Hamas

Hamas is named in the play’s closing account of the political aftermath of the Oslo Accords: two years after Ahmed Qurie became Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization is defeated at the ballot box by Hamas. The brief reference places the organization at the end of a history that had earlier presented the Palestine Liberation Organization as indispensable to a possible agreement—and then shows its political fortunes changing.

Position in the Play’s Political History

The play’s central diplomatic story concerns a clandestine channel through which Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants helped bring about the Oslo Accords. In the later political discussion, Shimon Peres argues that the Palestine Liberation Organization must not be allowed to collapse: if the agreement fails, he says, it may become so bereft of victories that it ceases to exist, while Israel needs it to remain in existence. He proposes that Yasser Arafat and the other PLO leaders be allowed to return to Gaza as part of a bold effort to secure a deal. Hamas is not identified as the cause of those earlier calculations, but its later appearance as the electoral victor sharpens the contrast between the Palestine Liberation Organization’s role in the negotiations and its subsequent political defeat.

Electoral Defeat and Its Consequence

In the closing sequence, the play moves from the renewed violence of the Second Intifada to a compressed account of subsequent political events. Ahmed Qurie becomes Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority; two years later, Hamas defeats the Palestine Liberation Organization at the ballot box, and Qurie retires from public life. The play states the electoral reversal without describing Hamas’s platform, campaign, or internal organization, and it does not present the vote as the cause of the preceding violence.

Significance in the Ending

Hamas’s single, consequential mention helps shift the ending beyond the negotiations themselves. The secret channel and the Accords had depended on the Palestine Liberation Organization as a negotiating counterpart; the closing chronology records that this organization later lost at the ballot box to Hamas. Set beside the renewed violence and Qurie’s retirement, the reversal leaves the diplomatic achievement in tension with a political future that the negotiation scenes do not resolve.