Anees Barghouti, Ambassador of Palestine in Washington

By Andrew I. Killgore

The sign on Anees Barghouti's office door in Washington, DC reads "League of Arab States, Palestine Affairs Center." As director of that office since June 1992, Barghouti, a Palestinian American, is the equivalent of the ambassador of Palestine to the United States. His country is not officially recognized by the United States, but he personally is accorded ambassadorial status by the majority of foreign ambassadors in Washington.

The Palestine Affairs Center, in an earlier incarnation as the Palestine Information Office (PIO) in Washington, was closed in 1988 by the Department of State. The instigator of the election-year closure order, acceded to by the outgoing Reagan administration, was the hyperactive American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which lobbies for Israel in Washington, DC. AIPAC's tactic was to raise the threat of a shift away from the Republican ticket of Jewish donors and voters who had supported Ronald Reagan in order to induce the administration to close both the PIO office in Washington and the Palestine Observer Mission at the United Nations in New York.

The latter, however, had been accorded official observer status by formal United Nations action. The campaign to close the Observer Mission, which was the defacto representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the U.N., failed when an American court ruled that the treaty between the United States and the United Nations establishing the U.N. on American soil precluded the U.S. from closing the mission.

Although that now is a closed chapter in the troubled history of U.S.-PLO relations, it probably is no coincidence that Mr. Barghouti, his wife, Somaia, their three daughters, Rola (25), Dina (24) and Riham (21), and, indeed, all of the senior staff of the Palestine Affairs Center, are American citizens, not subject to the kind of personal harassment an unfriendly individual in the U.S. government might otherwise be able to orchestrate.

The Palestine Affairs Center speaks in the United States for a total Palestinian population now approaching six million. Half are scattered around the world, including over 200,000 in the United States in exile from their ancient homeland. The other half is still living there, living in Israel (900,000), in the Israeli-occupied West Bank (1.2 million), and in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip (750,000).

Those under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza are accorded no rights whatever by Israel—not even the right to remain in the land of their birth. This was demonstrated dramatically by Israel's expulsion last Dec. 17, without any semblance of due process, of 415 Palestinians from the occupied territories to a frozen hillside just outside Israel's self-proclaimed "security zone" in Lebanon.

The 900,000 Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel itself, comprising nearly 20 percent of Israel's population, also are denied many of the normal rights of citizens in democratic nations because, as Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel, they lack "Jewish nationality." Although born in Israel, because they are not Jews they do not enjoy many of the rights and privileges bestowed upon their Jewish fellow citizens. Thus the Palestinians in Israel, the occupied territories, and, to a lesser extent, in the rest of the world, have become a modern equivalent of the Biblical Job, who suffered so many undeserved afflictions, multiplied by 6 million.

Anees Barghouti comes from a large land-owning family. They have been far more fortunate than many of their compatriots, who lost everything when, in 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were terrorized into fleeing their homes and, in 1967, another 200,000 were hustled out of their country during and after Israel's seizure of the West Bank.

Most members of the Barghouti family were able to remain on their lands, centering on the town of Bir Ghassaneh in the Jerusalem District of the West Bank, where Anees Barghouti was born in 1935. Most of these properties, to date, have not been seized by the Israeli government for the use of Israeli "settlers" in the occupied territories.

Caught in an Historical Collision

Nevertheless, like all Palestinians wherever they are, Center Director Barghouti has been caught up in the 20th century's ongoing collision between Jewish and Palestinian nationalisms. For 46 years of this clash the U.S. has played not only a major role but, the Palestinians say, an unbalanced and misguided one. It is the Center's job to explain to Americans the increasingly negative consequences of the traditional American partisanship toward Israel. This began in 1947, when the United States railroaded through the United Nations a resolution giving more than half of Palestine to the one-third of its inhabitants who were Jewish. It continued through the years with tens of billions of dollars in U.S. aid. This virtually unlimited outpouring of American largesse has enabled Israel to usurp all of the lands of the former British Mandate of Palestine, to exile half of the Palestinians from their homeland, and to deny even the most elementary rights to those under Israeli military control.

There are other factors, however, that facilitate the work of the Palestine Affairs Center. Most Americans who have lived and worked in the Middle East, whether as diplomats, Christian missionaries, petroleum engineers or military advisers, understand and sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians. Similarly, Arab Americans, perhaps three million of them from more than 20 Arab countries, are honored to help.

Nor has the moral support of such pro-Palestinian Americans gone unreciprocated by the Palestinians. Despite the damage to their campaign for an independent state done by many official U.S. policies, American education at all levels has been overwhelmingly favored by Palestinians in a position to avail themselves of it.

Anees Barghouti is a good example. He earned his high school diploma at the Friends (American Quaker) Boys School in Ramallah, a West Bank city now under Israeli occupation; his B.S. degree from the American Jesuit-operated Al-Hikma University in Baghdad, and his Master's degree from Clark University in Massachusetts. He had to break off his Ph.D. studies at Boston College in 1967 after Israel seized the West Bank and his family no longer was able to pay his U.S. tuition.

Broke and unemployed, the young Palestinian, on the advice of a friend, drove an ancient automobile to Steubenville, Ohio, where he landed a job as chief planner of the Jefferson County Regional Planning Commission. Two years later, in 1969, he returned to the Middle East for a stay of seven years. He worked first at the Arab Bank in Amman, and then as director of marketing and planning for Royal Jordanian Airlines. Still later he became an economic researcher for the Arab League in Cairo.

Like most American families with three children to educate, the Barghoutis have felt the financial strain. Mrs. Barghouti has continued to work in a responsible position at the Palestine Observer Mission in New York since her husband's assignment to Washington. Like many American couples, the Barghoutis have managed to remain a two-income family, but at the cost of working in different cities.

Virtue Becomes Necessity

Anees Barghouti is a friendly, outgoing man devoid of the pretensions that sometimes characterize senior diplomats in prestigious Washington positions. As an economist by training, he is systematic and careful with money, both on an official and personal level. What was once a virtue has become a stark necessity for Palestinian diplomats. Funds available to the Palestinian national movement have been seriously curtailed in the aftermath of the Gulf war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes and jobs not only in Kuwait, but also in other parts of the Palestinian diaspora. Their contributions, along with some subsidies to the PLO from oil-producing countries in the Gulf, were curtailed or stopped.

As a man born just one year before the Palestinian Revolt of 1936, which signaled the outright break between his country's long-term Arab residents and the incoming European Zionists, the Palestine Affairs Center director has developed a philosophical attitude over a lifetime spent as a participant in an unending series of turbulent events. He is calm and undeterred in the face of any and all personal and professional difficulties. Those who confuse his patience with resignation, however, will find they are mistaken. Like the rest of the Palestinian six million, and their millions of supporters around the globe, Anees Barghouti has dedicated his life, and instilled his children with that same dedication, to the cause of the country he represents in the United States, and Palestine's unremitting struggle for justice in the Middle East.

Andrew l. Killgore, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.