Hanan Ashrawi

Hanan Daoud Mikhael Ashrawi (Arabic: حنان داوود مخايل عشراوي; born 8 October 1946) is a Palestinian politician, activist, and scholar.

Ashrawi began her career at Birzeit University. Beginning in the 1990s, Ashrawi was a member of the PLO's Leadership Committee, serving as the official spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation during the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991. In 1996, Ashrawi was appointed as the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research of the Palestinian Authority in the second Arafat cabinet. Ashrawi was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council representing Jerusalem in 1996 and was re-elected in 2006. She was elected as member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 2009 and 2018, becoming the body's first female member. She resigned in 2020.

As a civil society activist, she founded the Independent Commission for Human Rights in 1994 and served as its Commissioner-General until 1995. In 1998, she also founded MIFTAH, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, and she continues to serve as head of its board of directors. In 1999, Ashrawi founded the National Coalition for Accountability and Integrity (AMAN).

She is the author of several books, articles, poems and short stories on Palestinian politics, culture and literature. Her book This Side of Peace (Simon & Schuster, 1995) earned worldwide recognition.

Ashrawi was born to Palestinian Christian parents on 8 October 1946 in the city of Nablus, British Mandate of Palestine, now part of the occupied West Bank. Her father, Daoud Mikhail, was a physician and one of the founders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and her mother Wadi'a Ass'ad Mikhail, was an ophthalmic nurse. Hanna Mikhail, a scholar and Fatah revolutionary, was her cousin.

The Ashrawi family lived in Nablus. From there, they moved to Tiberias, where they remained until Israel became a state in 1948. In 1948, the Mikhail family fled from Tiberias to Amman, Jordan as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Initially, her father, Daoud Mikhail, remained behind in what became Israel, but he later rejoined the family in Jordan.

In 1950, her family were able to settle in Ramallah, at the time part of the Jordanian annexed West Bank. Here, she attended the Ramallah Friends Girls School, a Quaker school. She was inspired to activism by her father, who favored a greater role for women in society and was repeatedly imprisoned by the Jordanian authorities for his activities with the Arab Nationalist Socialist Party and the PLO. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in literature in the Department of English at the American University of Beirut (AUB).

While a graduate student in literature at the American University in Beirut, she dated Peter Jennings of ABC News, who was stationed there as ABC's Beirut bureau chief. When the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, Ashrawi, then a 22-year-old student in Lebanon, was declared an absentee by Israel and denied re-entry to the West Bank. For the next six years, Ashrawi traveled and completed her education, gaining a Ph.D. in Medieval and Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia. Ashrawi was finally allowed to re-join her family in 1973 under the family reunification plan.