Mirabella

April 1992.

Send In A Woman: Hanan Ashrawi

For much of the winter, The Grand Hotel, a fashionable accommodation on the outskirts of Georgetown, has been taken hostage by the FBI, Secret Service, and a multi-national crew of personal bodyguards. Their collective mission is to keep a protective eye on the Arab guests who have made the hotel their headquarters while in Washington for the second and third round of Mideast talks. The guests included the seventy member Palestinian delegation and fifty Syrian participants - two groups not known for their amicable relations - along with their aides and members of the press. It is not exactly a war zone, but  it was necessary to pass through a metal detector/checkpoint before entering certain wings. Additional atmosphere was provided by swarthy looking, chain-smoking men,- clutching walkie-talkies to their ears, as they frenetically paced the lobby and halls.

Each evening brings the same ritual. As the weary negotiating teams returned to the hotel from their peace talk chores, a swarm of security guards and reporters crushed around them in the lobby. It was a sea of men with one exception,-Hanan Ashrawi, a short, sturdy-looking woman of 45, whose face is quickly supplanting the scruffy visage of Yasir Arafat in the Western world. An English professor and mother of two, she is an unlikely diplomat, - but one who has surpassed all expectations. Indeed, she is a publicist's dream: communicating in breathtakingly resonant sound bites - a lucid, warmhearted representation of the Palestinian struggle.

For the Israelis, Ashrawi may be the worst thing they have been up against since Nasser declared war. "She is the most dangerous person in the whole delegation because she is the smartest," says Louis Monheit, of the American Jewish Congress and a strong supporter of Israel. "She is pure politician."

By the time I catch up with Ashrawi in her suite of two rooms it is already past nine in the evening. She announces that she is starving. In between answering the continously ringing phones, she manages to order a turkey sandwich from room service. It is a routine day for Ashrawi - meaning that she's been up since five and will not see her bed before one in the morning, if not later.  Her sustenance appears to be primarily endless cups of coffee and back to back Salem cigarettes. She slumps on the sofa and her voice, dazzling in its diction and clarity, is hoarse with fatigue. Her powerful facial features soften as she speaks.

Ashrawi has been a lifelong Palestinian activist, but came to prominence in the West only after a 1988 appearance on Nightline. "I think Nightline created her," says Susan Mercandetti, a former producer for the show who scouted for guests. "We were searching for an articulate Palestinian who was fluent in English and Hanan was the only one we could find." A media star was born. Ashrawi so impressed Koppel with her pithy candor, that she became a frequent, favored guest.

After the Gulf War, when the Palestinian cause was disgraced by Yaser Arafat's grievous miscalculation to hitch his wagon to Iraqi madman Saddam Hussein, there was a desperate need to re-cast the Palestinian image. Realizing that Ashrawi was their best bet for re-capturing favor with the West, the PLO designated her as its spokesperson, though no one doubts that she is also a participant  with considerable influence on policy and negotiations. Indeed, she is not only the most powerful woman in the Palestinian movement, she is arguably  among the most powerful woman in the Arab world. In a region where many women live behind the veil, her prominence is nothing less than astonishing.

The youngest of five daughters, Ashrawi's childhood home in Ramallah was a hotbed of Palestinian activisim. Her father, a well known resistance fighter, never relented in his antagonism against Israel. The family had considerable wealth and property,- much of which they managed to hold onto even after the creation of Israel. Ashrawi and all of her sisters were given college educations, a rarity for Arab women, but not, claims Ashrawi, for Palestinians. "Palestinian society has a long tradition of liberty because of the emphasis on education and travel," she says. "Traditionally, we are open to the West. Because it has always been a land of pilgrims and pilgrimages, we've been exposed to different cultures. Our main emphasis is on education, especially since 1947. Your only security is what you got in your head. Not the land. Not the house - because you could lose that overnight."

Even by Western standards, Ashrawi is a singularly cosmopolitan creature. Her student years were  spent at the American University of Beirut during its heyday in the mid-60s.. Beirut, she says rhapsodically, "was the center of the universe. It was incredible, so cosmopolitan, so diverse, so rich, open and tolerant. You really could be anything." In Beirut, she became deeply radicalized. In 1969, she met Yasir Arafat as spokeswoman for the General Union of Palestinian Students at a conference in Amman. Always her twin passions have been politics and literature.

She spent the early seventies in America, doing her graduate work at the University of Virginia where she earned her doctorate in English Literature. "Middle English, Chaucer, Gawain, Beowolf, Spencer," she rattles off. For the last decade she has been a dean at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. "I teach history and criticism, and Medieval," she says, "though I did give a seminar in modern poetry. I love Yeats and Auden and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Basically, I like to teach." However, she's not teaching now as the university has been shut down again by the Israeli authorities in response to street rioting. It is the fourteenth closing, she says, of the university since the intifada began in late 1987.

Though the charade is maintained that the PLO is not participating in the talks, all parties know that any Palestinian proposals have the PLO stamp of approval. Ashrawi's considerable affection for Arafat is apparent, though some Middle East observers believe that he may have used the last of his nine political lives. "I think it will be a long time before Arafat is taken out of the cupboard - his name is still mud," said Jan Ziff, State Dept. correspondent for the BBC. "There are new, vibrant, smart English speaking leaders like Hanan. Arafat will be deferred to, but he is the old guard."

Ashrawi has been in the forefront of the Palestinian women's movement since the early 70's. In fact, she was the somewhat controversial keynote speaker at NOW's 25th anniversary in January in Washington, wheres she used the occasion to attack the Israeli government. I ask her if she worries that she and other Palestinian women will be dismissed from power if and when their struggle is won - as women were in Iran and other Arab countries.

"We've studied womens movements everywhere. The example we use is the Algerian [model], not the Iranian, because our revolution is not a religious revolution where the women were betrayed by the mullahs." I remind her that the Iranian women who marched in blue jeans by the thousands against the Shah also had no religious agenda nor are things particularly rosy for women in Algeria these days with the rise of fundamentalism.

"What happened in Algeria was that the women were active in the revolution,  but that, when there was independence and stability, the women went back - or were sent back - to the kitchen. I know there is a strong Islamic element emerging," she concedes, "but we have a long tradition of women's activism - Palestinian women's societies go back to the 1920's. Under occupation, women were the first to come out and lead demonstrations. We were transformed from a middle class, urban, charitable organization into a conscious- some say, feminist -women's movement that reached into refugee camps, villages, rural areas."

Skeptics question Ashrawi's assesment that a genuine grass-roots women's movement exists among the Palestinians. Whatever strides Palestinian women have made, there is a very long road ahead battling entrenched male Arab attitudes and misogyny.  Ashrawi herself has been criticized by provincial Muslims for a host of domestic crimes ranging from the fact that her husband, Emile, a musician and photographer, is four years younger than she and for not having produced any sons. She has two daughters, ages 10 and 14. Moreover, they point out that she is a Christian in a region with  a Muslim majority. Ashrawi rolls her eyes wearily at the charges, though she admits that even "my mother-in-law wanted me to keep trying 'because it's important to have sons.' My husband told her 'we have two girls. We're happy with them.'"

She seems impatient discussing Arab chauvinism, but she does not underestimate it: “Women were told all along, ‘Social issues can be postponed- we cannot have internal fragmentation because we’re under occupation.’ So it took us some time to evolve a gender agenda within the nationalist issues. If you are against national oppression, you have to be against the oppression of women. Any struggle which is postponed or given secondary status is a struggle lost.”

Ashrawi cites the Palestinian declaration of independence, which she helped to write. “It states very clearly a belief in democracy, political determinism, freedom of worship and equality between the sexes.” Ashrawi boasts that the Palestinian delegation includes three women in “high-level” positions and “many” in administrative jobs, but acknowledges that there are no women on the negotiating team.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the strongest support in Israel for the Palestinians has come from women, who make up the majority of the peace movement. Asharawi says she has no argument with the adage “men make war; women make peace.” In fact, one of Ashrawi’s closest friends is Leah Tsemel, an Israeli peace activist and lawyer who frequently defends Palestinians arrested by the government. Ten years ago, when both woman gave birth to daughters, Tsemel was summoned away to handle the arrest of some of Ashrawi’s students. Ashrawi took care of her friend’s infant and even breast fed her.

The top story in the news the day we meet is the United Nations repeal of its resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism. The resolution had been perceived by many Jews as a searing injustice. But Ashrawi views the UN reversal as simply a cynical, political act. “It was one of the rewards given to Israel for agreeing to the peace process,” she says with a shrug. Curiously, Ashrawi is neither offended by the resolution’s inhumanity nor by its nonsensical semantics. I ask her how if Judaism is a religion and not a race, it could be racist. “They have transformed Judaism into a national identity in Israel,” she says. “Any Jew can automatically become a citizen. So I don’t know whether this is racist or not. What do you think? I think Israel is an apartheid state and the way Palestinians have been treated under occupation is very clearly racist."

Ashrawi regards Israel as locked into a political version of the battered-child syndrome. “You do unto others what was done to you and become an abusive father or mother. What’s happened is that anti-Semitism in the West created a tremendous tragedy for the Jews, and we’re the first to recognize this. There was no justification, and the horror of it is so tremendous. But this collective fear has been used to justify the suffering of others. The healthy attitude is to say ‘never again’ not just for me, but ‘never again for anybody.’”

It is a classic Ashrawi epigram and precisely what infuriates her Israeli adversaries- glibly equating the hardship and dispossession of the Palestinians, however terrible, with the murder of six million Jews. Remarkably, Ashrawi defines anti-Semitism as a Western phenomenon, without regard for the Palestinians battling in the streets who yell, “Kill the Jews,” or countries like Saudi Arabia that prohibit Jews from crossing their borders, or Iraq, which requires a baptismal certificate from Westerners who want visas. Although she concedes that anti-Semitism exists, she believes “it is not an inherent tradition in the Arab world. It came as a result of a political problem”- meaning the partitioning of Israel in 1947. “I remember my father always talked about how we lived with the Jews…But when it became clear that Palestinians were going to pay the political price and their land was going to be taken over, that’s when the problem started.”

Playwright William Hoffman, who is writing about the massacre of his Jewish ancestors in Latvaria, says he doesn’t doubt Ashrawi’s sincerity, but worries that she doesn’t speak for the Palestinian majority. “Maybe she is decent,” says Hoffman, “but is she being used as a velvet glove masking an iron fist?” Other critics point out that the PLO didn’t even recognize Israel until late 1988 and then only after the PLO was routed from Lebanon and deprived of a front from which to launch its guerilla attacks. Many Israelis believe that the Palestinians will not be satisfied until they recapture all of Israel. Cynics point to a shoulder patch Arafat wears: a map of “Israel with “Palestine” written above the entire country.

While many Israelis privately admit to being willing to give up the occupied territories- the West Bank and Gaza- in exchange for keeping East Jerusalem, Ashrawi says that “East Jerusalem must be the capital of Palestine. It’s our economic center and cultural capital. It’s a Palestinian city. They can’t exchange what’s not theirs. This is the Israeli mentality at work: what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” What Ashrawi neglects to mention is that the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem were occupied only after the Israelis were under attack by their Arab neighbors and Nasser had threatened to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. No country has ever voluntarily returned the spoils of war, and the Israelis are even more reluctant to do so, surrounded as they are by hostile states.

A popular position among Israelis is that Palestine should be created out of part of Jordan, whose population is variously estimated at 40 to 60 percent Palestinian- a solution that Ashrawi rejects out of hand. “It’s solving the problem of one people at the cost of another,” she says emotionally. “We feel that the problem of Jewish suffering and the Holocaust was, in a way, solved at our cost, and we do not want to solve the Palestinian problem by making another people pay.”

Ashrawi and her colleagues on the delegation, moderate, Western-educated academics and liberals, have received almost as much heat from intransigent, radical Palestinians as from suspicious Israelis. “She’s a hero outside Palestine in the eye of international opinion,” Riyad al-Malki, a Palestinian hardliner, told ABC News, “but not inside the occupied territories.” Both the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a hard-line PLO faction financed by Syria, and the fundamentalist group Hamas, which is active in Gaza, have repudiated the peace talks and accused Ashrawi and her colleagues of selling out and of not speaking for the Palestinian masses. But Robin Wright, former Mideast correspondent for the London Sunday Times, points out that “Hanan does have the support of many Palestinians, and she has tremendous personal credibility.” Still, death threats were hurled at the negotiators who went to Madrid, and no one takes them lightly.

“Palestine was never a fundamentalist country,” Ashrawi says, “but what’s fanning the flames of fundamentalism is that the secular voices have not met with any success. Fundamentalism rises as a result of this sense of despair.” The implicit warning: if the West does not deal with moderates like herself, it will have to deal with the likes of the Hezbollah. How much does she fear the fundamentalists? At the moment she does not. But if they came to power, she says matter-of-factly, “I would be their first target.”

It was precisely Ashrawi’s willingness to gamble on compassion and conciliation at the Madrid talks that led to the Palestinians seizing the moral high ground. Their highly dramatic speech struck a nerve internationally: “In the name of the Palestinian people, we wish to address the Israeli people, with whom we had a prolonged exchange of pain. Let us share hope, instead….We have seen you look back in deepest sorrow at the tragedy of your past, and look on in the horror at the disfigurement of the victim turned oppressor.”

“It was a speech straight from the heart,” says Ashrawi, who collaborated on the text with several Palestinian writers. “I was crying even when writing it. Haidar [chief negotiator Abdel Shafi] kept saying, ‘How can I read this? I’ll cry.’ And we said, ‘Go ahead and cry. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’ The only way to address the world and to present the Palestinian case was to be honest, genuine, human- no posturing, no slogans no affectation. It wasn’t in any way manipulative. We are the ones who are saying, ‘We want to break the cycle of hate and revenge.’ It is only the victim who can say this. We are saying ‘Let’s stop this.’ You see, we were so busy negating the Jews and the Israelis for such a long time. The trauma of the loss of Palestine was a collective shock. It’s not a remote past. It’s not easy for a Palestinian to say, ‘I accept a two-state solution.’”

The speech was a public relations coup. Secretary of State James Baker responded with high praise for the Palestinians. A photograph of Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir grimacing as he leaned toward a colleague during the speech prompted journalists to circulate a joke that had Shamir groaning, “Why didn’t we let Arafat come!”

Ashrawi believes a Palestinian state is an inevitability. Once that is achieved, she says, Israel can begin to resolve its problems with its Arab neighbors. “We are the key,” she says, “and for the first time we are reaching out to the Israelis, saying, ‘We want to make peace.’” Nor is she alone in her optimism. “There may not ever be love or trust,” says Robin Wright, “but there can be coexistence.”

‘My sense is that the deal has already been struck: limited autonomy and self-government for the West Bank and Gaza,” says Bill Blackton, another Mideast observer. “What do you think Baker has been doing for the last eight months? Within the next year I do think the Palestinians will have some kind of control over their lives.”

The only certainty in the Mideast is uncertainty, but one given is that Hanan Ashrawi is here to stay. “Although the Israelis are still the best spin doctors in town,” according to the BBC’s Jan Ziff, Ashrawi’s eloquence is giving them a run for their money. As another Washington insider says, “She is an adept diplomat and a skilled politician. What remains to be seen is whether she is a stateswoman.”