Israel–PLO Relations

Israel–PLO Relations are the political and human center of the negotiations depicted in the play: an officially forbidden contact becomes a clandestine channel, then a route toward formal recognition, without resolving the conflict that produced it. The relationship changes not through a single handshake alone, but through a sequence of guarded meetings, personal encounters, political tests, and carefully qualified concessions. The eventual agreement marks a historic alteration in how the two sides address one another; the renewed violence of September 2000 prevents that alteration from being mistaken for lasting peace.

From Public Hostility to Secret Contact

The play situates the relationship against a long record of separation and animosity. Mona recalls a scene in which she and Terje crouch behind an overturned car as people fall around them. Across from one another stand two armed boys, one in uniform and the other in jeans. Their faces appear identical to her: each shows fear and a desire to be elsewhere rather than harming the other. For Mona, that recognition is where the possibility of change begins. The scene does not make the political conflict disappear; it gives its opposing sides a shared human likeness that the negotiations will have to contend with.

The opening of the secret channel is itself a breach of the public rules governing contact. When Holst asks what is happening, Larsen admits that he is facilitating secret conversations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose representatives are meeting face-to-face in Norway. Holst reacts with disbelief and asks whether Larsen has gone mad. The exchange establishes both the political risk of the contact and the gap between unofficial initiative and accepted government policy. In the playwright’s account of the events behind the play, the clandestine channel is presented as the means that made the Oslo Accords possible: without secret work by Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants, the public agreement would not have happened.

Building a Different Kind of Negotiation

Larsen describes the intended channel as the opposite of formal government pronouncements: intimate discussions between people, held somewhere isolated where Israeli participants and the PLO could meet alone. The distinction is important to the relationship’s development. The secret meetings do not begin as an authorized state-to-state negotiation; they create a setting in which contact can occur before the parties have publicly crossed that threshold. Qurie underscores the vulnerability of the arrangement by insisting that Larsen personally meet the Palestinian delegation on arrival and that no one else touch its passports.

The participants also establish a rule for how they will live together while negotiating. When a door is closed, they may converse and disagree, even bitterly. Outside that room, they are expected to share meals, talk about their families, and light the fire. Larsen argues that personal exchange allows them to see one another as people. The rule does not require agreement at the table; it places political dispute alongside ordinary shared life. Later, on the estate grounds as snow falls, Qurie and Savir walk together while Larsen and Mona follow at a discreet distance. Savir says he wants the process to work, as does Shimon; Qurie answers that the Chairman and he want it too. Their exchange gives the relationship a moment of direct, mutual commitment, even as Mona warns Terje not to take another step forward.

Authority, Reciprocity, and the Draft Agreement

The shift from secret contact toward official status exposes the continuing limits on what each side can promise. After a two-day meeting produces progress beyond Larsen’s expectations, he urges Beilin to upgrade the Israeli delegation. Beilin objects that Israel has no delegation to upgrade and that doing so would be illegal. The contradiction is central to this stage of the relationship: the Palestinians want recognition of the channel’s political weight, while the Israeli participants remain constrained by the absence of formal authorization.

Those limits sharpen into a dispute over reciprocity. Beilin says that the Israelis decide whom they send and tells the intermediary to convey that they will consider a request when the Palestinians put something substantive on the table. Qurie answers that the Palestinians have offered to take Gaza off Israel’s hands and demands an upgrade in return. Each side presents its position as a response to the other’s obligations, showing how quickly the private channel inherits the contested language of official diplomacy. The negotiations are not simply a story of growing personal trust: the representatives must also establish what counts as a meaningful offer and who has the authority to accept it.

The draft agreement intensifies the same tension. Singer denounces it as a capitulation and describes it as an extravagant gift to Yasser Arafat; Beilin insists that it is a working document. Savir says his involvement has made the terms better and that he had already walked them back from an earlier understanding. Beilin acknowledges that Savir will have to retreat further from what is written, but points to the speed of the change: in four months the parties have moved from not imagining a meeting with one another to negotiating over a document. The contrast with forty years of no comparable movement makes the draft both an opening and a source of alarm.

Recognition and the Move Toward Formality

A turning point comes when Singer, speaking on behalf of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israel, offers to make the back channel the official channel. The offer gives the clandestine relationship a potential institutional form, but Qurie immediately asks what will happen to the Washington-sponsored talks. The question keeps the transition from seeming automatic: official recognition of this channel raises the status of the negotiations while leaving their relation to the existing process unresolved.

Shimon Peres argues that the details must not obscure the larger political stakes. He believes the Palestine Liberation Organization may become hollowed out and cease to exist if the deal fails, and says Israel needs the organization to exist. He also identifies Arafat’s desire to return home as a possible basis for an agreement, instructing Savir to convey that he will allow Arafat and the PLO leadership to return to Gaza if Arafat makes the deal. Peres then calls for one last round in Oslo and says the Americans should no longer be told what is happening. His intervention links recognition to a concrete political possibility, but presents the return as a conditional offer, not an accomplished outcome.

The eventual formulations are reciprocal and explicit. Peres says Israel will accept the Palestine Liberation Organization as the official voice of the Palestinian people; Qurie says the Palestinians will accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel, and the exchange ends with agreement. The paired declarations mark a major change in the relationship: each side acknowledges the other as a political reality that cannot simply be excluded. The play’s account of the Oslo Accords places this achievement within the larger public history of the agreement, signed on 13 September 1993 at the White House Rose Garden.

The Limits of the Change

The agreement alters political recognition, but the play does not present it as the end of hostility or violence. Its closing chronology returns to September 2000, seven years after the signing. A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates on a bus in Jerusalem, killing twenty-six Israelis. In Gaza, Hassan Asfour is beaten almost to death by attackers who are never found; he retires from public life. Singer identifies the renewed violence in the Occupied Territories, and Beilin names the beginning of the Second Intifada.

That ending places the achievement of formal recognition beside the persistence of danger. The relationship has moved from forbidden contact to reciprocal declarations and an agreement, yet the later violence makes clear that a channel, a draft, and even a historic accord cannot by themselves settle the deeper conflict. The play’s central distinction is between opening a political relationship and completing its transformation: the first becomes possible through secret contact and recognition, while the second remains unresolved.