Speaking for Those Who Can’t : ‘Peace process’ prompt a voice for Palestinians : THIS SIDE OF PEACE: A Personal Account, <i> By Hanan Ashrawi (Simon & Schuster: $25; 318 pp.)</i>

Hanan Ashrawi was born in Palestine in 1946. By the time she reached her second birthday, her homeland had officially ceased to exist: Three-quarters of it had become Israel while most of the rest had been absorbed by Jordan. For some years it looked as if the indigenous inhabitants might follow their country into oblivion. In 1954 John Foster Dulles told an audience at the American University of Beirut that the Palestinian problem would be solved when the generation of exiles was replaced by its children, who would have no attachment to their ancestral land. Anyone who wants to know why he got it so wrong should read “This Side of Peace.”

As a child, Hanan Ashrawi was told by her father that, although their family was Palestinian, not Jordanian, it was unsafe to mention the fact out loud. When she grew up, she became determined that the word Palestinian should be transformed from one that was “whispered to one that could be uttered in normal tones.” But by then there were new problems. To the rest of the world Palestinians were either terrorists or refugees; to the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, they simply “did not exist.” But even those who admitted their existence did not regard them as a normal people. “With one hand,” writes Ashrawi, “the world covered its eyes, and with the other shoves us aside lest we display our unseemly sores.”

The author’s background has nothing in common with the stereotypes usually allotted her compatriots. Her Greek Orthodox father was a doctor and socialist, while her rather class-conscious mother was a strict Episcopalian who invited guests for afternoon tea every day of the week. Her childhood was divided between the family home in Ramallah near Jerusalem and a winter house in Jericho. She writes evocatively of the gardens and landscapes of both, recalling that the chief scents of her childhood were English lavender and Palestinian jasmine. Later she studied in Beirut and at the University of Virginia before returning to her homeland to become head of the English department at Birzeit University.

Had it not been for the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, Ashrawi would probably have devoted her life to teaching literature and bringing up her children. But the Israeli occupation and what followed--the repeated closures of Birzeit, the brutality of the soldiers, the desecration of much-loved hillsides to build Jewish settlements--changed her, and, in her own words, she became “unmellowed with age.” In a style reminiscent of Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” she describes the hardening of her people: “We had taken on the attributes of our landscape, rugged and rough, sharp-edged with the absence of our diverted and dried-up springs, longing for rain in the uncompromising glare of a brutal sun. Thus our tenderness was scorched, and we substituted uncompromising passion for compassion.”

Ashrawi was transformed from a West Bank academic to the most effective and articulate Palestinian “voice” by Secretary of State James Baker’s decision to start a Middle East “peace process” following the Gulf War in 1991. This book is the account of one participant’s attempting to inject a “human dimension” into that process. It is a tale of hectic schedules and late-night meetings, of frustration and lengthy bargaining, of being rung up in the middle of the night and told to fly immediately to Cairo or Tunis or Paris or Madrid. Eventually several Arab and Israeli delegations met in the Spanish capital in October, 1991. Although the mere fact of their encounter encouraged the world to believe that peace was in sight, Ashrawi was pessimistic. Her delegation returned home afterward, she notes, to “a people whose hopes were raised beyond realistic expectations.”

The author accepts that Baker was more sympathetic to the Palestinians than any other secretary of state but criticizes him for forcing so many concessions from them simply to persuade the Shamir government to participate in the talks. The most crucial step required by the peace process was (and is) an end to the construction and expansion of settlements on the West Bank, for how could anyone have believed the Israelis would give up land they were still building on? But Baker refused to make this a precondition of talks. The peace process itself, he assured the Palestinians, would stop the settlement program. Of course it didn’t (and hasn’t), as the secretary of state soon discovered. Later he admitted that every time he visited the Middle East the Israelis made a display of their disregard by creating a new settlement.

The participants at the Madrid conference were out of power or on the sidelines when the bilateral agreement between the PLO and the Rabin administration was secretly negotiated in Oslo. Again the world thought that peace was close, and again Ashrawi was right to be skeptical. She records Arafat’s absurdly optimistic forecast that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho would quickly lead to a Palestinian state. The Declaration of Principles signed on the White House lawn in September, 1993, merely postponed or ignored the most difficult issues--the settlements, the status of East Jerusalem, the future of the refugees. And it has not--and probably will not--become the basis for a real peace because Arafat’s position is so weak that he cannot extract the requisite concessions from Rabin.

Ashrawi was too disillusioned with the agreement to join the Palestinian National Authority. Despite her criticisms of Arafat, however, she was too loyal to go into outright opposition. Yet at the end of her moving and important book she seems to reveal her true feelings when she travels to South Africa and asks Nelson Mandela to teach her people the secrets of his calm, his dignity and his power. The implication seems clear and is hard to disagree with. Since the time of the British mandate, the Palestinians have been unlucky with their leaders; most of their best people go into academic life or the professions. Elsewhere Ashrawi quotes a common Palestinian saying that theirs is the “most just and compelling case with the most inept and unconvincing presentation.” Certainly Arafat is no Mandela, and equally certainly Rabin is no De Klerk.