Word: hanan
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...Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi has given the Palestinians a new face...
...PERFECT COINCIDENCE OF NEED AND ability: the Palestinians and Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi. That's why it is her face you see, her voice you hear speaking for her people, brilliantly recasting their cause as a cry for human justice. No longer can the world sum up -- and dismiss -- the Palestinians in the portrait of a stubble-bearded man wrapped in a kaffiyeh. This woman looks civilized, unthreatening, someone you'd like to invite to dinner, and she speaks with a compelling eloquence. With exquisite timing or luck or preternatural planning, she was there, this medieval-literature scholar, devoted mother, Christian...
...most interesting thing about Hanan (everyone -- Secretary of State James Baker, the old man in the street who shuffles up to shake her hand, her friends, her enemies -- calls her Hanan, a mark of honor and a measure of her prominence) is that the public person is the private person. The 45 years of her life have woven seamlessly into a single fabric. Her long battle as a woman to find an identity and equality is the same as the struggle for Palestinian identity and equality. She sounds the same at home as she does on a podium: there...
...came to that rather late. Hanan, cushioned in a wealthy, educated, upper-class family, the youngest of five daughters of a respected physician, had a political awareness that was largely theoretical until the day in June 1967 when Israel took over her hometown of Ramallah. She was a student at the American University in Beirut, then a hotbed of Arab nationalism. She joined in eagerly: "I was going to change the world." But on that June day she heard rumors that her house was being shelled, her parents were perhaps dead, her town occupied. As she stood in a long...
...devout Christian who taught her girls to emulate Jesus. But it was her father -- a dedicated doctor who never refused a call, an unusually enlightened man who preached women's equality, a socialist and a founder of the P.L.O. -- who profoundly defined her outlook. "Be daring," he told Hanan, "in the pursuit of the right." He made his children learn English from babyhood. Early on, he gave Hanan a copy of Nehru's diary, and she remembers the impact to this day: "I discovered the power of words...