 The magic word today is Oslo. More specifically, the girl from Oslo sounds very exotic, but it's much more than that. This is the movie show on Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. That's George Case and the handsome one. So George has done a lot of research on this, and we're going to find out what's behind this movie on Netflix. Ten episodes series. Very exciting draws you in. But more than that, it reflects things that are true, although it's not a true story, I think, and it teaches you things. And maybe it corrects some of your impressions about what was going on, the factual environment to this movie. George, welcome to your show, George. Thank you, Jay. It's your show as well. You're the host and I'm a co-host, but we get into some pretty interesting movies and series, and this is definitely an interesting one. And we'll discuss it and get into all the details. Yeah, well, okay. So let me just lay out the premise. In 1993, they had this meeting in Oslo, Norway, and it led to the Oslo Accords, which some people felt was useful. Other people did not feel was useful between the Israelis and the Palestinians trying to make peace. And Oslo was a good environment for that. At this meeting, at least in the hypothetical premise of the movie, two diplomats liked each other. A Norwegian lawyer, I'm sorry, a Norwegian diplomat and an Israeli intelligence officer. And she got pregnant. Exactly. They liked each other. I really liked each other. And she got pregnant. And if you do the math on it 20 years later, there was a child. And the child is the girl from Oslo, who decides who learns about her father in Israel. Now he's a senior intelligence officer, not far away from being prime minister in the story. And she goes to find him and see him and meet him, because she hasn't. Unfortunately, while she's there, her presence becomes known to ISIS, and they find her in the desert near, I guess it's the Sinai Desert, and near Hamas, the Gaza city. And they kidnap her, and her couple of friends that she's with on an outing in the desert. And it goes from there. And it is very exciting, and it doesn't end quickly, and you learn a lot in the process. George, that's just the premise. Why don't you go forward and put some detail on that? I'll segue into the people who are playing the roles. And I'll make it quick, so then I can get into the real nitty-gritty. There's a former Norwegian diplomat. She's known as Alex, played by Aniki van der Lippe, and she's placed a Norwegian diplomat. And then Amos Tamam is the Israeli. He's like an intelligence minister. He's got a high position. And then Raida Adon plays Leila, that's one of the Palestinian representatives in Oslo in 93. And then Pia, which is the daughter, the biological daughter of Alex and Amos, she's played that by Andrea Burtzen, who's another Norwegian. Yusuf is a young man played by Shadi Mari, a Palestinian. Daniel Litman plays Nadav, which is one of the hostages, the Israeli hostage. Anders Andersen is Karl, which is the, not the biological father of Pia, but the step, the father, he thinks he's the father of Pia, but he's really not. It was the father, the biological father. He's the lawyer in Oslo. Yeah, the lawyer in Oslo, right. His wife, the diplomat, has never clued him in. Not before this series. He doesn't know that this is not his daughter. And then Rotem Ahuha, which is Arik's wife. She's an Israeli actress. She plays it really good. Jamil Khouri is Bashir, the chief of Hamas. He's in a wheelchair. Powerful character, powerful actor. Very, very powerful. And then Abhim Galea is in Norway. He's in jail. He's an ISIS member by, he plays Abu Sahim. And then the writers, I'll make this quick. Writers of this series. You're not making it quick at all. You're making it too long. Okay. Let's, let's move along here. We got to get into the story. I think you've made the point though. This is a mixed cast. This is a cast just like the movie of Norwegians and Israelis and Arabs. And there's a lot of Americans involved too in the making of the movie. And that's interesting because that is kind of an accurate reflection of what might have happened, what would happen, what does happen in this kind of international arena. But let's talk about what we learned here. To me, I just want to tell you this. I learned about ISIS, not that I care to know very much about them. I learned about Hamas in Gaza and how they control Gaza. And I learned about the ongoing political type attack and counter attack that goes on in Gaza, which, by the way, George is happening right now again between the Hamas people throwing rockets and bombs at the Kibbutz settlements in southern Israel. And they're about Israel bombing Hamas in Gaza. There's footage in here about Gaza that I have never seen before. I don't know how they got that footage. They walked down the street in Gaza City and you got a view of Gaza City you have never ever seen before. That was quite remarkable. They must have had cooperation. Was that definitely Gaza City or could it have been some places in Israel that are predominantly have Arabs? It could have been, but it struck me from at least the establishment shots they were really talking about Gaza City. It taught me about the contention between ISIS and Hamas, which we didn't know that. It taught me about espionage and spying between everybody, everybody spying and keeping secrets and using information to achieve goals, which I think is a true statement of the way things work. We see that part of the world as a mirror image of what we would like to see in the US. Notice in the US it may not be so clear and clean as it used to be. And then we find out that gee whiz they're all spying on each other. Intelligence is all important. They're in a state of constant contention, including military contention. That's why the character who is the chief of intelligence of Israel is so important. We also find out about vulnerabilities, vulnerabilities of the Israelis, of the Norwegians, of the Palestinians, of the Hamas people and the ISIS people. I mean, it's really these characters are developed. And so in the process of watching them develop, you learn things about their style, their personality, their culture that you did not know. Now, as I alluded to, I have been to Israel and I did go on tours into the West Bank, Israeli tour company. And we stopped at places in the West Bank and then we went to the Dead Sea and then I went to Masada, which I mentioned. So I'm familiar with a lot of this. And I'm a historian. So a lot of this is not new to me. I know about Hamas. I know about ISIS. But it's really interesting for me. Bring up the map now. If you will bring up the map, what's his name? Yeah. Just a quick aside, if you look at this map, you'll see that Israel is this tiny little sliver in the middle of an Islamic sea, right? Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles and Hamas and ISIS, they're focused on this little sliver. And one of the things that I remember, and there's an Azeri Imam, he said, where the green flag of Islam has flown, no land shall be lost, no betrayal permitted. So there's a focus of the Imam of the Muslim religion to get rid of what they consider this cancer, which is Israel. And that's behind all this. I mean, why can't they all sit down like the 1993 Accords and sit down and reasonably with each other, come to some kind of a solution? It's because there's so much animosity, the fact that this little sliver in the middle of the Muslim sea. So the story begins with, in the Sinai, when these three young tourists in the Sinai, which was under Egypt, are taken hostage by ISIS, right? And then the storyline from there continues, right? And then in what you were alluding to the back and forth, the intelligence between the three. And you see the differences that I saw when I was in Israel, between Israel, which is advanced, this was 1998, the present era, and the Palestinians that are living centuries before. I mean, it was the 20th century, and they're living like in the 1800s, their whole style of living and whatever. And that's what Gaza is, and a good part of the West Bank. And then you have ISIS. ISIS has this thing against everyone who's not, I mean, if you remember, similar people in Afghanistan, they tore down, they destroyed the Buddhist statues. So this is what we're dealing with in that sense. And one of the things that was interesting for me, I'm sort of getting on off, is the Israelis in their center, the operation center, I was amazed at how they all work together, and how prominent they are, and how on top of things they are, and how calmly they're dealing with the situation in a very respectful way. And even Arik, he's dealing with some big emotional stuff. He's dealing with his biological daughter. He's dealing with these two other Israeli young people that are taken hostage, right? And yet, he's able to maintain on the surface his equilibrium. But the woman who played the Norwegian diplomat, you know, I mean, the actress, she was hysterical. You wouldn't believe that she was a diplomat in 1993. And her daughter was, Pia, her daughter, the one who was kidnapped, she was also hysterical. Yes. The two Norwegians, I was going to get it. We didn't know the Norwegians were so hysterical. We thought they were more stone faced. But the husband and lawyer, he's stone faced. He's very flat of fact. To go back to the intelligence center, you know, it struck me too that that was a very interesting, and I'm sure it's accurate, portrayal of an Israeli intelligence center. For one thing, there was no rank. They all sat around a U-shaped table. And at the open end, there were screens on the wall. And they had a staffer who would look at the screens and what was on the screens, multiple drones. They had drones constantly in the air overlooking everything. And this staffer was really smart. She looked like a Yemeni to me, a Yemeni Jew. But she was really a great character because she could make magic out of these screens and these drones wherever they were. Zoom in, find out all kinds of intelligence, real time on the spot. The other thing that struck me about the intelligence center was, you know, there were not a lot of them. My guess is it was seven, maybe, or eight, a total, sitting around this U-shaped table without regard to rank, there were no uniforms there at all. And it was in the context of a much larger room, a much larger office. And you had this feeling of, yes, this is secure, but within that larger office, it's transparent. Everybody could see what they were doing. They could overhear what they were doing. These guys were the center of the brain trust. And they were controlling important equipment, important decision making, and the thought process was very democratized. Exactly, exactly. And you have to look at the, you know, Jameel, who was his name, that played this, I'm tired today. Jameel, yeah, that played Bashir. You looked at his center, and that was very much what I remember on the West Bank and the Palestinian areas. It's sort of, it's a very different, you have to contrast that, you know, of where Bashir had his headquarters, right? And then one thing when you... Well, Bashir was totally in charge. Yes. Everybody kissed his ring. Exactly. Then there was no, the hierarchy was him and everyone else. There was no free flow of information or even conversation. He was a very wary, smart, clever fox kind of guy, but you did not see that democratization at all. And you also saw, you know, there's like wheels within wheels within wheels, and their agenda was completely different than the Israelis. And they were really into the espionage and the secrets and the using information against people and making deals that they knew they would not keep. Making over and over, that was portrayed in the series. They made deals, they swore on things, and never kept a single promise. And that was so for the ISIS crowd too. The ISIS crowd was really interesting because the ISIS didn't have a headquarters at all. They didn't have an intelligence center. They were run by people who are really, really mean, murderously mean, and whose primary mission was to kill, was to kill. And it was, of course, they had to do the thing with the jumpsuits and the slicing throats and de-heading, beheading people and all that stuff. Some people can't watch this. There wasn't that much of it, but some people cannot watch that part of the series because it was so bloody and violent and unfair. I mean, these were young kids, they were, you know, early 20s, and they had not a bad bone in their body, and they never did anything harmful to anybody, and yet ISIS was taking advantage. The other thing it taught me about ISIS is that it's thrown together. And you can have, you know, people who volunteered to be in ISIS thinking it was one thing, but in fact it wasn't what they thought. And they found out that it was just really a kind of a deception. And then when they got into ISIS, the stakes were high, it can't get out again. It's like, you know, it's like a mob. You get in, but you can't get out. And I think that's probably true, and that's the way a lot of ISIS people got sucked in and had to stay in or die. Case in point, Yusuf, that was Leila, the Palestinian negotiator from 1993. Her son got sucked into ISIS, and then he realized he was in beyond, above his head, and he couldn't do what they wanted to do, you know, killing these young people. So he sort of turned code and, you know, left them. But, you know, this was after, what was her name? Noah? I gotta put my glasses on. The young Israeli, yeah, Noah Solomon, when she had her throat slit, that was episode four. I didn't want to watch the rest of this. I mean, that really bothered me, you know, when the ISIS slit her throat. I know, you called me up and said, I don't want to watch the rest of this. Exactly. Too traumatic. But it's okay, because it resolved after that. That was the only serious violence which resulted in her death. And when you saw that ISIS guy, the leader of ISIS, raising his hands and taking into religious, he was talking religion, you know. I mean, this is what was driving him. I mean, the guy with the glasses, the head of that ISIS unit. He was a perfect character, wasn't he? Play the role. If you met him on the street, you say, this is an intellectual guy. Yeah. He reads, he thinks, he definitely in charge. But if you look at him in the field, which is, I think, what we have here, you know, the ISIS people are smart people, they were, I don't think there's that many left, smart people that they were educated, they could use computer technology and so forth. So, you know, it's funny how always these groups come together in this series and you get to see them engage all of them. And they retain this kind of cultural, strategic independence. And the engagement is the social experiment to see how they engage with each other. And you're troubled by it. You're troubled by it because you come away feeling that's nice, they had the Oslo Accords. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of violence under the hood. There's a lot of very negative things happening. And what exactly is the solution? And it's not isolated. You've got Iran involved, you have other, I mean, now there's the recent accords between Israel and a few of those Gulf states, which is a very positive thing. You know, they're finally getting along, right? But this is just so much, the middle, the whole Middle East is just a real mess. You know, I mean, I'm part Armenian and the between the Turks and the Azeris and the Armenians is all kind of things going on over there too. So the whole Middle East, you would like to hope that Israel can continue with these accords with other nations. Because Iran is behind a lot of this, you know, with Hamas and even Erdogan is playing into Hamas. So you got a lot of intimacy here. But, you know, one of the things you alluded to is how they're all playing, you know, against each other. And there's so much undercurrent, you know, behind the scenes. But I want to also get into the interaction between Alex and Arik. You know, she's really playing him, right? Because he had an illegitimate daughter. And she's using him, right? To save Pia's life. But I mean, she really gets a little out. I mean, that's that was out of hand. I mean, she was really, he's a minister. I think he was the intelligence minister. And she's playing him, right? And then he's up at the top of his balcony and his house, seeing his wife, you know, and the two, his two kids, right, his two other kids. And a little tear comes to his eye, because he knows if she, if she divulges the fact that he had an illegitimate child, and that's one of the reasons he's trying to save her, it would ruin his career. And of course, ruin their life. And his wife was saying, you know, she knew what was going on. And she says, we're going to have to give up all of this, our house. You've got to look at the way an Israeli family works, how the wife protected him. And I guess you could say she forgave him, but she protected him. She protected his career. I don't know if you'd see that in an American movie quite the same way. The other thing is, I think the producer director, we're trying to show us that people don't understand what goes on in the Middle East. They come from, you know, Scandinavia. They don't really have a clue. They don't understand about the undercurrent you're talking about. It's like the ugly American, the ugly Norwegian comes in there and busts all the China up, which is what they were portraying Alex as doing. And so, you know, that's a very important part of the series, that what you have is three countries, essentially. And you're watching them connect with each other. It's interesting how the episodes fly from one place to another. One minute you're in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, the next thing you're in Oslo, the next thing you're in Gaza, it just moves so quickly. You know, what happened here? What's going on? Well, what's going on is that this is an international story. In fact, it's about an international set of places that are connected at the hip, like it or not. And I think that tells us something about today's world. A lot of diplomatic and international issues there and a lot of technology there and a lot of, what do you want to call it, espionage and war strategy there. I was fascinated with it because I really had no idea where it was going. But I knew that I was learning a lot in the process. It keeps you on the edge of your chair to wonder if those other two young people are going to have the same fate as Noah did. Noah Solomon when she had her spokeslet. God, I'm still trying to remember that. I forget that scene. But the bottom line is, yeah, there's a lot of intricacy here between, as you alluded to, there's a lot of intimacy between it. And you see the dichotomy between the three elements and how each one operates. And it's just fascinating to get through those tens. I mean, to reiterate, I really had problems with those two Norwegian actresses and how they were hysterical. And oh, the Israeli mother who lost her daughter, how stoic she was, how adult she was compared to those two crazy Norwegians. I have issues with Stoltenberg too, that Noah, that they don't hate. But as you said, they're in there, never, never land up there in the northern Europe. They're away from all these issues. Germany, Nazism, that was decades ago. They don't have any problems, major problems with Sweden, Denmark, England. So they're living in a never, never land. And Israel, the Israelis are dealing with what they're dealing with, with Hamas and ISIS and other people and even the Christians in Syria, the Yazidis. So this shows you the Middle East, what a mess it is. I'll leave it at that. I'll let you say. I just want to talk about Layla for a minute. Layla was also at the Accords. Layla's a Palestinian. She was a doctor. She worked in a hospital trying to save lives. It was her son that absconded and joined ISIS. That was a really interesting twist in the plot. And it was horrible for her to find that. She didn't want her son subjected to either Hamas or ISIS. And there he was, breaking way and going out into the desert to join ISIS. And she cared a lot about people. She was ministering to some child that had some kind of cancer. And she wanted to take the child to, this is an interesting part of the plot, to Tel Aviv to get cancer therapy, chemotherapy it was. And she was willing to take all kinds of chances to make that happen. And furthermore, she was able to persuade the Israelis who were and are monitoring the border very closely to let her pass with the ambulance and the child. And so you realize that there's humanity there. Her humanity in terms of caring about this patient child of hers and the Israeli's humanity and letting her pass through to save the child's life. I also found it very interesting that they talked about the tunnel. And we know about the tunnel from the newspaper. In fact, there were many, many tunnels. And what the movie claimed was that all the tunnels had been destroyed, saved one. And this was the tunnel that was used for what, diplomatic or maybe espionage purposes that you could actually pass from Israel through this tunnel, long tunnel, a well built tunnel I might add into Gaza City. And a lot of action takes place in that tunnel because it's the only way that you can get from one to the other. That was really an education. I thought all the tunnels were either closed or well, not functioning. This one was left open intentionally by the Israelis for, they stated the reason. And I think it was something about diplomacy or maybe some kind of emergency need to pass across that border. Anyway, Layla was a huge character in this. And she was responsible, caring. She was educated. She was sort of a victim of Hamas and ISIS. And she was trying to do the right thing at all points. And if you want to look at a character who was kind of the mirror image of the intelligence officer, it would be Layla. Her agenda was appropriate. Her intellectual and emotional reactions to things were civilized. And I think they intended that. I mean, it didn't happen by accident in the movie. This was a critical character for them. And as I alluded earlier, a lot of those, all those Palestinian Arabs were Israeli Arabs. And they're given, they're obviously given a role in this joint Israeli Norwegian movie. So it shows you that there are Arabs in Israel that are given work in movies. And they played, and Layla played her role very, very well. And she was a positive character. So they showed a Palestinian Arab as a positive character. So taking it up a notch, then it seems to me that there are a fair number of Israeli movies coming out. I mean, not to say that there aren't a fair number of movies coming out from all over the world now. One side effect of ISIS is that people watch more movies like you and me. And many people not only in this country, but around the world are watching more movies. Movies are more international. I mean, I don't know if I told you, I watched a Bulgarian movie, which I thought was excellent. Every country you can think of, you know, South American countries, African countries, I watched one, two weeks in Lagos in Nigeria was a pretty good movie. So I mean, everybody's getting in on the act. And that's really important because this is, what do you want to call it? Movie diplomacy. If the Israelis have to work with the Arabs have to work with the Norwegians to make this movie and the Americans who were involved to make this movie. Then what we're really doing is we have a collaborative effort among various nations to produce a sensibly profitable project and share whatever message they want to share with the whole world was all sitting around watching their movies. So while we have all this contention, while we have, you know, the problems of COVID and autocratic governments Hither and Jan, the movies are connecting the world right now. This one is definitely a connector. Yep. And definitely the way it was produced was a connector without a doubt. And it brings you into the idea that people can work together if they choose to, instead of fighting against each other and killing each other. There was sadness here. I mean, as I said, Father, the heck, I mean, episode four, but Well, it was sadness, but ultimately, I don't want to reveal anything to people who haven't watched the movie, but ultimately worked out. And a Norwegian girl was saved. The girl from Oslo was saved. It was close call, but she was saved. But the other young women had her throat slit. And she was lost. She was she was a fatality, a casualty. The young man was the young Israeli. He became friendly with the girl from Oslo. I don't know where it goes from there. They were friendly before. That's why they went to the Sinai together. Yeah, well, maybe it's more than that in the sequel. Yeah, well, they were obviously falling in love, too. I mean, you could tell that that was going on. I mean, there was a love relationship there. But I mean, the one thing is that Pia went to Israel because her parents up in Norway didn't know because she found out that Eric was her biological father. That's why she went there in the first place. And then she met these two that might have where she met them and had become friend. They were furry coast friends with with Nadav and Noah. You mean the two Solomon kids, you know? So there's this little, you know, one of the things you've always said is little pieces that are given to you early that until the end, you don't understand. And this movie did the same thing. Maybe that's why you like this movie so much, Jay, because they didn't tell you everything up front. Right. But a piece meal, little pieces until it all comes together at the end. So, right, breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs, they are, you follow the trail of breadcrumbs, you have to you have to watch carefully so you can pick up on them later. And of course, you know, as we have discussed, these characters were, they were resonant characters. You could be from anywhere in the world and appreciate their motivations. Yes, they came from different cultures. And yes, some of those cultures are not cultures you want to spend time in. But at the same time, you could understand what was going on. So you could be from Ferenasi, India, and understand this movie. And so that's, that's another point of my, my international look at it is that this, this is built as many, many of these international movies are built to be understood around the world. It's not limited. It's not limited to anything. It's, it's, it's opening up a discussion, a conversation that is viable anywhere in the world. All good. All good. Well, thank you, George. A very interesting discussion about a very interesting series. There's a lot more out there. I'm not sure they all rise to the level of a girl from Oslo because that was special. But we're gonna, we're gonna do them one by one. It may take a thousand years. So, you know, stay safe. Thank you. Thank you for all your insights today, Jay. Sorry I got into too much of the nitty-gritty, but I wanted to give a record recording for each of the actors and actresses and give them credit. You know, thank you again for all your insights. And we'll do that. Thank you, George. Thank you, Jay. I look forward to our next show. Big time. Same to me. Have a good day. Take care. Thank you. Aloha.