Israeli–Palestinian conflict

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict forms the political and human landscape of the play’s account of the secret negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords. It is presented not as a problem solved by a single agreement, but as a struggle in which violence, political pressure, and incompatible demands coexist with the possibility of dialogue. The negotiations’ importance lies both in their concrete proposals and in the attempt to recognize people on the other side as human beings; the later return of violence makes clear how much that attempt could achieve, and how much it could not.

Historical setting and political rupture

The account places the conflict against a period of upheaval in Israel, Palestine, and the wider region. The Oslo Accords were the first peace deal between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and their public signing took place in the White House Rose Garden on September 13, 1993. The handshake between Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, became an emblem of a change that had seemed difficult to imagine. The play’s framing emphasizes that the ceremony followed a clandestine diplomatic channel: Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants met in secret in an effort to alter the political reality of two peoples.

That history is deliberately narrowed to the period immediately before and during the channel’s existence. The playwright describes drawing a tight boundary around that span and reshaping documented events for the stage rather than offering a textbook account or reenactment. The conflict therefore appears through particular pressures on negotiators and through the choices they make in response, not as a comprehensive history of its causes. The dramatic scale—secret meetings, danger, governments under strain, and friendships changing under pressure—makes the political rupture inseparable from the lives of the people working within it.

Violence and the pressure to act

The play connects the push for negotiations to the violence and fear experienced by civilians and political communities. In the Gaza Strip, Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul witness two boys, one in uniform and one in civilian clothes, facing each other with weapons. What strikes them is the likeness between the boys’ faces and their shared fear and wish not to be in that situation. The scene gives the conflict a human scale: opposing sides are not abstract positions, but people caught in a confrontation that neither boy appears to want.

For Terje Rød-Larsen, what they have witnessed becomes an argument for trying an improbable plan. He asks whether even a small chance of giving the boys a different future is enough to justify acting, and describes the moment as an unusual opportunity to make a difference. The exchange establishes a tension that recurs through the negotiations: urgency makes an attempt at peace feel necessary, but urgency does not make success probable or remove the political risks of proceeding.

Those risks intensify amid continued violence. The play refers to the First Intifada, which had continued in Gaza for five years by the time Yossi Beilin describes the crisis. He speaks of Palestinians killing Israeli settlers and soldiers, Palestinians also being killed, and children dying as the Israeli army responds. He also describes the political consequences beyond the immediate violence: images reaching international audiences, growing hostility toward Israel in Europe, and a sense that the existing negotiations were failing to produce results. His account links the conflict’s human cost to the pressure on Israeli political figures to reconsider their approach, without suggesting that public pressure alone could settle the underlying disputes.

In another escalation, an Israeli border guard is murdered and his body mutilated; the Israeli government responds by deporting 400 Palestinians accused of terrorist links to a remote area of Southern Lebanon, where they are left without basic provisions. The episode brings the conflict’s retaliatory logic into the foreground. It also threatens the negotiations directly: Palestinian representatives condemn the deportations, while an Israeli representative asserts that Israel will answer peace with peace and violence with violence. The exchanges make clear that diplomatic contact does not insulate the process from events outside the meeting room.

Negotiating across incompatible demands

The negotiations bring the conflict’s territorial and security questions into direct discussion. Early in one exchange, Ahmed Qurie asks for a direct answer to a concrete Palestinian offer to take control of Gaza. Yair Hirschfeld points instead to general proposals in a draft of the Declaration of Principles, and Qurie objects that these remain eloquent generalities. The disagreement is about more than tone: it identifies a persistent divide between broad diplomatic language and the specific arrangements needed to make a proposal meaningful.

The same tension appears in discussions of Jerusalem and security. Uri Savir says Israel will not negotiate over the sovereignty of Jerusalem, whether in the room or in a written document. Elsewhere he says Israel is willing to relinquish control of Gaza; Qurie answers that the Palestinians would accept that proposal only if Israel relinquished control of Jericho at the same time. Positions stated as limits can therefore become the basis for an exchange, but agreement on one issue remains tied to agreement on another. The play shows negotiation as a process of testing which demands can be discussed and which combinations might be acceptable, not as a smooth progression toward consensus.

A later exchange makes that bargaining structure explicit. Qurie agrees to drop the demand that outstanding disputes go to third-party international arbitration, while Savir agrees to negotiate the transfer of Gaza and Jericho. The men then plan to return to their respective leaders with deliberately hostile accounts of the meeting, while Terje Rød-Larsen is to call two days later with the actual agreement. Their maneuver allows them to preserve the appearance of resistance while advancing a compromise. It also reveals how progress depends on relationships, timing, and political presentation as well as on the written terms.

Contact, partial agreement, and continuing conflict

The play sets formal argument against the effort to build personal contact. Terje Rød-Larsen establishes a rule for participants at the Borregaard Estate: when the meeting-room door is closed, they may argue, but outside it they are to share meals, discuss their families, and light the fire together. His stated rationale is that sharing personal life can help people see one another as they are. Later, Ahmed Qurie and Uri Savir walk together across the estate grounds in the snow, with Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul following at a distance. Savir says that he and Shimon Peres want the process to succeed; Qurie answers that Yasser Arafat and he want that too. The scene contrasts the guarded work of negotiation with a moment of expressed common purpose, without implying that personal goodwill dissolves political disagreement.

Agreement remains fragile and incomplete. In a later argument about border security, Qurie proposes that Israeli forces control border security while Palestinian forces have joint control of all checkpoints. Shimon Peres rejects joint control and insists on Israeli control of the checkpoints and soldiers. Qurie responds with a threat of war but also leaves the possibility of a counterproposal open. The exchange shows that even as negotiators sustain communication, questions of authority and security can still bring the parties close to rupture.

The return of violence after the accords is the play’s decisive qualification of their achievement. In September 2000, seven years to the month after the signing, violence erupts again in the occupied territories and the Second Intifada begins. The play also reports a suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem that kills 26 Israelis. Ahmed Qurie later becomes prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority; two years afterward, Hamas defeats the Palestine Liberation Organization at the ballot box, and Qurie retires from public life. These events do not erase the negotiations or the agreements they produced, but they prevent the accords from standing as a final resolution. The conflict remains the condition against which the channel’s achievement and its limits must be measured: people crossed an enemy line and made agreements, yet the political and violent forces surrounding those agreements continued.