Episcopal Press and News
Anglican Woman 'Making a Difference' to the World as Palestinian Spokeswoman
Episcopal News Service. February 7, 1992 [92037]
Marjorie Hyer, former Religion Editor of the Washington Post
The chatter of the roomful of international journalists halted abruptly as the dark-haired woman strode confidently to the rostrum.
"Happy 1992," she began. "Let's hope 1992 is the year for peace and accomplishment." As the official spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace talks, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi was by now as at home with these questioners from the world's leading news media as she was in her classrooms at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, where she had been dean.
Besides, on this first day of the third round of the incredibly complex talks, Ashrawi had some amazing progress to report. "I am happy to report that the era of corridor diplomacy is over. Formal negotiations will start today." Translation: The month-long procedural dispute between Israel, which demanded that Palestinians be part of the Jordanian delegation, and the Palestinians, who wanted separate status, had been resolved. For the first time ever, Israelis and Palestinians were about to sit down together to talk peace.
Ashrawi, an Anglican, emerged as spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid conference on Middle East peace last November. "If you are making a list of Anglicans in the present era whose lives are making a difference to the wider world, then I recommend that you put Hanan Ashrawi on your list, said the Rev. Ray Barraclough, senior lecturer at St. George's College in Jerusalem, of his fellow countrywoman.
The international press found Ashrawi both informed and articulate. The only woman of all the delegations to hold such a high position -- indeed one of the rare women present -- she made it clear that she would be neither patronized nor bullied.
At one point, an American evangelical broadcaster challenged the Palestinian demand that Israel exchange land for peace, arguing that the Arab world had been poor stewards of "Judea and Samaria." These biblical terms for the occupied West Bank area, where Ashrawi lives and where Palestinians are seeking to establish an independent state, are code words for Israel's religion-based claim to the area.
"First of all, I find your reference to 'Judea and Samaria' a statement of extreme bias and rather offensive," Ashrawi responded evenly. "I am a Palestinian Christian, and I know what Christianity is. I am a descendant of the first Christians in the world, and Jesus Christ was born in my country -- in my land. Bethlehem is a Palestinian town. So I will not accept this one-upmanship on Christianity. Nobody has the monopoly."
Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi was born and raised in Ramallah, the youngest of five daughters. Her mother was a nurse and her father a doctor, active in the politics of his day. Ashrawi earned a master's degree from the American University of Beirut and a doctorate in medieval literature at the University of Virginia.
She married -- at St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem -- Emile Ashrawi, a photographer, artist, and filmmaker. They live in Ramallah with their two daughters. She has been professor of English and dean of arts at Birzeit University since 1973. The school, with its overwhelmingly Arab student body, was closed by Israeli authorities four years ago at the beginning of the Intifada, the uprising of Arabs in the Occupied Territories.
At Birzeit, Ashrawi has seen four students killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers. That, together with the horror of watching helplessly on television the aftermath of the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Palestinian refugees in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982, propelled her into the international political arena.
"I said to myself, 'This has got to stop. Palestinians must not be an easy prey to everybody,"' Ashrawi recalled. Already, in the late 1960s, while a student in Beirut, she had served as spokesperson for the General Union of Palestinian Students. Over the years she articulated the Palestinian cause in peace conferences in Prague, the Hague, New York, London, Stockholm and elsewhere.
In 1988, at the height of the Intifada, during a protest against Israeli occupation of Birzeit University, her passion -- and her fluency in English -- caught the attention of an ABC television crew. Ashrawi was booked onto a special "Town Meeting," a program featuring a debate between Palestinians and Israelis. She has since been invited back repeatedly to a variety of programs dealing with the Middle East. One network report last fall showed Ashrawi tenderly and poignantly explaining to her two pre-teenage daughters why she had to be away from them just before Christmas when the first bilateral talks were scheduled to be held in Washington.
Her television appearances so impressed U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that Ashrawi became one of the main conduits in his shuttle diplomacy talks leading up to the Madrid conference last November.
Whatever Ashrawi's contributions have been behind the closed doors of international diplomacy, she has brought the world a new image of Palestinians. "I always maintain that the end purpose of all human activity and commitment and endeavor is the welfare of the human being," she told the 25th anniversary conference of the National Organization of Women in January. "And if we lose sight of the human substance, then we lose sight of the basic essence of all our work....
"Men always choose the politics of domination and destruction.... It is time to transcend the pain of the moment and to impose a women's solution on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict," Ashrawi added. "And the women's solution is based on equality, on nondiscrimination, on the preservation of life and rights, and on addressing the core issues of justice, of freedom, with candor and with courage -- not with weapons and power."
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