Oslo Accords

The Oslo Accords are presented as both a landmark public agreement and the outcome of a secret diplomatic process that first brought Israeli and Palestinian representatives into direct contact. The play links the White House handshake of September 13, 1993, to the quieter work that preceded it: a channel built outside formal government negotiations, where proposals could be tested face to face before the process was offered official standing.

Background and the secret channel

The play identifies the Oslo Accords as the first peace deal between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Their public signing was already familiar to the playwright, who recalls the ceremony in the White House Rose Garden and the worldwide joy and rage provoked by the image of Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, shaking hands with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. What changed the playwright’s understanding was learning that a clandestine back channel had helped make the agreement possible. Without the Israelis, Palestinians, and Norwegians who worked in secret, the accords would not have happened.

The channel’s design deliberately contrasted with official diplomacy. Terje Rød-Larsen proposed intimate discussions between people rather than grand pronouncements between governments, in a place isolated enough for the participants to meet alone. He offered to oversee the model and arrange the location. In the play’s treatment, the distinction is consequential: the talks begin beyond the official channel’s boundaries, but they create the possibility of contact that formal negotiations had not yet achieved.

Establishing contact and testing proposals

Secrecy is expressed through practical arrangements as well as political design. In one exchange staged as a telephone conversation, Ahmed Qurie tells Terje Rød-Larsen that, on arrival, the Palestinian party expects Rød-Larsen to meet them personally and ensure that no one else touches their passports. The instruction makes the sensitivity of the meeting concrete: access and protection depend on a trusted intermediary, not on a publicly acknowledged delegation.

As the talks develop, the sides struggle over the difference between specific proposals and general language. Ahmed Qurie demands a direct reply to the Palestinian offer to take control of the Gaza Strip. Yair Hirschfeld points to a draft of the Declaration of Principles (DOP), but Qurie dismisses its language as eloquent generalities rather than an answer to the concrete offer. In a later exchange, Uri Savir says Israel is willing to discuss much of the draft but insists that demands he considers impossible must first be removed; he also rules out negotiating the sovereignty of Jerusalem. When Savir raises relinquishing control of the Gaza Strip, Qurie answers that the Palestinian side would accept it only if Israel relinquished control of Jericho at the same time. The exchange shows the negotiations turning on linked, contested terms rather than on agreement in principle alone.

From unofficial talks toward official standing

The channel’s status becomes a dispute in its own right. After a two-day meeting produces progress that Terje Rød-Larsen describes as beyond imagination, and the Palestinians express a wish to return, he urges Yossi Beilin to upgrade the Israeli delegation to official status. Beilin answers that Israel has no delegation to upgrade and that such a move would be illegal. The encounter lays bare the boundary the channel has been working against: the talks have produced movement, but their participants cannot yet simply present themselves as an authorized Israeli delegation.

The negotiations also involve reciprocal changes to demands. Ahmed Qurie agrees to drop the Palestinian demand that outstanding disputes be referred to third-party international arbitration; Uri Savir agrees that Israel will negotiate turning over the Gaza Strip and Jericho. Savir then proposes a deliberately indirect sequence: each side will tell its own leader that the other has insulted him, and Terje Rød-Larsen will call in two days to say that Israel agrees to the Palestinian demands. The play places this maneuver beside Yossi Beilin’s recognition that Uri Savir will have to walk back more of what is written in the document. Beilin measures the change against time: in four months, the participants have moved from not even imagining a meeting to having a document before them, after forty years in which, as he puts it, nothing had changed.

A further turning point comes when Joel Singer, speaking on behalf of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israel, offers to make the back channel the official channel. Ahmed Qurie immediately asks what will happen to the Washington-sponsored talks, preserving the question of how the new channel relates to existing diplomacy. Shimon Peres argues that the larger stakes require bold action: if an agreement fails, he fears the Palestine Liberation Organization may be hollowed out by the absence of victories and cease to exist, while Israel needs it to remain. He directs that the Palestinian leadership be offered a return to the Gaza Strip if it makes the deal, calls for one last round in Oslo, and says that the Americans should no longer be told what is happening. The offer and the decision to keep Washington uninformed mark a sharp shift in the channel’s political reach, without erasing the risks of moving from secret contact to a consequential agreement.

The public signing and its meaning

The play brings the process to Washington, D.C., on September 13, 1993. In the White House reception room, Terje Rød-Larsen arranges seating for the post-ceremony reception while Thor Bjornevog and Trond Gundersen assist him. Mona Juul identifies the date and place for the audience. The company then turns toward footage of the Rose Garden ceremony: Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shake hands, with President Clinton standing between them. Rabin’s recorded address speaks of Palestinians and Israelis as people destined to live on the same land and calls for an end to blood and tears.

The staging makes the ceremony more than a final image of reconciliation. The audience sees the public handshake only after the play has traced the guarded arrivals, disputes over concrete proposals, limits on official authority, and effort to move the secret channel into official standing. The contrast gives the accords their dramatic significance: a visible act between leaders rests on negotiations that began in private, among people working to alter the political reality of two peoples.