Hasan Abdul Rahman

Strangers are often taken aback when they get into conversation with Hasan Abdul Rahman at a social function and learn that he runs the Washington office of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Their surprise is understandable. After all, most Americans who follow Middle East affairs, even if only in passing, tend to be aware that U.S. Administrations have for many years been steadfast in their refusal to deal with the PLO. So how can it be?

Quite simply put, it can be because there is nothing illegal about it. Mr. Abdul Rahman's establishment in a downtown building is called, officially, the Palestine Information Office—but it is registered with the Justice Department as an agent of the PLO. "The government may not want to deal with us," says Mr. Abdul Rahman, "but it cannot avoid recognizing the fact that we do exist."

Operating in the Open

Mr. Abdul Rahman would have the option, of course, of operating solely as an office providing information on the Palestinians—which it does—and playing down the PLO link. But he will have none of that. "I don't try to hide who we are," he says. "I always bring this up right away in conversation to avoid misunderstandings. We are the PLO office, and I am the official spokesman for the PLO in the United States." Mr. Abdul Rahman is so upfront about it all that he even has the words "Palestine Liberation Organization" printed prominently on his visiting cards.

Since he took over his present position in August, 1982, he has become a familiar man about town—passing along the PLO's message with an air of easy-going confidence at diplomatic receptions and seminars, on radio and TV talk shows, and at the dinner table of his house in suburban Virginia, where he regularly entertains businessmen, academics, journalists, clergymen and a host of other American friends and acquaintances.

He cannot, of course, have formal meetings with American officials, but says he encounters and chats with many at social events, and a number of them are his friends.

Mr. Abdul Rahman is occasionally the victim of organized heckling when making scheduled appearances for speeches—particularly on college campuses—but he says he seldom meets hostility when giving his views on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to small groups, or to individuals. The most common reaction, he says, is for a person to declare "I did not know that," after being informed of a relevant fact in Arab history.

Mr. Abdul Rahman had plenty of practice explaining the Palestinian point of view before coming to Washington, during the eight years he spent in New York as a member of the PLO observer mission to the United Nations—serving as deputy permanent representative and as head of information activities. He believes there is a much better understanding of the Palestine problem among Americans now than there was when he arrived back in 1974, but not nearly enough.

"The Arabs as a whole, not just the PLO, are a long way from being able to compete with the Jewish lobby in influencing the internal decision-making process in the U.S.," he says. "So what we must do is to use our own capabilities as Arab states—financial, commercial, geopolitical—to exercise leverage in our bargaining with this country. The U.S. should stop taking us for granted."

Such an approach, Mr. Abdul Rahman acknowledges, is not feasible without an Arab consensus, which does not exist at the present time. But he argues that there is no party more interested in having a common Arab position than the PLO is—"we are opposed to the polarization of the Arabs"—and that it is working hard to attain it. And if the PLO fails to get it? "We will just keep working to build one up," he answers.

Future Shock

In his view, Administration officials who believe that PLO chairman Yasser Arafat's willingness to talk with President Mubarak and King Hussein are indications of a readiness by the PLO to support negotiations with Israel based on either the Camp David accords or the "Reagan plan" are very naive.

"We want Egypt to return to the Arab world," he says, "because its absence has been a severe blow to the Arab body politic. But we are absolutely against the Camp David accords, which have nothing whatsoever to do with our plans."

As for Jordan, he says he thinks many U.S. officials "will get a big shock when they discover that the Reagan plan is not the basis for our discussions with that country." He adds: "This plan is dead. It was killed by the Israelis. In any case, the plan had no credibility, because the U.S. couldn't even deliver on its commitment to get Israel to stop building settlements in the West bank."

Mr. Abdul Rahman was born in Ramallah, on the West Bank, and left there in 1964 to study in Amman and in Damascus. After Israel captured the West Bank during the June, 1967 war, he was not allowed to return home, and spent the next few years in Latin America. He is a graduate in political science from Puerto Rico's Catholic University, from which he also got an M.A. in public administration. He later was a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics at City College in New York.