If a new state of Palestine ever springs from what is now Israeli occupied territory, Dr. Mohammad Hassan Said of Ephrata, Wash. will have a remarkable story to tell his grandchildren.  

Said found himself in the midst of the first historic steps leading to the possible birth of a nation.  By invitation of Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, Said, a U.S. citizen who says he’s Palestinian by birth and spirit, attended the special conference of the U.N. General Assembly in Geneva earlier this month.  Said was an official member-observer with the PLO delegation.  

Top associates of Arafat in the United States said in recent interviews that Said conferred with PLO leaders in Geneva, where they discussed the commencement of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PLO.  

A Dec. 14 news conference Arafat held in Geneva will be remembered as the first time the PLO ever formally endorsed Israel’s right to exist in peace and renounced all forms of terrorism as means to securing a homeland.  In response, the United States dropped a decades-long policy of shunning the PLO, and the Reagan administration called for talks with Palestinian leaders.  How did an Ephrata physician wind up in the middle of one of the decade’s landmark historical events in U.S.-Middle East policymaking?  Said is related by marriage to a top leader of Al Fatah, the PLO’s core organization.

Said also is well-known to Arafat’s brother, Dr. Fathi Arafat, head of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, an emergency medical organization, PLO leaders said.   Fathi Arafat and Said worked closely at Madrid University in Spain when Said was completing a doctoral thesis in the early 1970s.  Said’s attendance at a PLO conference in Algiers in mid November, and at the U.N. session, was confirmed in interviews with Riyad Mansour, chief of the PLO’s U.S. mission in New York City, and Clovis Maksoud, ambassador to the U.N. for the League of Arab States.  The Algiers conference was a gathering of top PLO leaders, at which a declaration of Palestinian independence was forged.  There, Arafat made the first tentative steps toward easing tensions with Israel and opening relations with the United States.

"My people are suffering," Said told the P-I.  "I would like them to have dignity, a flag, a passport.  They were not as lucky as me to emigrate to this great country. I just wanted to help my people."   Mansour, who also was in Geneva, said of the Ephrata doctor, "We appreciate the contribution of every individual, every country, in paving the way toward the convening of an international peace conference."   Maksour says Said was in Geneva "as a sincere American friend of the PLO delegation."   Said, 50, has been a U.S. citizen since 1980 and moved in 1982 to Ephrata, where he runs a clinic.   Long an activist for Palestinian concerns, Said helped found the Moslem Student Organization in Europe in the 1960s.