Voice Of Her People

By JOHANNA MCGEARY RAMALLAH

THE PERFECT COINCIDENCE OF NEED AND ability: the Palestinians and Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi. That's why it is her face you see, her voice you hear speaking for her people, brilliantly recasting their cause as a cry for human justice. No longer can the world sum up -- and dismiss -- the Palestinians in the portrait of a stubble-bearded man wrapped in a kaffiyeh. This woman looks civilized, unthreatening, someone you'd like to invite to dinner, and she speaks with a compelling eloquence. With exquisite timing or luck or preternatural planning, she was there, this medieval-literature scholar, devoted mother, Christian and woman, exactly when the Palestinians were ready to put on a new face.

The bravura performance in Madrid at the opening of the Arab-Israeli peace talks seven months ago that catapulted her to world attention surprised no one who knew her. "The person was formed," says Albert Agazerian, a colleague at Bir Zeit University. "It just required the moment to bring it on center stage." She says, "I know I can make a difference."

Such self-confidence. She is today the best known of the New Palestinians, the most prominent woman in the Arab world, and she is very comfortable with that. This is not a lady you can shake. Only the way she chain-smokes Salem Lights betrays the pressure she is under.

The most interesting thing about Hanan (everyone -- Secretary of State James Baker, the old man in the street who shuffles up to shake her hand, her friends, her enemies -- calls her Hanan, a mark of honor and a measure of her prominence) is that the public person is the private person. The 45 years of her life have woven seamlessly into a single fabric. Her long battle as a woman to find an identity and equality is the same as the struggle for Palestinian identity and equality. She sounds the same at home as she does on a podium: there is no difference between the parent talking to her child, the spokeswoman jousting with the press, the Palestinian arguing for the cause. She has a rare ability to translate her people's longings into homely domestic terms, to turn an abstract dissertation on rights into a mother's plea for her children. That is real; that is how she sees it. "I do it," she says flatly, "for my daughters."

Yes, she turns on for the camera, no doubt about it. But this is no act, only the projection of a lifetime's commitment to alleviating the pain that history has imposed on her people. The intensity in her may be veiled by no- nonsense tones and a vocabulary of moderation, but it is always there. "I feel a very strong need to convey the human quality, the real image of our people, that never came through before," she says. "I am never far away from Palestinian reality."

She came to that rather late. Hanan, cushioned in a wealthy, educated, upper-class family, the youngest of five daughters of a respected physician, had a political awareness that was largely theoretical until the day in June 1967 when Israel took over her hometown of Ramallah. She was a student at the American University in Beirut, then a hotbed of Arab nationalism. She joined in eagerly: "I was going to change the world." But on that June day she heard rumors that her house was being shelled, her parents were perhaps dead, her town occupied. As she stood in a long line at the Red Cross waiting for news, "I knew then what the Palestinian predicament meant. It was not my parents' issue but my own. I realized," she says, "that it was my enduring responsibility to see that this oppression did not go on." Hanan was not allowed to go home again for seven years.

She was, in a way, always preparing to shoulder that burden. She could read at three. Her mother was a devout Christian who taught her girls to emulate Jesus. But it was her father -- a dedicated doctor who never refused a call, an unusually enlightened man who preached women's equality, a socialist and a founder of the P.L.O. -- who profoundly defined her outlook. "Be daring," he told Hanan, "in the pursuit of the right." He made his children learn English from babyhood. Early on, he gave Hanan a copy of Nehru's diary, and she remembers the impact to this day: "I discovered the power of words."

Words, and a dagger-sharp talent for choosing the right ones to turn tired propaganda into poignant exhortations or make diplomatic doublespeak sound incisive, are Hanan's stock in trade. Her colleagues at Bir Zeit University, where she taught English literature for 17 years, were always awed, and often overruled, by her command of the language. She could outtalk them as well in Arabic as in English. She has a good ear for saying the right thing the right way, says a member of the peace delegation -- not talking, as Palestinians are wont to do, out of two sides of her mouth, but shaping a single message to penetrate the preconceptions of different listeners. She also has a talent, aggravating to her rivals, for expressing a position better than the person who created it. "She knows," says one of her critics, "that language is a major ingredient in making a public figure today."

Her English, in fact, made her a star. First on Nightline, back in April 1988: she was one of six Palestinians invited to the first Israeli-Arab town meeting to discuss the intifadeh. People saw the stones, but she gave the uprising words. Then with Faisal Husseini, the No. 1 political leader in the occupied territories, who linked up with her as his voice (his own English is poor) and his guide to the American mind (she was a graduate student in Virginia for three years) when the Palestinians first engaged in a dialogue with Baker. Then she won over Baker himself. "When I first met him, I saw only cold, sharp, calculating eyes," she says. "I wondered, Is he human?" She managed to kindle his sense of moral outrage, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The West -- and many ordinary Palestinians -- fell in love with her at Madrid, but the West Bank political establishment did not. Her portable phone , buzzes with requests for speeches, appearances, interviews, meetings -- from foreigners. "Wow," her admirers from abroad think. "She's female, educated, talks like us: our kind of Arab. She's so rational, so pragmatic." But the camera-clicking adulation that follows her every move abroad produces a distinctly muted reaction at home.

Here is what rivals, and even friends, say. She never lived in a refugee camp, spent time in jail, proved her activist credentials: "We don't know her history, where she stands." She's not from any faction, and among Palestinians, who you are is whom you belong to. Her enemies accuse her of being a tool of the P.L.O., which pays her salary, supplies her bodyguards, keeps her in power. No, others say, she's there only because the Americans want her there. She's too compromising: "People think she negotiates on behalf of Baker instead of negotiating with Baker on behalf of the Palestinians." She's a woman. She's a Christian woman: "Some do not like to have a woman speaking for Palestine, let alone from a minority." She talks too much. She's aggressive. She's bossy, insists on being in control, doesn't take criticism well. She's a workaholic who has sacrificed her friends and her family for her job. She has a big ego. She's too individualistic; no, she's just a staff officer. She likes the limelight. She loves it, it's gone to her head: "Watch her on TV. She's reveling in it." She wants power and more power: "There's no limit to her aspirations." Who is she to be . . .

There is some truth to all of the above. Actually, a great deal of truth. She does relish the power, the limelight, the prominence. "Frankly, I would prefer a more private life," she says, but no one believes her, not even her husband. "For her, this is work that has to be done and that has priority over everything else," he says. Later on she is a little more honest: "I can imagine myself going back to teaching, but I don't know if I'd be able to."

The flip side of her passionate commitment and shatara (an admiring Arabic word for intellect and savvy) is an arrogance that makes her bluntly impatient with anyone less smart, less quick, less decisive. She can assume too much and forget who really is boss. After she independently agreed with Baker in Madrid that Washington would be the venue for bilateral talks with the Israelis, Yasser Arafat himself slapped her down. "Who appointed you," he reportedly asked, "Baker or me?" (She is careful to admit no connection to the P.L.O. )

The more puzzling question is the exact nature of Hanan's importance to the peace delegation. She is adamant: "My input is substantive as well as in terms of image." She could not convey so skillfully the Palestinian position, she says, were she not central to its formulation. She insisted on being titled official, not media, spokesperson, to emphasize the substantive nature of her role. "As official spokesperson, I present the binding view."

That is not what others say. One member of the peace team disparages even her p.r. success. "It's not the person telling the story that matters," he says. "It's the willingness of the world to listen." While Hanan is a member of the "higher committee" that determines Palestinian positions in the negotiations, her colleagues differ on how influential she is there. She does not have the automatic gravitas belonging to representatives of the various factions; on the other hand, her often sound advice follows no party line. Another delegate says she is just an "excellent packager." A third says "the real power is elsewhere."

Washington, surprisingly enough, rates her an admirable spokeswoman but not much more. She is not, after all, one of the 14 Palestinian negotiators; merely a member of the outsize advisory team that pushes and pulls at the official delegates. Her early intimacy with Baker has waned now that formal talks are under way. Her influence remains informal, exercised through carefully cultivated personal contacts with the leading Americans. Frankly, says a U.S. diplomat, "her importance is in the corridors, not in the negotiating room."

Sometimes the Americans find that convenient. She was publicly -- well, in a background briefing, which is about as public as Washington gets -- made the scapegoat for complaints that the Palestinians were paying more attention to the TV cameras and their constituents back home than to sound negotiating positions. Hanan did not take that lying down. She telephoned directly to the official involved, a very high-ranking man, and told him just how upset she was. "She took it personally," he says, but shrugs off her dismay.

Usually, she is the one to brush off criticism. "That's the price of success," she says. She knows that the person out front must absorb the most blows. She knows she has to handle the unrealistic expectations and frustrated disappointment of the Palestinian public; if the peace process fails, her $ political future, even she herself, would be in danger. She knows that hard- liners who oppose the negotiations take it out on her. "They try to attack the person, not the issues," she says. She knows a lot of it is envy, from rivals who wonder why they are not in her shoes.

But sometimes in the dark of night it hurts. At a televised press conference not long ago, after the Israelis announced plans to deport a dozen Palestinians, one of the wives unleashed a vicious diatribe against Hanan, blaming her for compromising with the enemy. When asked to comment, she said, "I understand her bitterness." But Hanan was shocked and deeply wounded, and she hated appearing to be rejected by her own people. "Why me?" she asked her husband that night. "What did I do?"

The blindingly plain fact about Hanan, the thing you cannot doubt, is her passion and compassion. She interrupts an endless day's work to receive two unexpected callers: Ramallah women she's never met before who seek her help to free their sons held in Israeli detention. "To me," she says, "this is the horror of it. This is why I do it." To have a nation is the only way to stop the wrenching apart of families, she says. There is no way you can question the authenticity of her commitment, the ferocity of her determination to bring the occupation to an end.

"The really fundamental thing is that you're never free of it," she says as she closes her front door. "You're always reminded you're not free." Outside that door is her own perpetual reminder, the first thing she sees in the morning, the last thing she sees at night: the barbed-wire compound of the Israeli prison across the street that incarcerates her fellow Palestinians.