Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres is the Israeli Foreign Minister whose brief but consequential entrance brings the authority of Israel’s government into the Oslo Channel’s negotiations. He does not appear as the channel’s originator or as a regular presence in its earlier discussions; instead, the play places him at a threshold where secret diplomacy is poised to become official. His response to a breach of protocol is to acknowledge how far events have moved beyond it, then begin. In the final telephone exchange, his firmness over checkpoint control leaves the negotiations open but unsettled.

Identity and Dramatic Placement

The cast list identifies Shimon Peres as Foreign Minister and assigns the role to Daniel Oreskes. That title matters to the character’s dramatic function: Peres represents high-level governmental authority, distinct from the Norwegian facilitators and the Palestinian and Israeli negotiators who have been working through the secret channel. The play does not give him a biographical introduction or an extended account of his political career. It defines him through his office, his entrance into the negotiations, and the decisions he voices there.

The larger history surrounding his appearance is the clandestine channel that helped make the Oslo Accords possible. The playwright describes the channel as a secret effort by Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants to alter the political reality between two peoples. Peres’s stage role belongs to the point at which that behind-the-scenes work meets the authority of the state. The text does not establish that he founded or personally directed the channel; rather, it shows him entering a process already built through other participants’ private discussions.

From Secret Contact to Official Channel

An earlier turning point in the channel’s development is an offer delivered by Joel Singer on behalf of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the State of Israel: the back channel could become the official channel. Ahmed Qurie responds by asking what will happen to the Washington-sponsored talks. The exchange makes the channel’s changing status a live political question, not merely a matter of secrecy. The offer gives the private negotiations a possible route into formal government business, while Qurie’s question registers that one channel’s elevation raises questions about the other.

Peres enters in a later sequence with Johan Jorgen Holst. Holst warns him that the situation represents a total breach of protocol and offers to instruct Yasser Arafat’s intermediary if Peres is uneasy. Peres does not deny the breach. He agrees that it is one, but says that everyone is now far beyond protocol’s bounds. His reply registers a changed circumstance: the rules remain visible, yet the negotiations have already exceeded their ordinary limits. When Peres extends his hand, Holst places the phone in it, and Peres tells Terje Rød-Larsen to begin.

This entrance is a compact transfer of responsibility into the scene. The phone links Peres’s governmental authority to the ongoing mediated contact, while Larsen remains the person carrying words between the parties. Peres is therefore not shown sitting down with Ahmed Qurie for a direct exchange. His intervention is consequential, but the channel’s established method of relaying messages remains in place.

Negotiation, Authority, and Limits

The exchange conducted through the phone turns to border security and checkpoints. Ahmed Qurie says that the Palestinian side will accept Israeli forces being in charge of border security, provided Palestinian forces have joint control of all checkpoints. Peres rejects that condition: he insists that the checkpoints remain theirs and that their soldiers remain in place. The scene gives his position concrete terms. It is not a general refusal to negotiate, but a refusal to cede this point in the proposed arrangement.

The structure of the conversation makes the disagreement audible as a relay. Larsen voices the message associated with the Father; Peres answers him, and Larsen carries the answer onward. The indirect form does not dilute the stakes. On the contrary, it exposes the distance between the people speaking and the parties whose forces and authority are at issue. The channel can carry proposals across that distance, but the sequence shows that it cannot make a contested security arrangement disappear by wording alone.

Change and Narrative Significance

Peres’s scene does not resolve the checkpoint dispute. After hearing the refusal, Ahmed Qurie says that the Palestinian side will burn the document and wage war, while also remaining open to a counterproposal. The threat and the continuing invitation occupy the same message: the disagreement is severe, but the negotiating door has not shut. Peres’s firm answer therefore contributes to a tense, unfinished exchange rather than a settlement.

His dramatic significance lies in the contrast between the channel’s informal beginnings and the official weight his presence brings to it. The Oslo Channel was built through secret contact, and its participants had to negotiate without the ordinary public form of state-to-state diplomacy. By acknowledging that protocol has been left behind and taking the phone, Peres accepts the reality of that irregular process without pretending its conflicts are over. His entrance marks official authority’s arrival inside the back channel; his position on checkpoints shows the limits of what that arrival can achieve.