Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences

Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences is the institutional base through which Terje Rød-Larsen helps create the Oslo Channel, an unofficial and secret route for Israeli-Palestinian discussions. In the play, the institute supplies more than a name: its resources and Rød-Larsen’s authority make secluded meetings possible, while a conference cover helps shield them from public and governmental scrutiny. The organization thus occupies the crucial middle ground between private initiative and formal diplomacy; the channel’s eventual offer to become official marks a change in status, not the beginning of its work.

Identity and Institutional Role

The introductory material identifies Terje Rød-Larsen as director of Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences. It also recounts how the playwright first encountered him in early 2012, when Rød-Larsen was a United Nations special envoy focused on Lebanon and was invited to speak to the cast of Blood and Gifts about his work as a diplomatic negotiator. In a later conversation, Rød-Larsen explained that he and Mona Juul had been closely involved in the making of the Oslo Accords. His account disclosed the existence of the secret back channel that, in the playwright’s understanding, had helped make the agreement possible.

The introduction gives the institute a consequential but carefully bounded place in that history. The playwright says that the participants’ involvement was available in the public record, although Rød-Larsen and Juul had downplayed their own roles in conversation and emphasized the achievements of the Israeli and Palestinian participants. The playwright’s research led him to conclude that the couple had midwifed the process. He also stresses that their involvement, and the channel itself, remained controversial: some regarded the effort as bold and necessary, while others saw it as reckless or naive meddling. The institute is therefore associated with both the practical work of creating a diplomatic opening and the dispute over whether that intervention was justified.

Building an Unofficial Channel

In the play, Rød-Larsen proposes a second channel built in deliberate contrast to government-to-government pronouncements. Instead of grand declarations, it would permit intimate discussions between people, in an isolated place where Israeli participants and representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization could meet without their governments conducting the exchange in public. Rød-Larsen offers to oversee the model and arrange the location. When Yossi Beilin asks how such an arrangement could be made, he places the resources of Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences, his own expertise, and a guarantee of discretion at Beilin’s disposal.

This offer defines the institute’s dramatic function. Fafo is not portrayed as a government negotiating body; it provides the institutional capacity and cover for a process operating outside formal diplomatic channels. That distinction matters: the private talks can explore possibilities that official talks have not opened, but their unofficial status also leaves their participants and organizers exposed to political risk. The playwright describes the historical channel as involving Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians working secretly to alter the political reality between two peoples. In the play, the institute gives that secret cooperation a usable structure rather than merely endorsing its goal.

Secrecy and Practical Arrangements

The proposed cover is specific. Rød-Larsen says that Fafo will describe the visitors as Israeli and Palestinian academics coming to Norway for a conference, and that no one beyond the organizers will know the real purpose. Mona Juul adds that there will be no diplomatic channels and that the participants will travel on regular flights whose routes are randomly chosen. Her conditions make secrecy a matter of procedure as well as intention: the meetings are to be hidden within ordinary travel and an apparently legitimate academic gathering.

The play also shows how that discretion depends on personal handling of arrivals. Ahmed Qurie tells Rød-Larsen that he must meet the visitors himself and that no one else may touch their passports. The arrangement links the institute’s organizational cover to direct responsibility for the people being brought into the channel. Later, Rød-Larsen assigns telephone code names for the participants and political figures, including names for Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, and Qurie. The coded vocabulary extends the effort to control what can be recognized or disclosed beyond the meeting room and into communications between participants.

From Back Channel to Official Offer

The play’s institutional arc reaches a turning point when Joel Singer, speaking on behalf of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the State of Israel, offers to make the back channel the official channel. That proposal demonstrates the unusual direction of movement the play assigns to Fafo’s role: a process established outside official diplomacy becomes a candidate for formal recognition. Ahmed Qurie immediately asks what will happen to the Washington-sponsored talks, making clear that elevation of the secret channel raises questions about its relationship to the existing process. The scene presents institutional success not as a clean resolution but as a new negotiation over authority and access.

The playwright’s introduction cautions that the stage version is not a documentary reenactment. He says that the historical events in Oslo are true but that he theatricalized and reinvented them to focus on the radical act at the center of the Oslo Channel. Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences should therefore be understood both as a real institution identified as Rød-Larsen’s organization and as a central mechanism in the play’s rendering of secret diplomacy. It embodies the channel’s dependence on resources, discretion, and a credible public explanation, while its association with the controversial process keeps the boundary between facilitation and political intervention in view.