiguity against the public, government-to-government diplomacy that had failed to bring the parties together. Terje Rød-Larsen proposes a second channel built on the opposite model: intimate discussions between people, held in an isolated place where Israeli participants and the Palestine Liberation Organization can meet and talk. The distinction matters to the principle’s operation. The secret channel creates room for discussion before every exchange must become an official position or a final settlement.

That room is not presented as an end in itself. The playwright’s account identifies the clandestine channel as the process through which a handful of Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants helped make the Oslo Accords possible. Within the drama, constructive ambiguity gives the negotiators a way to keep that process alive when direct proposals, formal status, or the wording of a document threaten to stall it.

From Generalities to Negotiable Terms

The negotiations repeatedly test whether an apparently constructive formulation contains enough substance to answer the other side’s demands. During an exchange over a Palestinian offer to take control of Gaza, Ahmed Qurie asks where the Israeli side’s direct reply is. Yair Hirschfeld points to the draft of the Declaration of Principles, but Qurie rejects its eloquent generalities as an inadequate response to a concrete offer. The disagreement establishes a limit: language can preserve flexibility, but vagueness alone does not satisfy a demand for an answer.

The question of official status sharpens the difference between flexibility and concession. After a two-day meeting that Terje Rød-Larsen describes as having made extraordinary progress, he argues that the Israeli delegation should be upgraded to official status. Yossi Beilin objects that Israel has no delegation to upgrade and that doing so would be illegal. Elsewhere, Beilin instructs Rød-Larsen to say that the Israeli side decides whom it sends and will consider a request when the other side puts something substantive on the table. Ahmed Qurie replies that the Palestinians have offered to take Gaza and demands an upgrade in reciprocity. In these exchanges, a channel can advance while its participants still disagree over what counts as a meaningful offer, who has authority, and what concession should be returned.

Exchanges, Risks, and Political Limits

The draft brings several substantive disputes into view rather than dissolving them. Uri Savir says Israel is willing to discuss much of it but demands the removal of provisions he considers impossible, and he rules out negotiating Jerusalem’s sovereignty. When he offers relinquishing control of Gaza, Qurie conditions Palestinian acceptance on Israel relinquishing control of Jericho at the same time. The exchange turns a unilateral-sounding proposal into a linked territorial bargain: each side’s acceptance depends on what the other gives up.

A further exchange links arbitration to territorial negotiations. Qurie agrees to drop the demand that outstanding disputes be referred to international arbitration; Savir agrees to negotiate the transfer of Gaza and Jericho. Savir then describes a deliberately indirect sequence: each will report an insult to his own leadership, and Rød-Larsen will call two days later to say that the demands have been accepted. The staging separates the appearance of defiance from the subsequent movement toward agreement. It shows how the secret channel can manage political presentation as well as the substance of a bargain, without claiming that the underlying disagreements have vanished.

The stakes extend beyond the wording of any single clause. Yossi Beilin observes that in four months the participants have gone from not imagining a meeting to having a document before them, while acknowledging that Uri Savir will have to walk back much of what is written. Shimon Peres argues that failure could leave the Palestine Liberation Organization so bereft of victories that it might cease to exist, and that Israel needs it to remain in being. He urges bold action, calls for one final round in Oslo, and directs that the Americans be told nothing from then on. These moments frame ambiguity as a method used under political pressure, not as proof that the parties have reached shared conclusions.

Jerusalem and the Document’s Open Ending

The final negotiation makes the principle explicit. Over seven hours, Rød-Larsen acts as go-between for Peres and Qurie while the last points of resistance are put on the table. The two sides clash over border security and checkpoints: Qurie accepts the other side’s forces being responsible for border security but demands joint control of all checkpoints; Peres refuses to cede the checkpoints. Qurie insists that his position is not a bluff, and Rød-Larsen leans in to whisper to Peres while Mona Juul and Johan Jorgen Holst gesture urgently at him.

Peres then invokes constructive ambiguity and accepts that the future of Jerusalem will be addressed in the final stage of further negotiations. Qurie accepts the document. The wording neither settles Jerusalem’s future nor removes the competing positions that made the question contentious. Its achievement is narrower and, in the scene, decisive: it permits acceptance of the document while leaving the disputed issue for later. The play’s ending therefore presents constructive ambiguity not as a solution to every conflict, but as a form of language through which an agreement can advance without pretending that its hardest question has been answered.