Hanan Ashrawi Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Activism

Belonging to a people who were stateless, you were carried forward into politics; you may not have chosen that. Tell us how an active political life became almost inevitable when you returned to your home town on the West Bank, began teaching, became a dean of faculty, and suddenly wound up protecting your students, as one would expect in any liberal society?

I started my political life, as I said, the moment I was born. You are born, as a Palestinian, with responsibility and a challenge. And being a Palestinian is something that's very controversial, something you can't take for granted; [it] evokes serious, extreme responses.

I started my political activism as a student in Beirut. I started working with refugees and then with the revolution. But it was 1967 that was the turning point, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, which is something my father always told me would happen, but somehow I had felt that was part of his legacy, his past, not mine. And I took it on then, in '67. But when I came back -- I was an activist in Beirut as a student, in the United States as a student even -- and when I went home, after a very difficult journey, I started a legal aid committee to defend students and human rights projects. But at the same time, I was also part and parcel of the student movement. The students and faculty then were one, there was no distinction, and we used to go out and demonstrate together. I was arrested with my students several times. But one of the most painful aspects, and I always said that no academic has ever had that responsibility, was to cradle the head of a dying student. I've had to do that, I've had to protect students. I carried wounded students in my car, went through checkpoints and tear gas and bullets to take them to hospitals. So in a sense, you merge the academic, the political, the personal, the human, the struggle, all together, and you don't fragment yourself as a human being or divide your roles. You're all these things together: you're a dean, a teacher, a mother, maybe even a priest if you will, at the end of the day.

You say that you always perceived yourself as an envoy. "Being and perceiving myself to be of the people and not official, an envoy though not a diplomat, I exercised my option for directness and honesty."

Yes. I felt, not so much as an envoy, but maybe somebody, a voice, a spokesperson; but somebody who would embody, who would express her people's fullness of experience, history, character, pain, aspirations, everything simultaneously without all the distortions of diplomatic talk and political doublespeak, but directly and honestly. To do them justice, one had to be part of them, one had to share their pain, their sorrow, their struggle, and also share their aspirations. I never felt that I came from outside the people, but rather, as being one of the people, had to convey in an honest and candid manner.

One of the things I always like to ask distinguished visitors like you who have been part of a political struggle is, what enabled you to survive? As I read your memoir I read two things, and you can tell me more. One is your family and the other was amanah, the trust. Tell us about those two things. Were they key to your surviving, persevering?

There are many other factors; yes, these two were the key. My family in terms of my upbringing but also my family in terms of my husband and daughters. To me, they're a major source of strength and love, unquestioning, unconditional, unlimited, and that is a source of strength.

Also my commitment, my commitment to the human dimension of the Palestinians through the history but also the future, to the pain that Palestinians have suffered through no fault of their own. Amanah is a trust, you are given something in trust; that is an amanah. But it also goes beyond that to mean that you will do so with integrity, that you will do so with honesty, that you will carry out what you've been entrusted with. I've always felt I have been entrusted to present, I called it a personal account and not a "memoir," because I don't like it to be a memoir, by the way. It's a personal account, because I believe that the collective is always seen through the individual narrative. And there were so many individual narratives, much more moving, much more tragic maybe, or even dramatic than mine. But I had to get to the reality of the Palestinian experience, one had to use the gateway of the personal narrative. And to do that one had to be honest, carry the amanah of the people through being honest with one's self in one's own articulation of the story.

And is not your effort for frankness, honesty, finding a voice, always coming up with a confrontation with the configuration of power?

Always.

How do you move forward in the face of that?

You have to continue with dedication, I think; maybe obsessive zeal. I think in a sense you create an alternative and more authentic power. I think the power of honesty, of principles and values is much more powerful than political power, so to speak, and personal power and self interest. Because I had no personal agenda and because I felt I was empowered by the trust I had, I wasn't going to be intimidated or deflected. I could speak up and speak up. I could stand up to all sorts of traditional power, whether it is in the hands of an Israeli soldier with a gun, or an assassin with a machine gun, or even courts, military courts under the occupation, or even with my own people and systems of power that deal with authority and people who view themselves as being above the law. Because it's not a personal agenda, it's a national agenda that finds an articulation through a personal experience and vindicates the collective human experience. That gave me strength, drive, confidence. And I felt I wasn't alone or vulnerable.

What distinctive role have women played in the Palestinian movement? You emphasize that a lot, your story is that story.

Yes, I wish it could be the story of my gender and the movement of my nation, my race. No; I am one of the women and there are many women. Historically, of course, the Palestinian women's movement is an old movement; it started in the twenties. But the gender-sensitive agenda started in the seventies, because that's when we decided to organize and start working on issues of bringing women's perceptions to politics, to social organization, to resistance, because we were part of the resistance and, later on, part of the Intifada under occupation. How to create appropriate alternative or authentic institutional structures, how to help empower women, how to benefit from the experience of others --Palestinian women are tremendously strong, it's amazing. Maybe that's true of all patriarchal societies and male-dominated societies, because the women have a big struggle. The battle for excellence, for credentials, has to be fought every day. You have to validate yourself as a woman wherever you are every day, and you don't have it easy because -- not me personally, because I was privileged -- but women have to stand up to tremendous discriminatory practices, whether inherited traditions, whether imposed norms, male perceptions of power and control. The women always have to go through that and cannot take any privilege for granted.

That's why, when I was Minister of Higher Education, for example, women students did much better than men. The top hundred percent would be ninety percent women. The top ten students, or the top fifty or the top hundred would always be women because they had the harder struggle. Because they had a harder life, but also because women have a sense of solidarity and we don't work alone. We work within a sort of group collective network. We try to bring to the agenda sensitivity, a women's approach, a language. And daring, because women have been at the forefront for resistance, have taken risks, have stood up to traditional norms or expressions of power. Women were in demonstrations. I wrote a poem called Women and Things which describes the power of women in different ways, and a series of short stories called Women on the Hilltop. I think these should tell you how I feel, that women, no matter where they come from, not only bring with them a sort of elemental or biological or natural force for life, but also bring a strength and a willingness to take risks and to confront and to stand up with pride, which I have seen, maybe because they don't look at themselves through their own self-interest but through the interest of the people as a whole, the cause, the issues, rather than personalities.

Next page: The Peace Process

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