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WHO IS MARWAN BARGHOUTI, AND WHY IS HE ISRAEL’S MOST IMPORTANT
PRISONER?  
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Jo-Ann Mort
January 30, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Many Palestinians and Israelis consider him the only person who can
lead the way to a two-state solution. Maybe that’s why Netanyahu
won’t release him. _

Marwan Barghouti in 2003, returning to jail after appearing before a
Tel Aviv court, (Credit: Tal Cohen/Agence France-Presse (AFP) // The
New Republic)

 

Marwan Barghouti is Israel’s most celebrated prisoner and, by all
accounts, the person most likely to succeed Palestinian Authority
president and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas whenever the Palestinian
Authority—and the PLO—holds elections. Since 2002, he has been
serving five life sentences plus an add-on of 40 years for his role in
the Second Intifada. Barghouti was convicted of the direct murder of
five Israeli citizens and for planning additional murders as the head
of the Tanzim, the military wing of the nationalist Fatah party (also
Abbas’s party), during the 1990s Second Intifada. Since then, he
has renounced violence [[link removed]].
In 2012, for example, in his court hearing, he spoke in Arabic
[[link removed]], telling the
Palestinian people to fight for “peaceful popular resistance of the
occupation.”

There is faint hope that he could be released soon, as part of a deal
with Hamas for the Israeli hostages. More likely, he will be released
by a post-Netanyahu government if there is any hope for a two-state
solution to the Israel-Palestinian crisis. There is simply no other
leader who can deliver this scenario. Indeed, his prisoner status
gives him extraordinary gravitas among the Palestinian people. He is
also seen as not corrupt, unlike the current leadership of Abbas and
those around him.

Once he is released, it will be difficult for an Israeli government to
defy momentum toward a two-state option. In
a recent _Haaretz_ interview
[///Users/jo-annmort/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/My%20Mac%20(Jo-Ann%E2%80%99s%20MacBook%20Air)/Downloads/0/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-misconception-was-that-the-palestinians-arent-a-people/0000018c-eec3-d0b4-a7ce-ffe38ec80000?utm_source=xxxxxx-general&utm_medium=email],
Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security services,
stressed not only that it was in Israel’s security interest to agree
to a Palestinian state but that Barghouti must be released to
negotiate and lead this state. “Marwan is the only Palestinian
leader who can be elected and lead a united and legitimate Palestinian
leadership toward a path of mutually agreed separation from Israel,”
he told the Israeli newspaper.

Every poll since his imprisonment shows Barghouti to be the favorite
to lead the Palestinian people in a free election. The most recent
survey by Ramallah-based pollster Khalil Shikaki shows the same. When
I met with Shikaki in January, in his Ramallah office, he told me:
“Barghouti remains the most popular by far. We have never seen
Barghouti losing, even during wartime, when Hamas gains ground.” No
other Fatah leader can claim the same.
 
A mural of Marwan Barghouti in a refugee camp in the northern Gaza
Strip on April 16  (Majdi Fathi/Nurphoto  //  The New Republic)
Journalists are not permitted to interview Barghouti in prison. His
wife, Fadwa Barghouti, herself a noted Fatah leader, women’s
activist, and lawyer, hasn’t seen him in 18 months. Once heading a
thriving legal practice, since her husband’s imprisonment she is
active full-time keeping him in the public eye and advocating globally
for his release. Barghouti’s closest political ally is Qadora Fares,
who spent 13 years in Israeli prisons for his activities during the
Intifada. The current commissioner of the Palestinian Commission of
Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs for the Palestinian Authority, he
oversees family needs and rehabilitation of prisoners kept in Israeli
jails and is himself a popular political leader with the grassroots.
Once called “the Fatah Young Guard,” he and Barghouti are now in
their late fifties. Fares is a veteran of earlier peace initiatives,
and today he still stands by all of them. So does Barghouti, Fares
told me when I visited him at his office in Ramallah.

One of the most important documents never to be implemented was
a 2006 “Prisoners’ Letter”
[[link removed]] co-authored by Barghouti on
behalf of Fatah, Hamas, and other Palestinian factions inside the
Israeli prisons, which offered an outline for a two-state solution. At
the time, it made headlines precisely because Barghouti was able to
negotiate it with the Hamas and more radical factions in prison. While
it clearly articulates two states, it is likely more sweeping in other
details than anything the Israeli government could accept, but the
two-state declaration in it is clear. When I asked Fares if it is
still relevant, he said, emphatically, “Yes, yes, yes.”

An earlier document, the Geneva Initiative
[[link removed]] of 2003, negotiated by former Israeli
Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Authority
Minister Yassar Abed Rabo, also outlines a two-state solution roughly
along the 1967 lines, with a refugee-return formula that is more
likely to be accepted by an Israeli government than the prisoners’
document. It has been used by Israel’s shrunken peace camp as an
aspirational model for years.

Fares, who signed Geneva at the time, told me that if Barghouti had
objected to his signing, he would not have done so. Fares thinks that
“Geneva, if you have a serious partner in Israel, will be accepted
by the Palestinian majority, including Hamas.”

This initiative makes the parameters of an agreement clear, according
to Fares, with “solutions—Jerusalem, refugees, borders, economic
cooperation, everything. Some people criticize us because of the
exchange of border swaps.” The compromise is to split Palestine.
“All this land is Palestine,” he told me. “But when we signed
the agreement, it became Palestine and Israel, OK? If you accept the
principle of splitting it, OK ... if we want to check which kind of
solution I find there, if tomorrow I became the representative of
Palestinians, I will sign this.”

Today, there is a completely different opportunity than existed 20 or
so years ago: to include all of the Arab states, most importantly
Saudi Arabia, in an agreement sponsored by the kingdom and called
the Arab Peace Initiative
[[link removed]],
which offers Israel full peace from regional governments with a
Palestinian state. Though it was originally promoted by the Saudis in
2002, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government ignored it, and until recently
Netanyahu (lured into a sort of unreality regarding the Palestinians
thanks to the Trump strategy regarding the Abraham Accords, which gave
Israel agreements with several Gulf States minus Palestinian
recognition) thought that Israel could amend the agreement for peace
with Saudi minus a Palestinian state. (As recently as at the 2023 U.N.
General Assembly plenum, Netanyahu held up a map that included all of
Israel’s neighbors minus a future Palestine.) That was highly
unlikely, to say the least, but October 7 shattered it completely.

According to Fares, who also agrees with this Saudi initiative,
“it’s been accepted by Marwan.” But for Israel to engage, there
will have to be a new government. He adds: “First of all, the
Israelis have to say that they decide to end the occupation, and they
want to cooperate with the Arab world, with the Palestinian people. If
there is an international effort, a real serious effort to react to a
serious political process that will lead to end the occupation and to
build our own state, I think that the behavior of Hamas, the policies
of Hamas, the decision will be different.” That’s because “the
Hamas political leadership understands that the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict has to find a solution one day.” One hopes that Fares’s
optimism could be warranted, though it’s difficult to imagine a
shaken and frightened Israeli public buying it. Regardless, a
political resolution promoting two viable states, with a strong
Palestinian leader—with the overt support of the leading Arab
states—could someday be a positive outcome of the Hamas attacks on
October 7.

That’s also why Fares’s comments about a demilitarized Palestine
were of vital importance. This is something that all Israeli political
factions (and the United States) demand—and, though it’s unstated,
the Arab states will also probably demand it. “If I am at peace with
Israel, with Jordan, with Egypt, with the international community, and
I need the support of the international community to rebuild our state
… to act according to the Palestinian people’s interest, I have to
think about an army?” he quips. “I have to create in Palestine
what is most necessary … we have to build hospitals, schools,
universities—to rehabilitate everything. We have around us here in
the region a lot of strong armies. What have they done? Nothing. So it
should be invested in education.… Let me imagine that I am a
dominant person in the Palestinian leadership. And we are an
independent state. Let us prepare the plan for the first five
years.… For what do I need the army?”

So, returning to the awful moment in which we still find ourselves,
why, I ask, did Hamas attack on October 7? Fares surmises that “it
was because Netanyahu was telling Israel and the world that there is
no Palestinian issue. That there could be a ‘new Middle East’
without finding a solution.” He continued: “The Palestinian
Authority in Ramallah is a weak one … Netanyahu wants to bring it in
as part of his administration indirectly.” As has been widely
documented, Netanyahu thought he could stave off an independent
Palestinian state by, as Fares characterized it, “taming Hamas.”
It’s common knowledge now that Netanyahu had been allowing funding
from Qatar to Hamas’s military and governing arm in Gaza for
years—as a means of defanging Fatah.

Meanwhile, at the war’s start, Barghouti was moved to Ayalon Prison
and placed in solitary confinement for five days. The Israeli
authorities claimed that Barghouti wrote a letter supporting October
7. He and his wife deny this vehemently, as does Fares. This was used
as an excuse to isolate him, where “his cell was dark 24 hours
daily,” Fares said. Barghouti has been given minimal food, his
mattress taken away during the day, and sleep deprived by blasting
music. “They tried to humiliate him when they tied his hands to his
back. They want his head to be close to the ground,” Fares
explained. Partly due to the family hiring one of Israel’s leading
human and civil rights attorneys, he is now back in Rimonim Prison in
the center of Israel.

According to Fares and others quite close to Barghouti with whom I
met, Marwan’s resolve remains. “He’s a true, true believer in
the two-state solution,” someone very close to the family stressed
to me during my recent Ramallah visit. Barghouti has become a bit of a
legend among both the Palestinian people and, increasingly, the
Israeli security establishment. The only way to test the promise of
his leadership will be for a visionary Israeli leader to take the bold
but necessary step to release him.

_[JO-ANN MORT often writes about Israel-Palestine and progressive
issues. She is co-author of Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can
Kibbutzim Survive in Today’s Israel?
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 @ChangeCommNYC [[link removed]]]_

* Marwan Barghouti
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* Palestinian prisoners
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* Palestine
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* Palestinians
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* Occupied Territories
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* West Bank
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* Gaza
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* Israel
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Nabka
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* Oslo Accords
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Hostages
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* Two-state Solution
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* Palestinian State
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