THE PLO's former globe trotting spokeswoman, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, launched a night's campaigning in the villages of Jerusalem district yesterday with a meeting in a freezing, half built football club high on a hill east of the city.
About 40 villagers, all men, several wearing the traditional Palestinian head dress, braved wind and rain to squeeze into the small hall and assemble in three ranks of school desks and assorted chairs. They listened to "Doctora" Ashrawi while a television team recorded her every word and gesture.
Elegant in a flowing camel coat with a paisley shawl round her shoulders, Dr Ashrawi sat at the front of the room beneath two colourful posters of Dutch footballers and behind a table upon which stood a model of Jerusalem's splendid, golden domed Mosque of Omar.
She was introduced by one of the village elders, who spoke of her family, of her connections with Jerusalem, her birth place, Ramallah, her dwelling place, and the northern town of Nablus, from which her husband's family comes.
He mentioned her education, her appointment as Professor of English at Bir Zeit University and her role as a spokeswoman for the Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, and the peace process.
"Doctora Hanan" opened with a joke. She asked the voters to permit her to sit rather than stand. "After all, I am not teaching a class tonight."
Then she launched a stiff defence of her support for - and role in - a peace process the majority of Palestinians deem deeply unsatisfactory. In her husky voice, she spoke to these damp and rumpled villagers of how the Intifada had given the Palestinians the strength to choose "the political path" to reach peace.
Then she criticised the way peace has been negotiated and implemented, without mentioning the name of the PLO chairman, Mr Yasser Arafat, and his colleagues. She ended her address with the mantra adopted by all candidates: "Our aim is an independent, democratic state with Jerusalem as its capital."
The villagers pressed her with intelligent questions. To these men she was fair game, a candidate like any other, an "honorary in a man's world, a Christian appealing to Muslims for their votes".
But she also had some items in her political platform that the conservative villagers did not like equal rights for women being the most controversial.
Dr Ashrawi and the other 26 women candidates, swamped by 652 men, are, as a group, the only real progressives running in the race. Most of the men are village elders, local businessmen or loyalists belonging to Mr Arafat's Fatah faction. They are status quo figures. The women seek change, both social and political, and they are not afraid to appeal to voters of both sexes who are wary of the peace process.
But this election is in itself an instrument of change. If the "Doctora" and her sisters do not secure places in the 88 seat Palestinian Council in this, the first Palestinian election, they are certain to do so in the second or third. The winds of change are blowing, strong and blustery.