Palestinian National Authority

The Palestinian National Authority is presented as a political institution taking shape through negotiation: its prospective territory, administrative powers, and obligations are argued over before the later account identifies Ahmed Qurie as its prime minister. The play makes its significance concrete by moving between the promise of Palestinian self-government and the unglamorous questions—who collects which garbage, who taxes whom, and how the new administration is organized—that would determine what governing authority meant in practice.

Origins in the Oslo Channel

The Palestinian National Authority’s emergence is tied to the secret diplomatic channel that the play calls the Oslo Channel. Rather than beginning with public declarations between governments, this channel was designed for private discussions between individuals. Terje Rød-Larsen describes a second channel built on precisely that contrast: intimate talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization in an isolated setting, which he says he can oversee and arrange. The dramatic emphasis is on the conditions that made negotiation possible; the institution to be discussed and eventually established is linked to a process conducted outside the usual public framework.

The play first gives the Authority a practical, if still prospective, form through arguments about control of territory. Ahmed Qurie demands a direct answer to a concrete Palestinian offer to take control of Gaza, rejecting the Israeli drafters’ generalities as insufficiently specific. In another exchange, Uri Savir says Israel is willing to relinquish control of Gaza, and Qurie answers that the Palestinian side will accept on condition that Israel relinquish control of Jericho at the same time. These exchanges establish that proposed Palestinian governance is not simply a future abstraction: it turns on particular places and on negotiated transfers of control.

Defining the Work of Government

The play tests the proposed Authority against the details of administration. During discussions with Joel Singer, the possibility that Israel will cede control of Jericho and its surrounding territory prompts a question about whether the Palestinian National Authority would collect Israeli garbage or only Palestinian garbage. Qurie refuses to treat this as a serious subject for the meeting, but Singer insists that garbage collection belongs to the ordinary work of government. If Israel is to grant authority to govern, he argues, the joint document must specify how that government will function. The exchange turns a deliberately mundane service into a measure of whether sovereignty and responsibility are being addressed concretely.

Tax collection becomes a second test. Singer asks whether the proposed Authority would send tax collectors into Israeli settlements if Israel cedes control of Jericho and the surrounding territory. Qurie objects that the Palestinian delegates did not travel across the world to discuss garbage and taxes; Singer’s reply is that such matters are precisely what a government does. The disagreement exposes a difference in negotiating emphasis: Qurie points toward the political stakes of the encounter, while Singer presses for written answers about the mechanisms of administration. Neither side can leave the proposed institution undefined if the agreement is to assign it governmental authority.

That demand for specificity continues through the night. As the scope and complexity of the questions grow, Singer asks whether the structure governing Gaza and Jericho will be centralized or decentralized. Qurie refers him back to the Declaration of Principles, but Singer says the document does not settle the issue and repeats the question. The exchange shows a limit of broad principles: a framework can name an arrangement without resolving the choices required to operate it. In the play, the Authority’s prospective form is therefore shaped not only by high-level territorial bargains but also by unresolved decisions about how it will govern.

From Back Channel to Official Channel

The secret negotiations acquire a possible official status when Singer tells the Palestinian representatives that their answers have been clear and direct. On behalf of Yitzhak Rabin and the State of Israel, he offers to make the back channel the official channel. Qurie immediately asks what will happen to the Washington-sponsored talks. The moment marks a change in the standing of the negotiations, not a completed settlement of every question about the Authority: the channel that enabled the discussions is being offered formal recognition, while the relationship between it and the existing talks remains to be addressed.

This transition gives the Authority’s development a dual character. Its prospective responsibilities are discussed in exacting administrative terms, yet the process leading toward them depends on a discreet network that only later receives an offer of official standing. The play thus presents the institution not as the product of a single public declaration, but as one possible outcome of negotiations that move from secret contact toward formal diplomacy. That movement does not erase the substantive disagreements; instead, it makes their resolution part of the work required to turn an agreement into government.

Political Aftermath and Historical Claim

In the play’s later account, Ahmed Qurie becomes prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority. Two years later, the Palestine Liberation Organization is defeated at the ballot box by Hamas, and Qurie retires from public life. The compressed sequence places the Authority within a changing political landscape: the negotiations lead toward a Palestinian governing institution, but the play’s account of subsequent electoral defeat and retirement does not present its political future as settled or uninterrupted.

At the end, Terje Rød-Larsen claims that without the Oslo Channel there would have been no Palestinian National Authority. He places that assertion within a broader account of the channel’s consequences, including the claim that it helped make the eventuality of a Palestinian state acceptable to the world. This is his retrospective assessment, delivered as he and Mona Juul stand alone onstage; the play frames it as a claim about the channel’s historical importance rather than as a detailed account of the Authority’s later operation. The institution’s significance in the drama lies both in the negotiations that sought to define its powers and in the larger political future that Larsen says those negotiations helped make imaginable.