How Middle East peace plans were hatched in the Norwegian woods

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Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.

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This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug and Yora people.

If you grab a map and have a look at Israel, how does it label the Gaza Strip and West Bank areas?

It depends on where you are, really.

If you're in China and you fire up their Google Maps equivalent Baidu, you'll notice that those areas are just blank.

There's nothing there at all.

No roads, no towns, no rivers, nothing.

Very curious.

Russia's Yandex maps mysteriously doesn't have any country names at all, or indeed any international borders.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that the Russian government sees borders as purely theoretical.

On an official US government map, they are called the Palestinian territories.

Whereas official Israeli maps kind of just mark them as blue or with stripey lines, a kind of the dragons kind of a vibe, if you look at a Norwegian map, it will describe those areas as Palestine.

On an Australian or British map, they are occupied Palestinian territories.

It's something similar on Canadian and French maps too.

But that might be changing soon.

Today I can confirm that at the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly in September, Australia will recognise the state of Palestine.

Australia didn't go first, of course.

First France, then Britain, now Canada.

Canada intends to recognise the state of Palestine.

And Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not happy about it.

Because the Palestinians are not about creating a state, they're about destroying a state.

The thing is, though, this is just the latest chapter in a very, very long story about how the rest of the world should treat the millions of Palestinian people who live live in those two tiny pockets of land.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War with its Arab neighbors, Israeli troops occupied Gaza and the West Bank.

Millions of Palestinians fled into refugee camps in surrounding countries, which were already packed with refugees from previous wars, going back to the establishment of Israel.

And in the 58 years since the Six-Day War, everyone has been trying to figure out how and when and if Israel should allow those pockets to become their own state as a two-state solution peaceful two-state solution.

So I'm looking at two state and one state and I like the one that both parties like.

It's left the occupied Palestinian territories or that stripy blue space or Palestine or whatever you call it in a strange limbo.

So what is going to happen next?

We're going to spend the next two episodes looking at this, because, well, it obviously really matters.

It's a story of walks in Norwegian woods, sitting by a log fire, and an assassination of a prime minister.

I also kind of just want to know if I need to get a new set of maps.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

Before we get started, I just want to foreshadow that we are obviously not going to tell the entire story of the Arab-Israeli conflict in this episode.

There are things that we cannot fit in.

But our back catalogue has heaps of episodes covering other facets of this story.

We've got like five episodes about Bibi Netanyahu's past.

We've got episodes about Hamas, Hezbollah, Mossad, and the Six-Day War.

All of that is to say that before you accuse me of not reporting on something important, consider that it might be because I've already done a full episode on it.

Anyway, 2025 feels like a pretty eventful time to be alive, but it's worth noting that 1993 felt that way too.

But first it would appear right now that we're living in something akin to an age of miracles.

Here at the AVC, veteran journalist George Negus was at the center of it all.

The Berlin Wall coming down, the Soviet Empire disintegrating, the freeing of Nelson Mandela, and the end of apartheid.

And now in the last week, a development considered by many to be one of the greatest miracles of all.

An incredible breakthrough for peace in the Middle East had come seemingly out of nowhere.

Only days ago, they were considered mortal enemies.

But today, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat turned their backs on a century of hostility to struggle for peace.

Israelis and Palestinians were celebrating in the streets.

And in Washington, there was a historic handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat.

Ladies and gentlemen, the time for peace has come.

It's impossible to overstate how unexpected this news was.

But to find out more about how this breakthrough happened, George Negas flew not to Israel, not even to Washington.

He flew to the Norwegian capital, Oslo.

Out of the blue, the world discovered that the extraordinary peace deal struck by the Israelis and the PLO had been secretly brokered by the Norwegians, and in particular by a husband and wife team, Mona Yule, a 33-year-old Korea diplomat, and Terry A.

Rod Larson, the head of a trade union research institute in Oslo.

Norway is hardly a big dog in the Middle East peace game.

They're more of a toy poodle, nice to look at but not scaring anyone.

But this Scandinavian couple had worked diligently as a team, making connections on both sides and doing the trusty good cop-bad cop routine.

As Abu Allah put it, the head of the Palestinian delegation on many occasions, when he was very angry with me, was saying, Taya, without Mona, you are nothing.

I think that's very true.

When they set out to begin the process, the couple had differing views on how likely they were to succeed.

So, did you really think that you would achieve what those negotiations did achieve?

No, at least not in the beginning.

And I think I was

probably all along less optimistic than Terry was.

It's actually true that I believed from the very start that we would be able to achieve something.

Terry thought that the planets had aligned in a way that made intervention by an obscure toy poodle like Norway the best option for finding common ground between Israelis and Palestinians.

I felt so strongly that this was the historical momentum and it would pass.

You had to do it right then.

The two Norwegians wanted to run a peace process a little differently to how it had always been done before and that's because generally these negotiations were a lot of spectacle and didn't really create solutions.

The cast in this extraordinary world event continues to arrive.

The year before, there'd been a big peace negotiation in Spain and all the big dogs were there, the American American Pit Bulls and the Siberian Huskies, all trying to peer pressure the Israelis and Palestinians into agreements.

And Turia thought that they were a little too flashy.

So it became a sort of media-driven political circus and not serious negotiations.

And to make things even more complicated, the Israelis refused to speak to the Palestinian Liberation Organization or its leader, Yasser Arafat, even though they were considered by most Palestinians to be their best representatives.

78% of those we questioned say Yasser Arafat, after 20 years, is still the leader who best represents their interests.

93% describe the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians.

To the Israelis, the PLO's history of terrorist activities disqualified them as peace partners.

I can tell you that if it's up to the PLO, there'll never be peace.

They're not interested in peace.

At the time, Benjamin Netanyahu was Israel's deputy foreign minister, and he was adamant that the government would not negotiate at all with Arafat, saying the PLO wanted to destroy Israel entirely.

Their problem never was that the Palestinians lack a state, but that the Jews have one.

They were also kind of trying to solve all of the problems in one single agreement.

Central to the success of the peace talks, will Israel be prepared to trade land for peace?

We believe that territorial compromise is essential for peace.

By the end of the day, the Arabs and Israelis seemed as far apart as they'd always been.

Unsurprisingly, this approach didn't really work.

Turns out trying to broker peace between two groups who can't even be in the same room together is actually really hard.

Toya and Mona in Norway thought that big public summits like this one prevented the sides from actually talking to each other.

And then it was so tempting for both parties

to talk to their electorate, to the Arab street and to the other electorate and not and not to each other.

But they saw a brief window of opportunity that might make the Israelis and Palestinians more willing to negotiate.

In 1992 a left-wing government had been elected in Israel and its leader, the retired Army General Yitzhak Rabin, had expressed interest in restricting the construction of Israeli settlements in the territories occupied in that 1967 six-day war.

For the sake of peace with Arab neighbours, his party is now talking about giving back land he fought for and won.

Labor has agreed to a one-year freeze on new settlements and a building restriction on others.

But Rabin's government's push for peace wasn't all about humanitarianism.

They knew that Yasser Arafat's PLO was basically at rock bottom.

Exiled from their homeland since the 1967 war, they were forced to operate out of refugee camps and temporary headquarters in friendly countries.

In the early 90s, various strategic errors had pushed them to the brink of bankruptcy.

They were isolated, broke, and homesick, making them potentially more susceptible to Israel's signature brand of hardball negotiation.

So it was these factors converging.

a more progressive Israeli government and a weakened PLO that led to what did Tury call it again?

This was the historical momentum.

And it was how he and Mona were able to convince small delegations from the Israeli government and the PLO to secretly come meet with them in Oslo without the press, the public, or even the Americans knowing what they were up to.

What was, I think, evident from the very start was that there was a war of images going on and that the Israelis had a completely false image of what the PLO was all about.

and mutually that the PLO leadership had a completely wrong image of who the Israelis were.

In fact, some of the PLO delegates had never met an Israeli in their life.

Mona and Turye were convinced that it was vital to get the two sides to socialise with each other in the most Norwegian way possible.

Arranging walks in the woods, sitting by a log fire, having a drink in the evening, chatting about their families, about life, about fate, about, I mean, all subjects that human beings are preoccupied with.

It took nine months, but the two parties finally came to an agreement.

Not a final agreement that would address every single problem, but an interim one.

An agreement to begin a five-year negotiation period where they would sort out all the other issues.

They knew they would need to sign the documents publicly in Washington, but to make sure nobody got cold feet, they did the diplomatic equivalent of running down to the registry to get married.

It was a secret ceremony when

the declaration of principle were initialed and that was very different from the ceremony outside the White House lawn.

There with the negotiators were Yule and Larsen looking on and all of this completely without the world's knowledge.

The Palestinian representative talked about how often he'd cried during the final steps of the process.

I cried this week twice.

The first time at five o'clock.

After we finished, really we cried, we congratulated each other.

And at that time we said

now we have to start

the real, the big battle for development, for construction, for cooperation.

The two parties signed the first part of what is now known as the Oslo Accords, an important document that set out the new relationship going forward between Israel and the Palestinian territories.

So what did this document set out?

Well, the two parties agreed to recognize each other.

The PLO would recognize Israel's right to exist, and Israel would recognize the PLO as the rightful representatives of the Palestinian people.

It felt like a huge breakthrough, but as the reality of what had actually been agreed to set in, it became apparent that the deal wasn't really that fair at all.

Academic studies have been published looking at how heavily the cards were stacked in Israel's favour.

The Israelis were leaders of a first world nuclear-armed regional superpower negotiating against a group of destitute exiles, unable to pay their electricity bill and desperate for some kind of agreement that would allow them to return home while still retaining power.

This led to some serious concessions by the PLO.

For example, during the talks, the PLO said that they wanted any agreement to include a guarantee that construction of Israeli settlements would stop.

But just to wind the tape back a little bit, Labor has agreed to a one-year freeze on new settlements and a building restriction on others.

Remember, Rabin's government had already stopped building settlements temporarily, so the Israeli negotiators said there was no need to put that in the official agreement.

Settlement construction had already stopped, so why bother adding something that's already happened?

So there was nothing in the document about stopping settlement construction, and nothing in there about evacuating the settlers who were already living there, despite the fact that they were considered illegal by the international community.

This is where the first Jew lived, Abraham, and his children and their children.

This is ours.

This was one of several issues that notably were not being addressed by the Oslo Agreement.

There was also nothing on what would happen to the millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps in neighboring countries, or who would control Jerusalem.

It is the holy place for the Jews, for the Christians, and for the Muslims.

But it was okay.

Those things would come during the five-year negotiation process.

In the meantime, exciting things were happening.

By next April, soldiers will have gone from here and from the Palestinian cities of the Gaza Strip.

During that time, the Palestinians will take over health, education, and culture, local taxation, and tourism.

A Palestinian police force will be on the streets.

To achieve that, a Palestinian authority would be set up as an interim government, which would then negotiate with Israel to create a permanent Palestinian state and sort out all those other issues.

Palestinian negotiators see the move as a first tangible step towards their ultimate goal.

In the short term, the Palestinian Authority's autonomy would be extremely limited.

The economy is more or less out of their hands.

The areas are too small.

Their economies are shattered anyway.

They're not going to have any control over their own security, and they're not going to have control over the sort of foreign affairs of their particular region.

So all that's going to absolutely remain in Israeli hands.

They wouldn't have control over all the land occupied by Israel in 1967, but there appeared to be a plan to hand that power over to them in the future.

As the Oslo process continued, maps were drawn to plan for that eventuality.

They showed the Palestinian territories broken into three areas, Area A, B, and C.

Area A gave the Palestinian Authority control over the Gaza Strip and Palestinian cities in the West Bank, like Bethlehem, Jericho, Hebron, and the capital Ramallah, and that control would include having their own police.

On a map, it looked like an archipelago of small islands.

Area B gave the Authority partial administrative control over smaller villages and towns, though both Palestinian and Israeli police would roam the streets.

This added more islands to the archipelago.

But areas A and B combined only took up about a third of the West Bank, and Area C, aptly named because it is the sea around the archipelago, remained under Israeli control pending further negotiations.

Area C is the majority of the West Bank and dominated by Israeli settlers.

You can see how it looked to the international community.

Area A is under Palestinian control, and of course, areas B and C will follow, like phases 1, 2, 3 of a highway project.

Sure, we're starting small, but you can see where we're headed, right?

The year after the secret signing in Oslo, Arafat and Prime Minister Rabin returned to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

But by this time, both Israelis and Palestinians saw the potential for problems down the road.

Both sides wanted to control Area C, and one of them was going to be very disappointed.

Violence seems almost inevitable.

Arabs and Jews, soldiers and settlers.

In the short term, it was very exciting for the PLO.

They were on course for reclaiming some of their territory.

It was Yasser Arafat's day of triumph.

After 27 years, the refugee who's become the human symbol of the struggle for a Palestinian homeland returned to Gaza.

For now, he may be reclaiming only a tiny part of Palestine.

But Palestinians have a leader, and for the first time since Israeli occupation, he was there among them.

But for many Israelis, it was a nightmare.

The idea of forfeiting land they believe was their spiritual home was not received well.

And those not prepared to compromise have taken to the streets of Jerusalem.

Right-wing Israelis protested the visit and called for Arafat's death.

Fortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was now the leader of the opposition, was extremely measured and not at all hyperbolic about the whole thing.

What we're seeing today is the beginning of the creation of the Palestinian state, which Arafat says

in more private moments will merely be a stepping stone for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Yes, Bibi Netanyahu is back and spending his every waking minute criticising the agreements that were struck in Oslo.

I think it's the height of folly.

It's the quest for peace at any price.

As the peace process continued, violence and political division increased.

It's always been assumed that Israel's greatest danger and the greatest threat to the peace process would come from outside this country.

Now for the first time, it seems Israel's internal divisions are just as dangerous.

The pressure within Israel was getting higher and higher.

Opposition to Prime Minister Rabin's policies was getting stronger.

At this rally, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu was cheered on by crowds yelling, Rabin is a traitor.

In response, Prime Minister Rabin held a peace rally in Jerusalem.

I've come here to support the peace agreement, to support the Israeli Prime Minister, to do peace with all the Arab countries.

I think the majority of the people in Israel are believing the peace and they want the peace.

Massive crowds gathered to watch the musical pre-show.

Prime Minister Rabin came out and sang with the musicians and gave a speech thanking the supporters of the peace process.

It was all very wholesome.

The rally wrapped up at about half past nine.

Rabin stepped down from the podium and was ushered towards his waiting car.

As he was climbing into the car...

Two bullets fired at close range struck Israel's Prime Minister, Itshak Rabin.

A 27-year-old Jewish extremist was apprehended immediately and confessed to the shooting as Rabin was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery.

But within an hour, the former general turned peacemaker was dead.

A political assassination unprecedented in Israel.

Yasser Arafat was devastated too.

Very shocked

for this awful and terrible

crime.

Against one of the

brave leaders of Israel.

Many here said their country would never be the same.

Far from it, actually.

In fact, the country kind of became frozen in place.

The following year, Bibi Netanyahu won a snap election, and one of his first moves was to make the theoretically interim agreements struck in Oslo that were only supposed to be in place for five years into permanent ones.

This decision had massive consequences that remain decades later.

The Palestinian Authority was meant to be temporary, but it's still there.

They control Area A, they partially control area B, and they have no control over Area C.

The number of settlers in Area C has more than doubled.

After all, there was nothing in the Oslo Accords that stopped construction of settlements.

There's been no progress on formalizing a Palestinian state or figuring out control of Jerusalem or what to do with the millions of Palestinian refugees.

But now, clearly, many of Israel's allies have decided that they are not happy with treading water.

Ever since the Oslo Accords, most Western countries have agreed that a two-state solution is the only way to achieve lasting peace in the region.

But they've never been particularly proactive about trying to force that to happen.

That is now changing.

Several Western allies say they intend to recognise Palestine at the UN General Assembly.

But what will that actually

change?

That's next on If You're Listening.

If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Tegan Nichols.

So the story of the Norwegian couple who organised the Oslo Accords.

We aren't the first people to make a big deal about this.

In 2017 a play about their story debuted on Broadway and won two Tony Awards including Best Play.

It's just called Oslo and it's played on the West End in London and in Tel Aviv.

As far as I can tell, it's never been performed in Australia though.

In 2021, a film adaptation was released by HBO.

Mona was played by Ruth Wilson, and Turya was played by Andrew Scott, a la the hot priest from Fleabag.

So, yes, if you want more of the Norwegians, you can find them in that movie, or you could put on the play, I suppose.

I'll catch you next week.