Second Intifada

The Second Intifada enters the play as the renewal of violence in September 2000, seven years to the month after the Oslo Accords were signed. The date turns the earlier promise of a secret diplomatic channel into a measure of how fragile that achievement proved: negotiations had opened a path toward agreement, but had not ended the conflict.

The peace process before the renewed violence

The play places the Second Intifada against the Oslo Channel, the clandestine diplomatic back channel that helped make the Oslo Accords possible. Its beginnings are framed not as a formal meeting between governments, but as an effort by Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants to alter the political reality between two peoples. Terje Rød-Larsen proposes a separate channel of intimate discussions between individuals, held in isolation, rather than grand declarations between governments.

That method depends on more than the words exchanged behind a closed door. Terje Rød-Larsen insists that participants also share meals, speak about their families, and spend time together outside the negotiating room. Later, Ahmed Qurie and Uri Savir walk together on the estate grounds while Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul follow at a discreet distance. Savir says that Shimon Peres wants the effort to succeed; Qurie says that the Chairman and he do as well. These moments establish the human contact and political hope that the later violence will test.

A fragile interval

The play also shows how quickly violence and domestic pressure could threaten the negotiations. After a Palestinian youth kills two Israelis in Tel Aviv in March 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin seals Gaza. Yossi Beilin argues that the closure responds to killings and political pressure, while Terje Rød-Larsen calls the action counterproductive. Even amid that dispute, Beilin conveys that the participants remain willing to continue discussions if the Palestinian representatives return for another round.

Another crisis comes on the eve of a planned meeting: after an Israeli border guard is murdered, four hundred Palestinians accused of terrorist links are deported to southern Lebanon and abandoned without basic provisions. The play presents this episode as a grave disruption, not as a resolution of the conflict. Against such shocks, the back channel eventually receives an offer to become the official channel. The move from secret contact toward official negotiations marks a significant achievement, but the play’s later chronology makes clear that formalizing a channel is not the same as securing lasting peace.

September 2000

Mona Juul dates the renewed eruption of violence to September 2000. Joel Singer emphasizes the interval: it is seven years to the month after the Oslo Accords were signed. Yossi Beilin then identifies the beginning of the Second Intifada. The sequence is spare, but its placement gives the date force: the play sets the return of violence directly against the anniversary of the agreement that had embodied hopes for a different political future.

The surrounding events make that reversal concrete. A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates himself on a bus in Jerusalem, killing twenty-six Israelis. In Gaza, Hassan Asfour is attacked in the hallway of his apartment building; the attackers are never found, and he withdraws from public life. The play juxtaposes these individual consequences with its announcement that violence has resumed across the territories, showing the renewed conflict through both public events and the altered lives of people involved in the earlier process.

Political aftermath and dramatic significance

The chronology continues beyond the outbreak itself. 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. These developments extend the play’s account of the Second Intifada into a wider period of political change, without presenting the outbreak as an isolated episode or claiming that the earlier negotiations alone determined what followed.

As a dramatic turn, the Second Intifada interrupts the story of negotiation with evidence of its limits. The play has shown adversaries meeting in private, sharing ordinary time, and expressing a desire for the process to work; it then places those gestures beside renewed violence and political upheaval. The contrast does not erase the achievement of the Oslo Accords, but it refuses to equate agreement with reconciliation or a diplomatic breakthrough with an end to conflict.