Yitzhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin is a largely offstage but consequential presence in the play: the prime minister whose personal authority helps transform the Oslo Channel from a secret back channel into an official one, and whose assassination later punctures the hope embodied by the agreements. The drama makes his power legible through other people’s speech, decisions, and performance—until footage and his recorded voice briefly place him before the audience.

Identity and Dramatic Presence

Rabin is identified as the Prime Minister of Israel and as one of the two leaders at the historic signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden on September 13, 1993. There, he shook hands with Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, under the gaze of President Bill Clinton. The play’s frame presents that handshake as an image already charged with both joy and rage; its later return makes the ceremony not a self-sufficient ending but a public emblem of a fragile political undertaking.

Most of the negotiations unfold without Rabin physically present. His absence does not mean he is irrelevant: it becomes a measure of the distance between confidential discussion and state power. In a later exchange over checkpoints, Ahmed Qurie invokes the other side’s Grandfather, a familial code that gives the prime minister a presence inside the back-channel conversation even when the principals communicate through intermediaries. The device compresses intimacy and hierarchy into a name: decisions made in the room still have to reach the leader whose government must accept them.

Authority Behind the Oslo Channel

The secret channel begins as an alternative to formal, government-to-government pronouncements. Terje Rød-Larsen proposes intimate discussions between people, held in an isolated place where Israeli representatives and the PLO can meet alone. The distinction matters to Rabin’s role in the drama. The channel can generate direct contact and negotiate proposals, but it cannot by itself confer official standing on what its participants accomplish.

That boundary becomes explicit when Joel Singer arrives with two hundred questions about the joint document. He tells the participants that the questions come directly from Rabin and that he is there at the prime minister’s personal request. The revelation surprises everyone except Uri Savir and Singer. It changes the meaning of the meeting: the document is no longer only the product of a concealed initiative but is being examined at the highest level of the Israeli government. Singer’s declaration also gives the negotiators a new interlocutor, while making clear that their words and proposed terms now carry Rabin’s authority into the room.

The talks have addressed concrete and difficult questions before that authorization is announced. Qurie asks for a direct reply to the Palestinian offer to take control of Gaza, rejecting the Israeli draft’s generalities as an answer. In another exchange, Savir says Israel is willing to relinquish control of Gaza; Qurie conditions acceptance on Israel relinquishing control of Jericho at the same time. The negotiators also agree to drop the Palestinian demand for third-party international arbitration over outstanding disputes, while the Israeli side agrees to negotiate the transfer of Gaza and Jericho. These are the accumulated terms and concessions behind the shift in status—not a sudden resolution of every disagreement.

From Secret Contact to Official Negotiation

Rabin’s clearest direct intervention is delivered through Singer. After reviewing the Palestinians’ answers, Singer offers, on behalf of Rabin and the State of Israel, to make the back channel the official channel. The offer marks a formal change in the process: what began as secluded contact is proposed as the recognized route forward. Qurie immediately asks what this means for the Washington-sponsored talks, showing that official recognition alters the relationship between existing diplomatic tracks rather than making their status irrelevant.

The play keeps the distinction between authorization and agreement visible. In the checkpoint dispute, Qurie offers joint control of all checkpoints while accepting that Israeli forces would be responsible for border security. Peres refuses to cede the checkpoint issue; Qurie answers with a threat to burn the document and wage war, while also remaining open to a counterproposal. The exchange conveys the pressure carried by the emerging document: Rabin’s government can empower a channel, but its recognition does not erase the conflict over what the parties will actually sign or implement.

The Rose Garden and the Aftermath

Near the end, the Company turns away from the audience to watch footage of the Rose Garden ceremony. Rabin’s recorded voice addresses Palestinians and invokes the shared ground on which the two peoples are destined to live. He recalls soldiers returning from bloody battles, relatives and friends killed, funerals, and parents burying children, before calling for an end to blood and tears. Once the voice falls silent, the Company turns back to face the audience. The staging joins public historical record to theatrical address: the handshake and speech are not merely recalled as images but presented as words whose consequences remain unresolved.

The chronology that follows makes that unresolved future unmistakable. One month after the ceremony, an Israeli settler kills twenty-nine Palestinians as they pray at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. In November 1995, during a demonstration in support of the Oslo Accords, an Israeli extremist who opposes them assassinates Rabin. The play then marks a February 1996 suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus that kills twenty-six Israelis. These events are presented in sequence, not as proof that the agreements themselves caused the violence, but as a stark account of the violence and political loss that surround their aftermath.

Narrative Significance

Rabin’s role rests on a tension between mediation and decision. The back channel depends on people meeting in private, testing proposals, and making concessions; its passage into official diplomacy depends on authority that cannot be supplied by secrecy alone. Singer’s revelation and offer dramatize that hinge. Rabin is therefore both the absent figure whose authorization changes the negotiations’ status and the leader whose public commitment is recalled in the final historical tableau.

His assassination gives that tableau a further weight. The play places Rabin’s call for an end to bloodshed beside the later killing of the prime minister who supported the accords, then continues into renewed attacks and deaths. It does not present the handshake as a guarantee of peace or Rabin’s death as a complete explanation of what followed. Instead, his presence links the labor of negotiation to its political vulnerability: an official channel can be opened, and a public appeal can be made, while the future those gestures seek remains exposed to opposition and violence.