Hanan Ashrawi

Hanan Ashrawi (born 1946, Ramallah, Palestine [now in the Israeli-occupied territory of the West Bank]) is a Palestinian educator, legislator, and spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation to the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the early 1990s.

Ashrawi was the youngest daughter of a prominent physician who was a founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and 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 went to the United States and earned a doctorate in English literature from the University of Virginia. Upon her return to Ramallah 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 first intifāḍah (Arabic: “shaking off”; see Palestine: The first intifadah) among West Bank Palestinians in December 1987.

Though Ashrawi had long been a supporter of the PLO, it was during the intifadah 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 H.W. 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.

After the conclusion of the Oslo Accords peace agreement in 1993, the Palestinian Authority was established and she held several positions within that body during the 1990s. She later served briefly as the Arab League’s first commissioner for information and public policy, a position to which she was appointed in 2001. In 2005 Ashrawi joined former finance minister Salam Fayyad to form Third Way, an alternative to both Fatah and Hamas. Although the Third Way party earned only a narrow proportion of the vote in the parliamentary elections of 2006, she and Fayyad each won a seat in the Palestinian Legislative Council. She continued to be a prominent spokesperson for the PLO until December 2020, when she resigned from its executive committee, citing a lack of opportunity for women and young people in the aging organization.

Ashrawi wrote a memoir of her role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process entitled This Side of Peace (1995). She received a number of acclamations including the Sydney Peace Prize (2003) and the Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Peace and Reconciliation (2005).