Ambassador Hassan Abdel Rahman

Ambassador Hassan Abdel Rahman is the executive director and general coordinator of the Arab-Latin American Forum and a senior advisor to the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development. He is a former Palestinian National Authority ambassador to the United States and Morocco. Nominated by the Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee in 1982 to serve as the PLO’s representative in Washington, DC, from 1994 through 2005, he represented the PNA in the U.S. capital. Rahman began his academic career at Damascus University in the early 1960s. However, his active participation in the university’s Palestinian student political movement brought him to the attention of the Syrian mukhabarat, eventually forcing him to flee Syria in 1964 for Latin America. Rahman ended up spending one year in Argentina and three years in Brazil before moving on to various Caribbean countries and eventually settling in Puerto Rico. In 1971, Rahman graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico with a bachelor’s in political science and sociology. One year later, he earned a master’s in public administration from the University of Puerto Rico. In 1972, Rahman left for the United States, where he was a doctoral candidate in political science at the City College of New York.  

In 1974, Rahman was hired by the PLO to help prepare for Yasser Arafat’s historic address to the United Nations. On November 22, 1974, when the organization received formal observer status, Rahman became its deputy representative in New York City. Just weeks prior to the announcement, Rahman was the victim of a terrorist attack in his New York City office by three armed members of the Jewish Defense League who entered the building and beat him with pipes and bats, leaving him with permanent scars on his forehead. In 1982, Rahman was appointed to serve as the PLO’s official representative to the United States, a position he held (save for a brief two-year interlude as the organization’s representative in Canada from 1991-92) until the signing of the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements in September 1993. From 1994-2005, he served as chief representative of the PNA to the United States. As a fluent Spanish speaker, he concurrently served as the PNA’s liaison to the governments of Colombia, Chile, and Venezuela.  

In addition to his official representative positions, Rahman was an active participant in the peace process for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving as a senior political advisor to the Palestinian negotiating teams at the Madrid Conference of 1991, Wye River Conference, and Camp David summit of 2000. During his tenure in Washington, DC, Rahman was a frequent guest on television news programs and the college lecture circuit.