AS WE were leaving the theatre, an email dropped into my inbox inviting me to give some feedback. “Did you enjoy Oslo?” was the subject line.

Hmm, tricky question. The acting was good. The dialogue was sharp and witty, but the process it depicted turned out to be a political nightmare and a national catastrophe for the Palestinian people. That didn’t stop the audience in London’s West End applauding the show with enthusiasm.

JT Rogers’s play on the secret talks arranged by Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul and her husband Terje Rod-Larsen succeeded in making men in suits shouting and swearing at each other an entertaining three hours, at times even suspenseful, despite knowing the outcome.

What it also did was show how most of the world still views the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians — two implacable foes, full of mutual suspicion, endlessly fighting over the same territory. Lock them together in a room for long enough and surely they will eventually come to their senses.

Oslo, both the play and the “peace process” it depicts, explains why, 25 years on, there is still no peace and still no justice. Instead, Oslo created a myth of symmetry, an equality of suffering, that continues to hold sway, stunting public understanding and political progress.

At the end of this year, we’ll mark the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn and that famously reticent handshake offered by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat.

I remember watching it live on TV and thinking that this was it, the conflict was over, peace had come and Israel could become a “normal” fully democratic country and that the Palestinians would get their state. End of story. My ambition to one day become the BBC Jerusalem correspondent suddenly looked like a far less interesting posting.

In some ways, it was indeed an historic breakthrough. Israel recognised the PLO as the legitimate body representing the wishes of the Palestinian people. That was a improvement on being terrorist gangsters to be crushed without mercy.

It was also a big risk for Rabin, as was the idea of giving any amount of self-rule to the Palestinians. A few years later he paid for this risk-taking with his life, assassinated by an Israeli Jewish right-wing extremist.

The seeds of failure, however, were there at the very beginning. The two sides brought with them very different baggage to Oslo.

The Palestinians arrived for the talks at another low point in their history. The global public had learnt a great deal about the 20-year Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory through the first intifada that erupted independently of the PLO in late 1987.

The stone-throwing children of Gaza and the West Bank rebelling against the might of the Israeli Defence Forces created powerful images that no amount of Israel's hasbora (“explaining”) could counter, but Arafat’s political and moral mistake in backing Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 squandered that goodwill and left the PLO virtually bankrupt.

Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union had lost the Palestinians their only superpower support and the PLO leadership feared the rise of Hamas in Gaza as an alternative champion of the people. Oslo was a chance to regain status, funding and influence.

Israel, on the other hand, continued to have the support of the US, now left standing as the only superpower and looking to dominate the New World Order. Rabin and his Foreign Minister Shimon Peres understood that, if there had to be compromises for peace, Israel would be making them from a position of strength.

Little of this background comes through in Rogers’s play. And neither does a clear sense of the longer-term historical disparity between the two negotiating teams that came to Norway. Israel by 1993 was a well developed state, the regional superpower with a nuclear arsenal. The Palestinians had been displaced and dispossessed twice by the Israelis in 1948 and 1967. Their leaders were considered pariahs, exiled in Tunis, and fast growing out of touch geographically and politically with their own people.

Here’s how Terje Rod-Larsen explains his approach to peacemaking early on in the play. “This new model, my model, is not in the organisational but in the personal. A process of negotiation, allowing the most implacable of adversaries to focus on a single issue of contention — resolve it, then move on to the next single issue of contention as they gradually build a bond of trust.”

It’s true that personal relationships can be as critical to high politics as they are to everyday life. It was a strange way though to deal with a situation where the power relationship between the two peoples represented was as asymmetrical as you could possibly imagine.

Why did anyone think such a process based on a false equivalence was a fair way to operate? The same power discrepancy that existed outside the room would continue to exist inside the room and long after the accords were signed, but it remains the international lens through which the situation is seen. A “conflict” rather than a colonisation, a “dispute” rather than a dispossession.

In 2018, we have reached yet another low point in the Palestinian story. Trump’s announcement in December to recognise undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital showed that his administration has no intention of meaningful consultation on peace with the Palestinian Authority. This time they are not even “in the room.”

Before Christmas, President Abbas said he would now refuse to co-operate with the Trump administration, but that assumes there was ever an invitation to co-operate in the first place.

Abbas is now trying to court Russia, but what leverage, political or economic, do the Palestinians have today? I can understand Putin’s involvement with Syria and Iran, but why bother with the Palestinians? Their only power is as a moral cause in the world, one that sheds light and shares experience with other examples of power disparities and colonial oppression.

The actions of one teenager, Ahed Tamimi, and her slap to the faces of two occupying Israeli soldiers, seems to have greater influence in the world than anything Abbas can do or say. Globally, it’s the New Zealand singer Lorde’s decision to cancel a concert in Tel Aviv that’s more powerful than anything coming out of the PA compound in Ramallah.

And what of Jewish opinion in Israel and around the world? Ironically, just as Palestinian nationalism appears to have reached the end of the road, a younger generation of Jews is becoming aware of the true cost of the Jewish national project.

In Israel itself, young Jews are refusing to serve in the occupied territories, because they do not wish to take part in the oppression of the Palestinian people, but this awakening of Jewish conscience, while beginning to split the Jewish community, may be far too late to help the Palestinians.

If you weren’t on the losing end of it all, it was possible to watch Oslo and see a diplomatic as well as a theatrical success, but, if the audience in our London West End theatre had been Palestinian rather than British, white and middle-class, I wonder if anyone would have applauded the performance.

Time to complete that feedback questionnaire.

Did you enjoy Oslo?

Yes and No. But it’s good to be infuriated now and again.

Was Oslo good value for money?

Not if you’re a Palestinian.

Did anything distract from your enjoyment?

Yes, the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the play and the process it portrayed.

What do you think of the price for Oslo?

Way, way too high.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about Oslo?

Next time, if there is a next time, let’s do this differently and better.

This is an edited version of Robert AH Cohen's post on his blog Writing From the Edge at patheos.com