Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is the political authority whose knowledge and support help make the secret Oslo Channel more than a private experiment. The play rarely centers him in the negotiating room; instead, his influence travels through confirmation, messages, impersonation, and the closing image of the 1993 handshake. That mediated presence makes him both a person the negotiators must answer to and a measure of whether their unofficial work can reach the level of public agreement.

Position in the Secret Channel

The channel begins as an alternative to government-level pronouncements: Terje Rød-Larsen proposes intimate discussions between people, in an isolated place where the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israeli participants can meet alone. This confidential format depends on political leaders being informed even while the negotiations themselves remain unofficial. The play’s account of Arafat therefore establishes a crucial distinction between secrecy from the public and lack of authority within the Palestinian leadership.

Jan Egeland challenges Mona Juul over whether Ahmed Qurie can speak for the Palestine Liberation Organization, asking how she can know that he has told Arafat what he is doing. Juul answers with a concrete assurance: Terje Rød-Larsen has gone to Tunis and spent the day with Arafat. He holds up a commemorative photograph, and Juul explains that she wanted Arafat fully informed and behind the initiative before bringing it to Egeland. The photograph functions as evidence in the room: the channel is not proceeding without the leader’s knowledge.

That confirmation matters to the play’s larger account of how the Oslo Accords became possible. Its framing describes a clandestine diplomatic back channel involving Israeli, Palestinian, and Norwegian participants, and argues that the agreement depended on their secret effort. Arafat is not shown as the channel’s sole author or as a participant in every discussion; rather, his backing supplies an essential political connection between the Palestinian negotiators and the leadership whose authority their work must ultimately carry.

A Leader Present Through Performance

The play introduces Arafat through the perceptions and performances of others. Terje Rød-Larsen describes him with the phrase "a bloodstained terrorist," then immediately adds that he is "terribly charming." The juxtaposition exposes the distance between the fixed public label and the personal impression reported by a negotiator who has met him. The comedy does not erase the conflict implied by the first description; it makes the encounter’s contradiction part of Arafat’s characterization.

Elsewhere, Arafat’s voice is staged through Rød-Larsen’s imitation. In recounting a presentation, Rød-Larsen says that Arafat slapped the table and wagged his finger before insisting, "There must be kissing points!" Rød-Larsen answers that he thought Arafat meant checkpoints. The verbal confusion turns a negotiating term into a comic image, but it also gives Arafat a vivid gesture and an emphatic presence within a scene otherwise carried by someone else’s recollection. The moment is not presented as a transcript of a negotiation; it is a character’s performed account, shaped for the stage.

This relay of voice continues when Qurie explains that Arafat’s English is not as he wishes, so Qurie asks to speak for and to him. Qurie then specifically asks Rød-Larsen to be the person he addresses. The arrangement makes language part of the channel’s practical structure: Arafat’s position can enter the conversation through an intermediary, while Rød-Larsen becomes the point of contact. Arafat is present in the exchange without the play making him the direct speaker of every demand.

Authority, Terms, and Negotiation

The substantive discussions show the distance between Palestinian proposals and Israeli responses. Qurie asks for a direct answer to a concrete offer concerning Palestinian control of Gaza, rejecting the Israeli draft as eloquent generalities rather than a specific reply. Later, when Uri Savir says Israel is willing to relinquish control of Gaza, Qurie conditions acceptance on Israel relinquishing control of Jericho at the same time. These exchanges establish the negotiators’ hard bargaining over territory; the evidence does not make every position Qurie takes a direct personal statement by Arafat.

The play does, however, explicitly connect Arafat to the Palestinian side’s decisions through reported messages. Qurie says that Arafat will be told that Savir told him to go away, just as Savir will be told that Qurie said the same to Arafat; after the theatrical insult, Savir predicts that Rød-Larsen will call in two days to say that the Israeli side accepts the demands. The exchange dramatizes an indirect route between negotiators and leaders, in which forceful words at the table can coexist with continued communication and anticipated movement.

A similar mix of refusal and continued bargaining appears in the later dispute over security. Qurie says the Palestinian side will accept the other side’s forces being in charge of border security, but insists on joint control of all checkpoints. When Peres refuses to cede the point, Qurie relays Arafat’s threat to burn the document and wage war, while also conveying that a counterproposal remains welcome. The threat is severe, but the message’s final opening matters: the exchange keeps negotiation alive even at the moment it invokes its possible collapse. Arafat’s authority is dramatized through the force of the position attributed to him and through the possibility that he can still authorize a response.

From Back Channel to Public Image

The secret discussions eventually reach a proposed change in status. On behalf of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the State of Israel, Joel Singer offers to make the back channel the official channel. The offer marks a transition from confidential contact toward formal negotiation; it does not, in the cited scene, establish Arafat’s response to that offer. The play keeps that distinction visible even as it shows how the private channel’s work approaches official recognition.

Arafat’s decisive public image comes at the end. The company turns toward footage of the White House Rose Garden ceremony on September 13, 1993: Arafat and Rabin shake hands while President Bill Clinton stands between them. The staged image recalls the play’s opening account of the historic handshake between bitter enemies and places the secret negotiations in relation to their public culmination. Arafat’s role thus spans two contrasting forms of presence: the leader whose prior knowledge and support matter to a hidden process, and the visible partner in a ceremony that makes the agreement legible to the world. The final handshake does not erase the conflict or guarantee what follows; it gives the channel’s difficult, mediated labor its most recognizable image.