Declaration of Principles (DOP)

The Declaration of Principles (DOP) is the working document through which secret Israeli-Palestinian discussions began to take the shape of a negotiated agreement. Drafted by people meeting outside the official talks, challenged over the substance and clarity of its terms, and revised into legal form, it became both a record of bargaining and a means of moving it forward. Its path—from a joint draft to an accepted document—shows how the Oslo Channel tried to turn political positions into proposals that each side could discuss, without eliminating the conflicts those proposals exposed.

Creation in the Oslo Channel

The DOP emerged from the clandestine diplomatic back channel that, in the play’s account, made the Oslo Accords possible. Terje Rød-Larsen describes its method as the opposite of grand pronouncements between governments: intimate discussions between people, held somewhere isolated, where the participants could meet alone and talk. The channel’s secrecy was not incidental to the document’s creation. It provided a setting for contact between Israelis and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization when official relations constrained what could be done openly.

The early meetings produced a draft through sustained work rather than a prepared roadmap. Yossi Beilin and Yair Hirschfeld worked with the Palestinian participants for two days and nights, with waffles, cigarettes, and coffee punctuating the sessions. Mona Juul describes the result as a joint draft of a Declaration of Principles, radical and without precedent in recognizing that both sides had grievances and wished to find a way forward. The document therefore began not as a finished settlement but as a shared framework assembled through direct discussion.

That distinction mattered. At one point Terje Rød-Larsen urged Yossi Beilin to see the progress made in a single two-day meeting as a reason to raise the Israeli delegation’s status. Beilin replied that Israel had no delegation to upgrade and that doing so would be illegal. The draft could advance political contact, but the participants’ authority and the channel’s unofficial status remained unresolved. Its contents and the status of those discussing them were connected problems, not separate questions.

Proposals, disputes, and limits

The DOP’s value was tested against concrete proposals. At Borregaard Estate, Ahmed Qurie asked where the Israelis’ direct reply was to the Palestinian offer to take control of the Gaza Strip. Yair Hirschfeld answered that the draft they had written put forward their own specific proposals; Qurie rejected that as eloquent generalities. The exchange revealed a central weakness in the early text: language that its authors regarded as proposal-making could seem to the other side to avoid answering a specific offer.

The argument over substance also ran through the document’s contested terms. Ahmed Qurie maintained that the Palestinians had made a substantial offer by proposing to take the Gaza Strip, and demanded an upgrade in reciprocity. In a later exchange, Uri Savir said Israel was willing to relinquish control of the Gaza Strip; Qurie answered that the Palestinians would accept on condition that Israel also relinquish control of Jericho. The DOP did not erase the distance between the positions. It provided a place where the proposed exchange could be stated, tested, and met with a countercondition.

Security and Jerusalem exposed further limits. Qurie argued that Israel would not have security until it made peace with the Palestinians, while Savir insisted that Israel would not negotiate over the sovereignty of Jerusalem, either in the room or in a document. These disputes show why the DOP could not function simply as a declaration of agreement: some issues remained unacceptable to one side, even as other parts were open to discussion. At one point Qurie agreed to drop the demand for international arbitration of outstanding quarrels, while Savir agreed that Israel would negotiate turning over the Gaza Strip and Jericho. Each concession was tied to the other’s, making the draft’s development a process of exchange rather than unilateral retreat.

From contested draft to legal text

When Joel Singer examined the draft, he condemned its imprecision. He said every sentence could be read to mean anything by either side and called it a time bomb. Yossi Beilin answered by asking him to defuse it, explaining that Yitzhak Rabin trusted Singer alone to do so. The scene places the document’s weakness and its promise side by side: the draft had brought the parties far enough to make revision consequential, but its ambiguity could also make that progress unstable.

Singer reworked the DOP, incorporating Ahmed Qurie and Hassan Asfour’s answers to his questions. Mona Juul describes the result as a proper, legal document. Singer and Uri Savir then returned to Borregaard Estate to meet with the Palestinians. The revision did not make the underlying political disagreements disappear; it gave the document a more formal and legally shaped basis on which those disagreements could continue to be negotiated.

The changing status of the channel accompanied the changing status of the text. Singer offered, on behalf of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israel, to make the back channel the official channel. The offer marked a move from secret contact toward official negotiation, while the revised DOP supplied a text for that next phase. Its development thus links the informal process that made discussion possible with a public political process that would require a document capable of surviving scrutiny.

Acceptance and the work left open

The DOP’s final movement does not present agreement as the disappearance of conflict. In a seven-hour exchange relayed by Terje Rød-Larsen between Shimon Peres and Ahmed Qurie, the parties remained divided over border security and checkpoints. Qurie proposed that Israeli forces control border security while Palestinian forces share control of all checkpoints; Peres rejected joint control of the checkpoints. Qurie paired a threat to burn the document and wage war with an openness to a counterproposal, keeping the possibility of negotiation alive even in a moment of confrontation.

Jerusalem was handled through a formulation that postponed rather than resolved the dispute. Invoking constructive ambiguity, Peres accepted that the city’s future would be addressed in the final stage of further negotiations. Ahmed Qurie accepted the document, and Peres did as well. The ending gives the DOP a precise but limited achievement: it secured acceptance of a text while leaving a central question for later negotiation.

The document’s significance lies in this dual function. It enabled proposals, reciprocal concessions, legal revision, and a transition toward official talks, yet its progress depended on language that could accommodate unresolved differences. From the early complaint that it offered generalities to the final acceptance under constructive ambiguity, the DOP registers both the reach and the incompleteness of the negotiating process.