White House Rose Garden

The White House Rose Garden frames the public culmination of the Oslo Accords and the play’s final return to their history: the handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on 13 September 1993. Against the secret work of the Oslo Channel, the televised ceremony becomes both a political image seen around the world and a stage image through which the play asks what that moment meant.

The Public Ceremony

The play’s narrator recalls watching the signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden on television. President Bill Clinton stood between Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, and Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as they shook hands. The gesture was historic, but not universally welcomed: the narrator remembers the joy and rage it provoked around the world. The garden therefore enters the account not simply as a ceremonial backdrop, but as the setting for a highly visible act whose meaning was contested from the outset.

The Secret Channel Behind the Image

The Rose Garden ceremony is set against the clandestine diplomacy that preceded it. The narrator learns that a small group of Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants had worked secretly to alter the political reality between the two peoples, and that without this back channel the Accords would not have been possible. In the dramatic action, Terje Rød-Larsen proposes an isolated place where Israeli and PLO representatives can meet privately, in a model opposed to grand pronouncements between governments. The contrast is structural: private conversations and incremental proposals take place out of public view, while the Rose Garden handshake makes the resulting agreement visible to the world.

The Return in the Final Image

At the play’s close, the company turns away from the audience to watch footage of the Rose Garden ceremony: Rabin and Arafat shaking hands, with Clinton standing between them. Rabin’s recorded address speaks to Palestinians of living together on the same soil, recalls the losses borne by both sides, and calls for an end to blood and tears. After the footage and speech, the company turns back to face the audience, and Mona announces the date as January 1994. The return to the ceremony thus places its hopeful public language beside the play’s account of the difficult, secret negotiations that preceded it, without treating the handshake as the end of the political story.