Oslo

For guessable reasons, this week I decided to watch the movie Oslo, which is about the Norwegians who organized a series of meetings between Israeli and PLO representatives leading to the 1993 Oslo accords.

The movie is an American production, with a British and Irish actor playing the Norwegian leads. The title is fitting, because the Norwegian couple take up the center of the drama, even though what goes on between the two warring parties around the negotiating table is inherently more dramatic. A lot of the tension around the meeting, from the Norwegian point of view, is whether the organizers will feel compelled to intervene in any way - or if they are simply there to facilitate. Although the structure and framing of the film made sense as I watched, it occurs to me as I write that this is a strange focus. It suggests that that the movie is not really about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, but about the instinct for peacemaking. The Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul (played by Ruth Wilson), whose quiet skill and passion turn out to be critical for the success of the backchannel - at least according to the film - explicitly says that the attempt to make peace is worthwhile, even if it does not succeed.

As we know all too well, the attempt did not work. The film is heartbreaking to watch this month, because it reminds its audience how close the two sides came. Every time someone said the word “Gaza,” I flinched. Of course it was as part of the 1993 Accords that control of the Strip was handed back to the Palestinians.

The first half or so of the film struck me as more realistic than the latter, because it is built around the first set of meetings, in which high-level Palestinian representatives were negotiating with very low-level Israelis. The Israelis participating were simply a pair of academics who could pose as people attending an ordinary conference, acting more or less as placeholders for actual government or diplomatic personnel. All four of the original set come off as human and relatable, even the Gazan who burns with hatred for the perceived oppressor. In the second half, you meet more powerful Israelis. I found the portrayal of Uri Savir over the top. I wanted to press pause in order to look up whether the real figure was truly that dashing and intense. Savir and the Gazan, Hassan Asfour, spend their initial meetings at loggerheads—or each other’s throats—which worked dramatically but remained distracting because of the question mark around the diplomat’s characterization. The choices related to Savir reminded me of Ben Schnetzer’s portrayal of an Israeli commando in 7 Days in Entebbe, only in that case the performance fit in better with the surrounding work because it depicted actual military action.

Andrew Scott as Mona Juul’s partner, Terje Rød-Larsen, managed to hold the film together for me, counteracting this sense of unreality with his very low-key and detailed portrait of what it’s like to just be willing to keep going and do your best and have a sense of humor about it even when things constantly fall apart.

I was old enough to follow news at the time of the Accords, and I have my own sense of that history—fading in and out over time—but I was listening to a podcast and an NPR story this week about the Accords to jostle my memory. In my head I asked questions like: Was it the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin that effectively ended the peace process? Was the ultimate failure, as Dennis Ross suggests, more to do with Arafat’s perception of his options and the process by the later rounds?

I suppose the message of the film worked for me, on a small scale, in that it encouraged me to try to see the humanity of everyone involved, even as I was inclined to pick different historical figures or actions apart. Maybe there was something to its framing, after all.