Shared-Living Rules for the Borregaard Talks

The Shared-Living Rules for the Borregaard Talks establish a distinction between political disagreement and life shared beyond the negotiating room. Terje Rød-Larsen presents the distinction as an unbreakable rule: behind a closed door, the participants may argue; outside it, they are to eat together, speak about their families, and light the fire. The rule makes everyday contact part of the talks’ design, not a substitute for political argument but a condition for seeing one another as people while that argument continues.

Definition and Setting

Terje Rød-Larsen introduces the rule while addressing Ahmed Qurie as Abu Ala, the name his friends use, and drawing the conclusion that the participants gathered at Borregaard Estate are friends too. He then points to a shut door to mark the boundary. In the room beyond it, the negotiators will converse, disagree, and perhaps do worse; on the other side, they will share meals and talk about family. The physical door gives the rule a simple, visible structure: political conflict has a place, but it is not to govern every interaction between the people conducting it.

The rule is emphatically prescriptive. Terje Rød-Larsen calls it their one unbreakable rule and insists that it apply to everyone present. Its rationale is also stated directly: sharing personal life allows the participants to see one another as they truly are. In this account, ordinary contact is not merely a pleasant interval between sessions. It is a means of recognition, intended to keep the people across the negotiating table from being reduced entirely to their positions.

Practice During the Talks

The rule operates alongside intense and sustained work. The participants spend two days and nights working almost without stopping, with waffles, cigarettes, and coffee recurring amid the papers and negotiations. Behind closed doors, Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak hammer out a joint draft of a Declaration of Principles, a proposal described as radical and without precedent because it recognizes grievances on both sides. The effort is arduous and political; the shared meals and personal conversation occupy the other side of the boundary Terje Rød-Larsen has drawn.

That division does not mean that personal connection resolves the policy disputes. When Ahmed Qurie later asks where the Israeli draft directly answers the Palestinian offer to take control of Gaza, he rejects its generalities as inadequate. The exchange shows the continuing force of the closed-room work: friendliness does not erase disagreement or make concrete proposals unnecessary. The rule instead holds two activities together. The participants can press opposing positions in negotiation and still be asked to maintain a shared life outside it.

Boundaries and Red Lines

A later exchange gives the rule a related, more explicit form. After Toril Grandal has left, Yair Hirschfeld proposes that there are certain subjects, and certain people, that the participants should not discuss, just as they have limits on what they discuss in the negotiating room. Hassan Asfour names these limits as red lines, and Yair Hirschfeld agrees. He then returns to the contrast between the two settings: here, they should be friends.

This proposal is not identical to Terje Rød-Larsen’s original rule. His instruction divides the political room from shared life and specifies what the participants should do together outside it. The later exchange proposes a restraint on the subjects and people they bring into that shared space. Together, the two formulations define conviviality not as unrestricted intimacy but as a practice with boundaries. The participants are invited to share meals and personal conversation, while also recognizing that some topics should not cross from the negotiating context into the space of friendship.

Function and Significance

The rule’s force comes from the tension it preserves rather than from any claim that personal familiarity will remove political conflict. The negotiations continue to involve concrete disputes, demands, and incompatible positions; the shared-life rule does not settle those matters. Instead, it sets terms for how participants are to encounter one another while they remain unresolved. The closed door permits disagreement; the life outside it asks that disagreement not become the whole relationship.

The rule also makes the talks’ social arrangements part of their method. Family conversation, meals, waffles, coffee, cigarettes, and lighting the fire are the ordinary activities that give the principle its practical form. Their significance is not that they guarantee agreement, but that they repeatedly place political adversaries in a shared setting where each may be encountered beyond the argument. The later language of red lines sharpens the same idea: maintaining that setting requires both personal contact and limits on what is brought into it. The result is a fragile but deliberate discipline of coexistence, set beside negotiations that remain difficult and exacting.