Voice Of Her People: HANAN MIKHAIL-ASHWAW

THE 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 and woman, exactly when the Palestinians were ready to put on a new face.

The bravura performance in Madrid at the opening of the Arab-Israeli peace talks seven months ago that catapulted her to world attention surprised no one who knew her. "The person was formed," says Albert Agazerian, a colleague at Bir Zeit University. "It just required the moment to bring it on center stage." She says, "I know I can make a difference."

Such self-confidence. She is today the best known of the New Palestinians, the most prominent woman in the Arab world, and she is very comfortable with that. This is not a lady you can shake. Only the way she chain-smokes Salem Lights betrays the pressure she is under.

The 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 is no difference between the parent talking to her child, the spokeswoman jousting with the press, the Palestinian arguing for the cause. She has a rare ability to translate her people's longings into homely domestic terms, to turn an abstract dissertation on rights into a mother's plea for her children. That is real; that is how she sees it. "I do it," she says flatly, "for my daughters."

Yes, she turns on for the camera, no doubt about it. But this is no act, only the projection of a lifetime's commitment to alleviating the pain that history has imposed on her people. The intensity in her may be veiled by no- nonsense tones and a vocabulary of moderation, but it is always there. "I feel a very strong need to convey the human quality, the real image of our people, that never came through before," she says. "I am never far away from Palestinian reality."