Woman of the Year
Review of This Side of Peace: A Personal Account, by Hanan Ashrawi. 310 pp., Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Avi Shlaim
New York Review of Books, 8 June 1995.
Published without the review of A Voice of Reason: Hanan Ashrawi and Peace in the Middle East, by Barbara Victor. 310 pp., Harcourt Brace, 1994.
At the Madrid peace conference in late October 1991, for the first time
in a century-old conflict, the Israelis lost the battle for hearts and
minds to their Palestinian opponents. There was a palpable feeling of
history in the making as Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi, the elderly physician
from Gaza and head of the Palestinian delegation, delivered his opening
address in the Grand Palace. Of all the presentations of the
Palestinian case made by official spokesmen since the beginning of the
conflict, this was undoubtedly the most eloquent as well as the most
conciliatory and convincing. It would have been inconceivable for the
PLO, despite all its growing moderation, to make such an unambiguous
peace overture to Israel. The PLO, in any case, had been excluded from
the Madrid conference by the right-wing Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak
Shamir. Shamir, evidently troubled by the conciliatory tone of Dr Abdul
Shafi's speech, passed a note to an aide. One spectator speculated that
the note said: "We made a big mistake. We should have insisted that the
PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people."
The
principal author of this remarkable speech was Dr Hanan Ashrawi, the
spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation. Hanan was born in Nablus on
8 October 1946 to a wealthy Christian middle class family. Her father,
Daud Mikhail, was a doctor who joined in the resistance against British
rule in Palestine. After the loss of Palestine in 1948, the family
lived under Jordanian rule in Ramallah in what became known as the West
Bank. From the Friends Girls School in Ramallah Hanan went to study
English literature in the American University in Beirut. The Israeli
occupation of the West Bank in June 1967 turned Hanan overnight into an
exile. It also marked the beginning of her active involvement in the
Palestinian revolution. In 1970, barred by the Israeli authorities from
returning home, she enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate in medieval English
literature at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. At
Charlottesville she combined radical political activism with her
esoteric academic pursuits and began to make a place for herself in the
new world at a time when the word "Palestinian" was synonymous with
terrorist.
A general amnesty for Palestinians enabled Dr Ashrawi to return home to
Ramallah and to reunite with her family in 1974. She settled into
academic life as faculty member and head of the English Department at
Birzeit University. From the outset, the occupation and the outspoken
academic did not get along. Following her participation in a few
student demonstrations and protest marches, she was arrested and hauled
before a military judge. "What are you doing here today" asked the
judge after she chose to take her oath on the New Testament rather than
the Koran or the Old Testament. "That's a good question," she replied
calmly. "A very good question. Maybe you can answer it." This
experience spurred her to establish the University Legal Aid Committee
to provide support for Palestinian students. Outside the University
framework, she and a group of other women started feminist study groups
and held consciousness-raiding sessions on the subject of gender in
different aspects of Palestinian life.
Hanan's husband was not a political activist but a musician, a drummer
in a rock band which used Arabic lyrics with contemporary music, named
Emile Ashrawi. They got married in 1975 and had two daughters, Amal and
Zeina. With a supportive husband and a happy home life, Hanan was able
to continue her manifold nationalist, feminist and humanist activities.
Like many of her colleagues in Birzeit University, she had some contact
with the leftist political factions of the PLO but she did not join any
one of them. With the passage of time, she moved closer to the
mainstream Fatah movement while always retaining her political
independence.
The intifada, the spontaneous popular revolt against Israeli occupation
which broke out in December 1987, drew Ashrawi deeper and deeper into
politics. The intifada brought together the seemingly irreconcilable
elements of Palestinian society in a joint quest for freedom which
pitted the human spirit against the mighty Israeli military machine. It
was a heady experience which, despite all the pain and suffering,
released suppressed energies and imbued the participants with a sense
of power, drive, and invincibility. Ashrawi was susceptible to the
sense of exhilaration which charged the atmosphere. But she also learnt
the meaning of organization, discipline and self-criticism as a means
of reform. She took the lead in mounting a campaign of information and
emerged as a bold innovator when it came to relations with the media.
As a matter of policy, Palestinians had refrained from addressing
Israelis in a public debate as a way of withholding recognition. This
gave the Israelis exclusive access to the media and ample scope for
blaming and misrepresenting the absent Palestinians. An invitation to
debate face-to-face with Israelis on Ted Koppel's Nightline in April
1988 gave Ashrawi just the opportunity she was looking for to break
away with the Palestinian tradition of reticence and boycott. She
seized the opportunity to send out multiple signals: "to the world -
that we wanted to be heard directly; to the Palestinians - that it was
time to take the initiative and speak out; to the Israelis - that we
were ready to take them on."
Encouraged by the result of this first public encounter, Ashrawi and a
group of other political "independents" formed the Political Committee
which held many of its meetings in her house. The objectives of the
committee were to brief journalists and foreign visitors, to provide a
pool of accredited speakers to participate in conferences and seminars
all over the world, to present creative options to the unified national
leadership of the intifada, and to become a focus of political and
diplomatic activity in the occupied territories. Such activity was
illegal then but the danger only spurned them on. Apart from being
risky, this activity impinged heavily on Ashrawi's home life for it was
then that Zeina, her younger daughter, announced: "I have lent my
mother to the peace process."
The peace process between the Palestinians and Israel, which culminated
in the famous handshake between Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on 13
September 1993, is the main theme of Ashrawi's revealing and highly
readable memoirs. The book, as its title indicates, is not a piece of
diplomatic history but an inside account by one of the participants. "I
feel compelled to narrate," she tells us in the Author's Note, "that
side of peace which the standard textbooks of history and political
science tend to ignore - a personal account of one player and the human
dimension of an impersonal process." She also tells us that she was
encouraged to write this account by Edward Said, her friend and mentor,
who often lamented the lack of a Palestinian narrative to reveal in
human terms their side of the truth.
Hanan Ashrawi is not a politician by choice, politics being her second
career. Her literary background, however, inevitably influenced her
political style. Her command of English was an obvious asset in putting
across the Palestinian case but, precisely because she was not a
professional politician, she was able to offer a new perspective on the
Palestinian struggle. She elevated the level of debate about
Palestinian politics by focusing on existential issues, by articulating
the hopes and fears of ordinary people, by dwelling on justice and
morality. Being a woman probably made it easier for her to speak about
feelings, emotions and human values and this touched the right chord
with the Western audiences to whom she addressed herself. Although she
presented her case with passion, and although she could be dogmatic,
her listeners did not feel threatened by her. Even under severe
pressure, she carried herself with dignity.
Like Edward Said, Hanan Ashrawi understands the importance of
Palestinians telling their own narrative; unlike him, she also
understands the requirements of pragmatic politics, the necessity of
compromise not only with one's enemies but also with one's partners.
Both of them are intellectuals with a passionate commitment to the
Palestinian cause and considerable expository and oratorical skills.
Both of them are at home in the realm of big ideas. The difference is
that Ashrawi can translate these ideas into a plan of action whereas
Said cannot or would not. Her approach to politics is informed by
practical experience, by a capacity to balance conflicting
considerations, which is conspicuously lacking in his case.
It was these political skills and not just her mastery of the English
language that commended Ashrawi to Yasir Arafat as an envoy to the
American government. Arafat knew that she had no personal agenda beyond
fighting for self-determination and that she would not threaten his
position as the leader of the Palestinian political movement. Yet their
relationship mirrored some of the tensions between the two major
components of this movement: the inside and the outside, al-dakhil and
al-kharij. Both the Americans and the Israelis wanted the center of
gravity within the Palestinian movement to shift from the outside
leadership in Tunis to the local leadership in the occupied
territories, a shift which Arafat was determined to resist. However, in
1989 Arafat himself asked Ashrawi to meet with State Department
officials and make a plea for upgrading the US-PLO dialogue. That was
the beginning of the role she was to play for the next six years, a
role which gave her an increasingly visible international profile.
At the State Department Ashrawi met three of James Baker's aides,
Dennis Ross, Dan Kurtzer and Aaron Miller who were later to be dubbed
"the peace processors." By her own account, she was not exactly
self-effacing:
Being,
and perceiving myself to be, of the people and not officialdom, an
envoy though not a diplomat, I exercised my option for directness and
honesty. I brought with me an aspect of the innocence of the intifada,
its willingness to confront, to take the initiative, to assert itself,
and not to succumb to intimidation. But most of all, I brought to that
encounter, and subsequently to all others, that one essential sine qua
non that was to become the most salient quality of Palestinian
political discourse: the human dimension.
A year later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Yasir Arafat committed one of
the most egregious blunders of his entire political career by embracing
Saddam Hussein. That embrace plunged the PLO once again into the
dog-house and exposed the Palestinians in the occupied territory to
physical danger. Publicly, Saddam Hussein posed as the champion of the
Palestinians; privately, when asked about the safety of the
Palestinians should he attack Israel with Scud missiles, he is reported
to have replied, "I am not separating lentils." The leadership of the
inside had to steer a very careful course. For years Ashrawi and her
colleagues had been trying to teach the language of peace: "Like
Sisyphus we had laboriously rolled the rock of non-military solutions
uphill. Now, it seemed with the glorification of Mars, the rock was not
only about to roll back, but to crush us in the process."
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Ashrawi and a
handful of leaders from the inside, led by Faisal Husseini,
participated in numerous exploratory talks with secretary of State
James Baker which helped to launch the Middle East peace process with
the Palestinians on board. George Bush proudly proclaimed that the Gulf
War laid the foundations for a New world Order. James Baker's task was
to convene an international conference to deal with the Arab-Israeli
conflict and in this endeavour Palestinians were a useful but
dispensable ally. Baker therefore leaned hard on the Palestinians. As
prime minister Yitzhak Shamir kept stonewalling, Baker steadily
intensified the pressure on the Palestinians. Any proposals that
bounced off the Israeli brick wall, he tried to sell to the
Palestinians as the only way of getting Israel into the talks.
Baker and his aides shuffled back and forth between Israel and the
Palestinians, carrying the carrot and the stick; the carrot, as Ashrawi
ruefully observed, for the Israelis and the stick for the Palestinians.
Baker developed a healthy respect for his unconventional interlocutors,
as one journalist travelling with him reported to Ashrawi. Rather
flippantly she replied that "After a six-hour meeting with Shamir,
he'll find anybody likeable." In the course of these exploratory
meetings, Husseini and Ashrawi resisted every attempt to create an
alternative leadership to replace the PLO. Their role, as they saw it,
was to represent the PLO, not to replace it. While forced to yield to
most of Shamir's conditions on Palestinian representation in the
planned peace conference, their long-term aim was to get the PLO on
board, to gain them recognition, and ultimately to get them to
negotiate with Israel directly and officially.
Madrid was the mother of all Middle East peace conferences with the
United States and the Soviet Union as co-sponsors, United Nations and
European Union observers, delegations from Israel and several Arab
countries, a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and some five
thousand journalists from all over the world. Hanan Ashrawi, the
spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation, quickly emerged as the star
of the show. The exclusion of the PLO from the show enabled her to
project the Palestinian delegation as a people's delegation made up
mainly of academics and professionals who had come to Madrid to present
the cause of the people. PLO leaders wanted the opening address to be
delivered in Arabic but Ashrawi persuaded them that it should be
delivered in English because it was aimed primarily at the American
public. In composing the address, Ashrawi was driven by the urge to
capture in words the essence of the Palestinian experience and to turn
it into an irresistible force for change. So moving was the speech that
Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi, a gentleman of the old school, was afraid he
would cry when delivering it. "Then cry," said the author, "the world
will be crying with you."
In the intervals between plenary sessions Ashrawi was constantly in the
limelight, giving press briefings and interviews. The Israelis fielded
a large professional public relations team but they clearly lost this
round to Ashrawi. In the battle for hearts and minds, she was a
formidable opponent. One of the Israeli experts described her as
terrifyingly articulate. Her handling of the media was nothing short of
brilliant. The press did not intimidate her and she did not suffer from
stage fright. She believed that the press was after the truth and that
the truth was her ally. At the final press briefing in Madrid, she
ended by saying: "You have given me and the Palestinian people a fair
hearing, and for that I'm deeply grateful." She received a standing
ovation.
The second stage in the American-sponsored peace process were the
bilateral talks between Israel and the Arab delegations which got under
way in Washington in January 1992. Dr haidar Abdel Shafi stayed on as
the head of the Palestinian delegation which consisted largely of
doctors and academics from inside while Dr Ashrawi stayed on as the
spokesperson. One critic called these delegates "an arbitrary fistful"
while the press depicted them as "the best and the brightest." The PLO
leadership in Tunis was still excluded from direct participation in the
talks but determined as ever to call the shots. This gave rise to an
extraordinarily complex structure which included three elements: the
delegation which conducted the negotiations, the Leadership Committee
which was headed by Arafat's adviser, `rosy glow' Nabil Sha'th, and a
Strategic Committee consisting of advisers and experts. Thrown together
literally overnight, this diverse group of men and women functioned as
a surprisingly coherent team.
The constraint which more than any other impaired the work of the
Palestinian team was constant interference from Tunis. Working with the
PLO chairman had never been easy because of his autocratic and
idiosyncratic style of decision-making and because he combines vanity
and ineptitude in roughly equal portions. But now he began to develop
an obsession with the threat of an "alternative leadership" which
verged on paranoia. He feared that any progress made by the "people's
delegation" would undermine the status of the PLO and his own position
as the leader of the Palestinian movement. The analogy he cited was
that of a drone used to fertilize the queen bee and then left to die.
Another analogy was reviving the patient in order to make him sign his
will and then leaving him to die or even finishing him off. To fend off
this imagined threat, Arafat resorted to manipulations, divide and rule
tactics, and petty intrigues. He was anxious to demonstrate that
without his backing, no progress could be achieved in the talks. He
pulled the strings from Tunis and he went to extraordinary lengths to
show that only he could make decisions on behalf of the Palestinians.
Hanan Ashrawi enjoyed a special position within the Leadership
Committee both because she was the spokesperson and a media megastar
and because of her close contacts with the Americans. She represented
the Palestinian side in many talks, formal and informal, with
James Baker and his aides in the State Department and consequently she
could speak with authority about the American position. But although
liaison with the State Department was one of her official duties, it
exposed her to the charge of being too close to the Americans. Certain
individuals in Arafat's entourage, probably prompted by jealousy, took
to questioning the reliability of her reporting of the American
position and even insinuated that she had sold out to the Americans.
Arafat himself was double-faced. In her presence he would be
appreciative and ingratiating, calling her not only "a dear sister but
the crown on our heads, taj rasna." Behind her back, however, he could
be every bit as dismissive and malicious as his subordinates.
If the attitude of the PLO leadership posed one set of problems for
Hanan Ashrawi and her colleagues during the bilateral talks, the
attitude of the Israeli negotiators posed another. Throughout the first
five rounds of the Washington talks, the Palestinians tried to engage
the Israelis on substantive issues but the latter remained slippery and
evasive. They kept up the semblance of participation without addressing
the real issues. That Yitzhak shamir wanted the talks to go nowhere
slowly was an open secret. As far as the back-stage involvement of the
PLO in the talks was concerned, Shamir preferred to bury his head in
the sand, to play ostrich politics. Shamir's intransigence contributed
to the defeat of the Likud in the June 1992 elections. A few days after
the defeat, Shamir confessed that he had intended all along to draw out
the negotiations for ten years and to build more settlements in the
occupied territories which would render the talks irrelevant. The Labor
Party's electoral victory gave rise to optimistic forecasts that peace
was around the corner. "The real test is yet to come," cautioned
Ashrawi, "whether Rabin the bone-breaker can be Rabin the peacemaker."
To her dismay, even the modest expectations pinned on the new Israeli
prime minister were quickly shattered.
A third source of frustration for the Palestinians was the American
reluctance to play a more active part in the management of the peace
process except when Israel needed bailing out. The peace process
started with two sponsors at Madrid but one disappeared and the other
became a spectator. With the approach of the 1992 presidential
elections, George Bush and James Baker relaxed their grip on the peace
talks and allowed Israel to exploit its power to its own advantage.
Predictions of impending electoral defeat transformed the Bush
administration from a lame duck administration into a dead duck
administration. The bottom line, however, was that no
administration was prepared to stand up to Israel because it did
not pay political dividends. The Palestinians on the other hand,
however just their cause might be, were seen as irrelevant in the
making and breaking of political careers on Capital Hill and in the
White House and therefore disposable. Among themselves the Palestinians
joked that the Americans only sent them nonpapers because they looked
on them as a nonpeople and that they did not respond to most of their
memoranda because they regarded them as a nondelegation.
When Bill Clinton succeeded George Bush as president, the pro-Israeli
bias in American policy became more pronounced and more blatant.
Clinton gave Israel a blank check and adopted a hands-off attitude to
the Middle East peace talks. At the first meeting with Secretary of
State Warren Christopher, Ashrawi studied closely his spoken and
nonverbal language but the signals were so few as to betray no personal
involvement. The policy of the new administration, she observed, was
characterized by hesitancy and vagueness. On the few occasions when the
Clinton administration did present papers to break the deadlock in the
talks, the papers had Israeli fingerprints all over them. By the summer
of 1993, the Palestinian negotiators gave up hope that the Clinton
administration would exercise a corrective influence on Israel, let
alone come up with fair formulations.
Consequently, Hanan Ashrawi became convinced of the need to change the
negotiating framework and to get serious and discreet negotiations
going between the PLO and the Israeli government. America's posture in
the official talks in Washington also contributed, without her
knowledge, to the alternative back-channel negotiations in Oslo between
the PLO and the representatives of the Israeli government. The PLO had
made numerous attempts to establish a back-channel to Rabin but Rabin
did not respond. Oslo was the first back-channel that Rabin appeared to
take seriously. Arafat, from his end, played a characteristically
devious double-game. He kept the official Palestinian negotiators
completely in the dark about the secret talks in the Norwegian capital.
Moreover, when the Oslo talks moved forward, Arafat started issuing
more hard-line instructions in a deliberate attempt to block the
Washington talks.
When Arafat, in yet another abrupt reversal of policy, instructed
Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi to hand to Christopher a paper they
considered unacceptable, they obeyed his instructions and promptly
submitted their resignations. Arafat's arbitrary order was the straw
that broke the camel's back. This time Ashrawi made no attempt to
conceal her anger. "We cannot go on," she told Arafat to his face "with
conflicting instructions, multiple channels, lack of a coherent
strategy, inconsistent political decision making, total disregard for
our structures, and lack of accountability and openness in our internal
work." Next, at a specially convened meeting, she excoriated the PLO
Executive Committee, accusing them of stabbing her and her colleagues
in the back.
On her next trip to Tunis, on 26 August, Ashrawi was told about the
Declaration of Principles which had been initialed in Oslo. She was not
surprised by the existence of a back-channel; what did surprise her was
that a particular back-channel suddenly delivered. The next morning she
and Faisal Husseini went to the office of Mahmud Abbas, whose nom de
guerre is Abu Mazen, and studied a copy of the agreement. Her first
reaction was one of shock. It was clear that the PLO officials who had
negotiated this agreement had not lived under occupation for it did not
commit Israel to cease all settlement activity, it postponed the
question of Jerusalem, and it said nothing about human rights. Like
Husseini, she registered her deep concern about the gaps in the
agreement, the ambiguities, the lack of detail, and the absence of
implementation mechanisms. While recognizing that the PLO had made some
strategic political gains, as Abu Mazen pointed out, she also thought
that the agreement had many potentially explosive provisions that could
be turned to the disadvantage of the Palestinian side. Her main concern
was not about being kept in the dark or even being used but about
substance. In any case, it was clear to her when she read the document
that one chapter was drawing to a close, another about to begin and
that she should start preparing her exit.
At the signing ceremony of the accord between the PLO and Israel on the
South Lawn of the White House, Hanan Ashrawi sat in the tenth row.
Ashrawi offered to write the speech for the former guerrilla chieftain
to deliver in his new incarnation as world statesman, and she no doubt
had it in her to produce a fitting sequel to the Madrid speech, but her
offer was turned down. In the event, Arafat's speech was quite
remarkable for its flatness and banality. Yet the choice of this
speech, as someone told Ashrawi, was a conscious one. The implicit
message was that her kind of language was over. "The next phase," she
was told, "is not one for poets and intellectuals. It's the era of
hard-core politicians, one in which slogans are the weapons of a
struggle for power. Self-interest produces clichיs, not humanistic
visions."
Arafat himself made Ashrawi a number of job offers in his new
administration which she wisely declined. The parting of the ways was
only to be expected. For the self-styled President of Palestine had
intended all along to follow the Algerian model in which the
politicians returned from exile after independence to rule the country
and to exclude from power the local leaders who had fought the French.
Ashrawi was wise to preserve her political independence because
Arafat's language is not her language, his values are not her values
and his vision for the future is not her vision. Democracy and human
rights are only two of the salient issues on which they do not see
eye-to-eye. But the reasons she gave Arafat for declining his job
offers were tactfully phrased:
We
have to turn the page, close one chapter and begin another. I will not
be part of any political structure, nor will I accept any official
post. From now on, I will be pursing a different vision. I had entered
the public political arena to serve the people and the cause, and for
the last few years I've given it all I had. Now it's time to move on,
for each phase requires its own instruments and vehicles, its own
language and people.
Hanan Ashrawi moved on to establish and to head the Palestinian
Independent Commission on Human Rights. She views the work of the
commission as an important part of the process of institution-building
which would hopefully help to lay the foundations for Palestinian
statehood. In the meantime, the gulf between the expectations that
attended the conclusion of the Oslo accord and the actual results is
becoming more apparent by the day. Old habits die hard. Arafat has not
renounced his "revolutionary" mentality in favor of a "state-building"
one. The administration set up by him in the area so far confined to
about 6.5 per cent of original Palestine, is undemocratic and unpopular
and marked by growing repression. Thus, sadly, the head of the
Palestinian Independent Commission on Human Rights has her work cut out
for her.
One puts down Hanan Ashrawi's memoirs with admiration for her courage
and integrity and astonishment at her achievements. Rarely in the
annals of human history have so many men owed so much to one woman. She
rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Gulf War, during one of the
most difficult phases in Palestinian history since the disaster of
1948. She was an academic with no constituency, no party, no power
base, no organization and support from the leader of her movement which
was at best erratic. Yet she threw herself whole-heartedly into
political and diplomatic activity on behalf of her people and she was
spectacularly successful in projecting a new image of Palestinian
nationalism with a human face.
Hanan Ashrawi was an ordinary woman, subjected over a period of years
to the most extraordinary and unrelenting pressures, sucked into a
vortex of petty manipulations, and yet she maintained her psychological
balance and never lost her bearings. Nor did she allow fame and
flattery to go to her head. It is this that is so remarkable about her
story. She was the right person, at the right time, doing the right job
and she also made her graceful exit at exactly the right moment. Yasir
Arafat and some of the men who surround him in his seedy little
statelet in Gaza compare with her like the pigeons of Trafalgar Square
with the Bird of Paradise.
One of the few positive things one can say about Barbara Victor's
biography of Hanan Ashrawi is that it has an apt title. In a political
movement which had its fair share of extremists, Ashrawi did indeed
stand out as a voice of reason. But the book itself has very little to
recommend it. Victor's knowledge of Middle East history is not just
superficial but extremely shaky. She writes, for example, that the
Balfour Declaration was issued in 1921 and provided for two states,
Israel and Palestine, to exist side by side. Anyone who believes that
would believe anything. Ignorance is compounded by political prejudice.
Israel emerges from Victor's pages as snow white, whereas the
Palestinians, in line with popular American stereotypes, are repeatedly
described as terrorists.
In chapter one of her book Victor poses a question: "Was Hanan Ashrawi
a sincere advocate of peace, the voice of moderation, or was she a
shrewd public relations ploy, gaining sympathy and respect for the
Palestinian cause while the PLO remained steadfastly committed to its
agenda of terror?" Victor does not answer this question directly.
Instead she refers to "certain of her critics" who claimed that behind
Hanan's cultured voice and moderate facade lurked a woman who was
unwilling to compromise on any issue. Victor also quotes Israeli
critics who insist that underneath Hanan's intellectual exterior lurks
a hard-liner, that "despite all the words and rhetoric, she represents
a terrorist organization that has changed neither its covenant nor its
leader, a man identified with countless terrorist attacks." That some
Israelis would say that is hardly surprising. What is completely
lacking is any evidence to substantiate these allegations.
Much of what Victor tries to pass as a biography does not rise above
the level of common gossip. Some of the Palestinians that Victor talked
to, who have nothing worthwhile to say but are nevertheless quoted at
great length in the book, claim that Ashrawi is an unprincipled
self-promoter, with a talent for seducing the media, who puts her love
for her own words above the needs of her people. Curiously, it does not
seem to occur to Victor that success breeds resentment and that success
by a woman in a sphere traditionally dominated by men is liable to
breed even more bitter resentment.
Barbara Victor's biography was published six months before the
appearance of Hanan Ashrawi's personal memoir of the role she played in
the Middle East peace process. Any marginal value that the biography
might have had was thus superseded by Ashrawi's infinitely more subtle,
sophisticated informative and insightful account. The only two mildly
interesting questions prompted by reading Barbara Victor is how a
person of Hanan Ashrawi's stature got mixed up in such a shabby
literary venture and why any publisher should have seen fit to publish
such an irredeemably shoddy book.
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