Washington, D.C. is both a political backdrop and the public endpoint of the negotiations depicted in the book: the city is associated with the long-running official talks, a carefully limited attempt to alert the U.S. Department of State to the secret channel, and the White House ceremony where the Oslo Accords are signed. Its role sharpens the contrast between diplomacy conducted in public view and the secluded conversations that helped make an agreement possible.

The Official Negotiating Arena

Washington appears first as part of the established multinational process. Yossi Beilin describes those negotiations as having continued for two years, naming Madrid and Washington among their settings. The reference places Washington within a formal diplomatic effort already underway, but also helps explain the frustration that prompts a search for another method: the official talks have not produced the progress the characters seek.

The alternative Terje Rød-Larsen proposes is deliberately unlike government-to-government pronouncements. He offers to oversee an intimate second channel, arranged in an isolated place where Israeli representatives and the Palestine Liberation Organization can meet alone. Washington is therefore not presented as the site of these secret sessions; it belongs to the public diplomatic framework against which their privacy and informality are defined.

A Carefully Limited Connection

Washington enters the secret channel’s practical calculations through Jan Egeland’s planned visit to the U.S. Department of State. He proposes making only a casual mention of what the participants are doing, withholding details so that the effort is not exposed while the Norwegians can say they have not concealed it entirely. The city thus represents a sensitive point of contact with official American diplomacy, not an announced sponsor of the clandestine meetings.

That boundary changes as the channel advances. At a later meeting, Joel Singer, speaking on behalf of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the State of Israel, offers to make the back channel the official channel. The moment marks a shift in status: a process established apart from formal government negotiations is offered recognition by the Israeli government. Washington’s earlier association with official talks makes this transition legible, even though the offer itself is made in the channel rather than in the U.S. capital.

From Secret Negotiation to Public Ceremony

The play’s framing gives Washington an importance beyond its references in the negotiation scenes. In the author’s account, Terje Rød-Larsen explains that a clandestine back channel helped make the Oslo Accords possible; the public culmination was the signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden on September 13, 1993. There, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat—leaders of bitterly opposed sides—shake hands before a watching world. The city becomes the visible stage on which the outcome of less visible work is recognized.

The final Washington sequence returns to the White House on September 13, 1993, now in the reception room. Voices gather offstage as Terje Rød-Larsen arranges seating for the post-ceremony reception, assisted by Thor Bjornevog and Trond Gundersen. The scene places logistical labor beside the ceremony’s historical scale: after years of clandestine contact and difficult bargaining, people must still be seated and a reception prepared. Washington closes the dramatic movement by bringing the agreement out of the private channel and into a public gathering.

Dramatic Significance

Washington’s appearances hold two forms of diplomacy in tension. It is associated with the multinational talks that had persisted for years, while the secret channel begins as a separate, isolated alternative; later, the channel is offered official status, and the Accords receive their public ceremony in the city. The movement is not simply from secrecy to publicity, but from a parallel process to an outcome displayed before the world.

The location’s significance is therefore partly structural. Washington links the negotiations’ public context to their ceremonial conclusion without becoming the setting for the secret meetings themselves. The White House Rose Garden handshake and the reception-room preparations give the city a final, visible role: it is where the work conducted away from public view is translated into a scene of official recognition.