The woman behind the scenes:
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
The woman behind the scenes In April 1990, along with a small American delegation, I was invited to meet with Israelis and Palestinians then in the midst of the intifada. One of the most impressive...
...She clearly understood the moral leverage that the intifada brought to the stalemate...
...Her appeal to Arafat to take a more rigorous stand was refused, and she knew that she could not serve in a PLO "government...
...Hanan Ashrawi's decision to forgo a political role in the interim government was an act of great integrity...
...Discovering this gave us Americans the sense that things were moving...
...It was clear to them that those who initialed the agreement did not live in the Occupied Territories...
...All the details of this are set forth in This Side of Peace: A Personal Account (Simon and Schuster, $25, 318 pp...
...One of the most impressive of our interlocutors was Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian Palestinian, English professor, and dean at Barzeit University in Ramallah, then dosed down by the Israelis...
...Instead she turned to building the practices and policies of a civic society as the founder of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights...
...at first, in meeting delegations like ours from all over the world, in organizing demonstrations, student defense teams, women's groups, and civil rights activities, often with the collaboration of sympathetic Israelis...
...Second...
...Not only did she passionately and accurately represent the situation of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, she was able through her command of English and familiarity with the United States (she has a Ph.D...
...Her desire to create a Palesinian discourse and point of view from the "inside" was carried out...
...She did not mouth political slogans or present the condition of the Palesinians in ideological abstractions, but, as she said, in their human dimensions, not us terrorists but men and women, mothers and fathers desperate to end the siege of their children's lives by the Israeli occupation...
...Though a Palestinian-Israeli Accord was ultimately reached through a back-channel diplomatic effort carried out in Oslo, while the bilateral talks continued, without Hanan Ashrawi even the fragile peace that now exists could never have been achieved...
...Ashrawi, appealing to our small group as though we hud the power to begin peace talks, was articulate and knowledgeable...
...When she and Faisal Husseini, the other "inside" member of the Palestinian delegation, finally saw the Oslo agreement to which Arafat had agreed, she reports their extreme concern "about the gaps, ambiguities, lack of detail, and absence of implementaiton mechanisms...
...And then finally she struggled through bilateral Paleslinian-lsrueli talks under the sponsorship of the United States, first with Secretary of State James Baker and then Warren Christopher...
...Third, someday soon she will have to reenter the political fray to bring sanity, passion, and the human dimension to a peace that could yet be won...
...in medieval studies from the University of Virginia) to plead the case for Palestinian sovereignty in ways that many Americans hud never before grasped...
...During months of negotiations, she curbed some of the worst factionalism and double-dealing of the PLO while maintaining the confidence of Yasir Arafat...
...She believed that many Israelis, if not the Likud government, had the moral sensibilities to respond...
...Our meeting in East Jerusalem hud been arranged by our Israeli hosts, meetings that would have been denounced in the United States, but that were not uncommon among Palestinians and Israelis themselves...
...She convinced the PI.O leadership mat the opening address (which she wrote) he given in English so that the whole world could understand it...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS...
...Seeing Arafat and the PLO from Ashrawi's sympathetic but critical perspective, three thoughts come to mind: First, the years Palestinians spent wandering in the "desert" may have had as much to do with Arafat's duplicity and idiosyncracies as with his tenacity and resolve...
...Meeting Ashrawi reenforced that sense...
...above all Americans...
...By her persistence in dealing with the Israelis, she made the possiblity of a Palestinian people in a Palestinian nation a reality...
...This "creation of a discourse" about the Palestinian situation was expanded in the decision of "insiders" and "outsiders" (the PLO and Palestinians in exile) to go to Madrid, where Ashwari served as spokesperson...
Vol. 122 • June 1995 • No. 12
