With his arms cuffed and raised, Marwan Barghouti is painted on the wall at the Qalandia checkpoint towards Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian newspapers published his statements from prison. Opinion polls have shown for years that he is the most popular Palestinian leader.
Barghouti, from the Fatah party, has been in prison for 22 years. According to Israel, he was involved in terrorist acts. In early February, Hamas called for his release during prisoner swap negotiations with Israel. The movement refused to accept a temporary ceasefire until Barghouti is free.
Barghouti is not only a subject in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas, but also plays an important role in discussions about the future of Palestine after the Gaza war. Out polls in the West Bank and Gaza in December, it appears that Barghouti would win in elections against both current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Despite the declining popularity of the Fatah party of the much-unloved, 88-year-old Abbas — 90% want him to resign — Barghouti is unprecedentedly popular. For many Palestinians, he represents the hope for a united national leadership of an independent Palestinian state.
Born in 1959 in the West Bank village of Kobar, Barghouti became a member of Fatah at the age of fifteen. He was imprisoned for five years in 1978 because of his involvement in what Israel considered an illegal group. From prison he completed high school and learned Hebrew. After his release, he studied at the Palestinian Birzeit University, where he met his future wife Fadwa, a lawyer and women’s rights activist who campaigned internationally for his release.
In 1987, a large-scale uprising broke out against the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, the First Intifada. Due to his political activism, Barghouti was exiled to Jordan. He was only able to return in 1994, after the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. Barghouti was in favor of the peace negotiations and maintained contact with Israeli politicians and peace activists.
As a politician, he spoke out about corruption within the Yasser Arafat-led Palestinian Authority and human rights violations by the security services. In the movie Tomorrow’s Freedomabout Barghouti’s life, shows him laughing as he interrupts a debate in parliament to collect signatures for a petition, to the annoyance of some members.
“Throughout his entire political career he fought against corruption. He saw it as another face of the Israeli occupation,” said his son Arab Barghouti (33) by telephone from Ramallah.
Barghouti supported the two-state solution, but slowly lost confidence in Israel as a partner for peace. Partly due to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he preferred armed resistance to the occupation. “Twenty years of negotiations (…) have only led to the growth of settlements, the entrenchment of the occupation, the Judaization of Jerusalem, and an increase in detentions,” Barghouti said in a 2014 interview with the Journal of Palestine Studies.
During the Second Intifada from 2000, he led Fatah’s armed branch, Tanzim, and coordinated attacks on military targets. The Israeli security services considered him as a leader of a terrorist organization, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a coalition of Palestinian militias affiliated with Fatah. They say they have evidence that Barghouti directed attacks on civilians in Tel Aviv.
Shortly after surviving an Israeli assassination attempt, he was tracked down and captured in his hideout in Ramallah in 2002. Ultimately, Israel chose to let him live; rather a living, influential prisoner than a martyr.
He was accused of directing attacks on a total of 26 Israelis. There was no trial, because Barghouti refused to recognize the Israeli court out of opposition to the unequal legal system under the occupation. Ultimately, he was sentenced to five life sentences plus forty years for murder, attempted murder and involvement in a terrorist organization. Barghouti denies the accusations. “No one can justify the killing of civilians, women and children anywhere in the world, they must be left out. That should be very clear, in Palestine or in Israel,” he said in one interview from prison in 2006.
Barghouti, who completed a dissertation in political science in prison, emphasizes the importance of education. He taught his fellow prisoners because he believed that they needed to obtain academic degrees to become competent leaders.
In prison he built ties with imprisoned members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian movements. “Hamas is part of the Palestinian people,” he said in the 2006 interview, encouraging their participation in the elections.
Hamas won those elections – the last summit to date. The movement took control of the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in 2007 after a violent battle with Fatah. Hamas had become popular partly because it opposed the PLO and later the Palestinian Authority, which had alienated themselves from the people and had aligned themselves with the occupying forces.
In light of this historical relationship, it is remarkable that Hamas is now calling for Barghouti’s release. However, according to Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, Hamas knows that without Fatah and the PLO they have no future in Gaza, and vice versa. “Not everyone within Hamas will want him released,” Kuttab said by telephone from the Jordanian capital Amman. “Barghouti will allow them to share power, but not allow them to be in control.”
It is not only Hamas that currently wants Barghouti released. That is also what some representatives of the Israeli security apparatus want. Recently A former leader of the Israeli security services, Ami Ayalon, spoke out in favor of the release of Bar-ghouti, an “essential step” towards negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Son Arab Barghouti is proud that his father is nicknamed the “Palestinian Mandela”. “Mandela’s statement ‘our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinian people’ is famous in Palestine.” According to Arab, Mandela has been too often represented as someone who only supported peaceful resistance. “Every people under occupation has the right to resist, and this was also the way for Mandela.”
The question is whether Barghouti’s high expectations – among both Palestinians and some Israelis – are realistic. He no longer participates in daily politics and mainly represents hopes and ambitions. For Palestinians, he represents the desire for new leadership and national liberation, and for Israel, a prisoner who could potentially be used strategically under the guise of national security.
Whether he is released ultimately depends on Israel. But it remains to be seen whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition, which strongly opposes a Palestinian state and associates Barghouti with terrorism, will agree to his release. In addition, a prisoner swap in 2011 freed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who is now seen as the mastermind behind Hamas’s terrorist act last October 7.
During the previous prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, Barghouti was not included on ‘the list’. His wife Fadwa believes that not enough effort was made at the time by either Hamas or Fatah. Barghouti’s son Arab is optimistic that this time it will work: “The situation is very different now, and many more Israelis are being detained.”
Barghouti walks a middle path between Hamas and the unpopular Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians see as complicit in the occupation. The main reason why so many Palestinians trust Barghouti, unlike President Mahmoud Abbas, is that he is not corrupt, Kuttab believes. “If Abbas compromises, he will be seen as a traitor. But if Barghouti does this, people will accept it.”
The fact that, unlike Abbas and former leader Yasser Arafat, he was born and raised in the West Bank and spent much of his life in captivity also contributes to his popularity.
In addition, he believes in the right to resist the occupation, but only if legitimate targets, such as soldiers, are attacked, according to Kuttab. “He is not a pacifist, but neither is he a terrorist.” According to him, Barghouti will be able to “communicate with Israelis like no one has done before.” He speaks fluent Hebrew and knows Israel well.
Moreover, he is seen as a connector between the various Palestinian movements, with whom he became familiar in captivity. “Barghouti is respected by the Palestinian people, but also by Hamas and Islamic Jihad,” says Kuttab.
Shortly after the deeply divisive 2006 elections won by Hamas, he initiated the Palestinian Prisoner’s Document, an agreement between imprisoned leaders of five Palestinian movements. The purpose of the document was to underline the Palestinian right to resistance and create a national unity government. “My father still believes that a political partnership is needed,” says his son Arab about the document.
According to Kuttab, Barghouti convinced members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to accept the two-state solution because the document envisioned an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital — and thus the implicit recognition of Israel.
After a possible release, Barghouti’s main objective will be to bridge the internal divisions within the Fatah party and the PLO, Kuttab thinks, and then bring Hamas and Islamic Jihad ‘to the table’. But we are not there yet. Barghouti is in solitary confinement in the Israeli prison in Ramla. Arab Barghouti says his father’s situation has deteriorated sharply since October 7. He has been moved from prison several times, has received less food and the number of visits from his lawyer has been limited.
Arab himself must submit an application to the Red Cross to obtain permission from the Israeli authorities for a family visit – but he has been waiting for that for eighteen months.
From his cell, Marwan Barghouti himself made the Mandela comparison during the interview in 2006: “You know what happened with Mandela, in the end they started negotiating with him.”