ASHRAWI, HANAN

ne Mikhail born 1946, Ram Allah, Palestine [now in Israeli-occupied territory] Palestinian educator and spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to Middle East peace talks in the early 1990s. The youngest daughter of a prominent physician, who was a founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), she grew up in an Anglican family. In the late 1960s Ashrawi joined the General Union of Palestinian Students while attending the American University in Beirut, where she completed a master's degree. Unable to return to her hometown after the occupation of the West Bank by Israel during the Six-Day War (1967), she later earned a doctorate in English literature from the University of Virginia. Upon her return to Ram Allah in 1973, she joined the faculty of Birzeit University as a professor of medieval and comparative literature and also served as dean of the School of Arts until the Israeli army closed the university in 1988 after the outbreak of the intifada (uprising) among West Bank Palestinians in December 1987. Though Ashrawi had long been a supporter of the PLO, it was during the intifada that she became prominent internationally through frequent appearances as a guest commentator on American television news programs, on which she presented articulate appeals to the world to recognize Palestinian rights. When U.S. President George Bush announced a new international Middle East peace initiative in mid-1991, Ashrawi was appointed to the advisory committee to the Palestinian delegation and served as its official spokeswoman. From the time of the opening round of talks at Madrid in the fall of 1991, she emerged, through her speeches and news conferences as well as in behind-the-scenes diplomacy, as the representative of a new spirit of Palestinian pragmatism.