Marwan Barghouti
Marwan Barghouti's name re-emerged in late 2023, with a number of countries seeking to renew the Palestinian Authority, in light of the impact of the Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip, and the ongoing debate about the future vision of the Authority and its relationship with the Strip, as well as the ongoing research regarding who will succeed Mahmoud Abbas. In addition, a number of opinion polls, which were conducted prior to the Palestinian legislative elections, scheduled for the year 2021, before they were canceled in the same year, revealed that Barghouti enjoyed wide popularity.
The Palestinian Center for Political Research and Opinion Polls said that Barghouti emerged as the preferred candidate in presidential elections in the West Bank, according to a poll conducted in March 2021, in which the head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh , received 14% of voting intentions, and President Mahmoud Abbas received 9%, while Barghouti received the largest percentage, which was 22%.
Anatolia reported in December 2023 that Palestinian public opinion polls indicate that Marwan Barghouti (64 years old), who has been detained since 2002 and sentenced to 5 life sentences and 40 years in prison, is the most popular among Fatah leaders to head the Palestinian Authority after President Mahmoud Abbas. Yedioth Ahronoth also considered that the release of Marwan Barghouti "is capable of changing the face of the Palestinian Authority."
The most popular contender among Palestinians to succeed Yasser Arafat was Marwan Barghouti. Palestinian activist leader Marwan Barghouti is a leader of the militant Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which claimed responsibility for suicide attacks against Israel. Barghouti denounced Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Barghouti, a Palestinian politician, was jailed on charges of leading militia movements Fatah's Tanzim and al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. Barghouti is in jail for directing the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and having a hand in the killing of at least 26 Israelis. He was in an Israeli jail serving five consecutive life sentences for masterminding suicide bombings in Israel. Before his arrest in 2002, he was a major figure in the intifada, and his conviction is seen to have only bolstered his popularity among Palestinians.
Despite Barghouti's arrest and sentencing, he had a prominent presence on the Palestinian scene from behind the prison walls, as he was the one who prepared the formula for the Palestinian factions' agreement in 2003 to stop military operations for three months, in exchange for the occupation stopping the assassinations and raids it carried out, and this step was the beginning of For his continuous presence from inside his prison.
The "Intifada elite" -- or new guard -- was born and raised in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and has had a very different life history than its Oslo elders. Members of this group tend to be economically poorer but better educated, and know Israel much more intimately than do those old leaders coming back from exile. Some, like Marwan Barghouti, speak excellent Hebrew.
Marwan Hasib Barghouti was born in the town of Kobar in the Ramallah and Al-Bireh Governorate on June 6, 1959. He is married and has three sons and a daughter. He studied basic stage in the town of Cooper, obtained high school in the occupation prisons, and obtained a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from the Faculty of Arts at Birzeit University in 1994, a master’s degree in international relations from the same university in 1998, and a doctorate degree in political science from the Research Institute. Studies affiliated with the League of Arab States in 2010 (during his detention in the occupation prisons). He worked as a lecturer at Al-Quds University/Abu Dis.
Barghouti became involved in the national struggle at an early stage in his life, and had leftist tendencies, but he joined the Fatah movement inside the occupation prisons in 1978, and became one of the most important leaders of the student youth movement in the West Bank, and was elected president of the Student Council at Birzeit University between the years (1983- 1985), and he worked alongside the Fatah leader Khalil Al-Wazir “Abu Jihad”, where he was appointed coordinator of mobilization and organization affairs in the occupied territories, then he became a leading member in the western sector, and was elected a member of the Revolutionary Council of the Fatah movement in 1989, and a member of the Supreme Committee for the Intifada of the PLO. . He returned to Palestine in 1994, and was chosen as deputy to Faisal Al-Husseini and secretary of the Fatah movement. He was also elected as a member of the Legislative Council for the Fatah movement in the 1996 elections, served as a member of the legal and political committees, and chaired the first French-Palestinian parliamentary friendship association.
Barghouti was imprisoned by Israel in the late 1970s for plotting attacks and was later deported. He returned to the West Bank in 1994, after Israel and the PLO reached an accord, and got elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council. But when peacemaking broke down, he was among the first Palestinians to call for a new uprising. Barghouti has said he considers any Israeli in the West Bank and Gaza a legitimate target for attack. In August 2001, Barghouti said Palestinians must use violence. He has also been critical of the Palestinian effort to make peace with Israel. In an often quoted statement, Marwan once said: "We tried seven years of intifada without negotiations, and then seven years of negotiations without intifada; perhaps it is time to try both simultaneously."
Barghouti was one of the leaders of the Second Intifada. He became one of the leaders of the prisoner movement. He participated in its struggle against the Prison Service administration. He was the initiator of drafting the Prisoners’ Document for National Reconciliation with a group of his fellow prisoners in 2006. He was re-elected during his detention in the occupation prisons as a member of the Legislative Council on a list. Fatah movement in the 2006 elections, and he was elected a member of the Fatah Movement’s Central Committee at its seventh conference in 2009.
Barghouti suffered during his struggle; The occupation arrested him for the first time in 1978, then continued his arrests, imposed house arrest on him in 1985, pursued him and deported him to Jordan in May 1987, then pursued him after the outbreak of the second intifada, tried to assassinate him in August 2001, and arrested him again on April 15.
It should be noted that the prisoner Marwan Barghouti has been detained since April 15, 2002. He is considered the first Palestinian MP and the first member of the Central Committee of the “Fatah” movement. The Israeli authorities arrest him and sentence him to five life sentences and 40 years in prison. Barghouti enjoys great symbolism in all Palestinian circles, like all prisoners with high sentences, but what distinguishes him is that he comes from the Palestinian political level and not just the field, as he was serving as Secretary-General of the Fatah movement in the West Bank when he was arrested.
The reference to Mandela is repeated, in his speeches in which he links the struggle against apartheid with the Palestinian cause, and in the scenes of repeated Palestinian demonstrations, the statue of Nelson Mandela overlooking the demonstrators in the square that bears his name in the city of Ramallah. The reference to Mandela, as justified by the conditions of the long imprisonment and the backgrounds of the two struggles, is also capable of arousing positive reactions in a Western viewer who is sufficiently familiar with that reference. In optimism on the same South African scale, through rhetorical and visual mechanisms, a message that is repeated throughout, which is that Barghouti outside prison is the most capable of uniting Palestinian ranks, and he is the partner and negotiator who can be trusted and relied upon in order to achieve peace with the Israelis.
This depiction is an incomplete biography of Barghouti, as his responsibility for the armed resistance during the uprising is minimized in favor of his image as a man of peace. As for the intensification of the Palestinian struggle, peacefully and violently, in his person, just as it gave him a deserved heroic shine, it also led to the personalization of this struggle, and an unintended sense of the heroism of the Palestinian masses, their divisions, and their succession. After more than two decades of Barghouti’s imprisonment, a lot has happened to the Palestinian arena.
Barghouti believes in the two-state solution as a basis for achieving comprehensive peace between the Palestinian people and the occupying state. He sees armed resistance as a necessary option to confront the occupation in parallel with the option of negotiations. He calls for achieving national reconciliation on the basis of a struggle program that achieves an independent Palestinian state on the June 4 borders with Jerusalem as its capital and the return of Palestinian refugees.
Barghouti published a number of books, including: French-Palestinian Relations 1967-1997 (1999), Resisting Arrest (with Abdel Nasser Issa and Ahed Abu Gholma, 2010), and A Thousand Days in a Solitary Isolation Cell (2011), and he has a collection of studies and research that he published in Specialized Palestinian and Arab magazines.
Barghouti is a street politician who is able to inspire the masses of his people, listen to them, and live their struggle on the ground daily. He led the ranks in the Palestinian protests, being beaten and arrested time after time. Barghouti's leadership role in the second intifada ended with his trial in Israel, which led to his being punished with five life sentences. Barghouti organizes and led a dignity strike inside the prisons for 43 days and succeeded in extracting the rights of the Palestinian prisoners.
The Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade emerged as a mature organization on 12 October 2000, during a paramilitary parade in Nablus, Palestinian Territories. The brigades were "a loose coalition of irregulars, hurriedly trained in basic individual combat and equipped with privately owned small arms. Operatives wore plainclothes and limited their activities to roadside shootings. The growth phase included efforts to create a formal military organization, establish infrastructure, acquire arms, develop tactical leadership, and attract recruits to their secular version of the Hamas suicide squads. Upon maturity, a cell-based structure emerged under the senior command of Marwan Barghouti.
Marwan Barghouti is nicknamed “Abu al-Qassam.” In mid-January 2002, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon broke the most prominent ceasefire announced by the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in the Second Intifada, and gave the green light to assassinate Raed Al-Karmi, a leader in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and one of its most prominent founders, which ignited the situation in Palestine. .
At that time, Fatah Movement Secretary Marwan Barghouti stated on Al Jazeera that “this crime will push our people to respond more than Sharon’s government imagines.” A few hours after Al-Karmi’s assassination, the Al-Aqsa Brigades (the military wing of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement Fatah) killed an Israeli soldier and wounded two near Nablus, and under the slogan “We will take revenge,” it threatened more revenge, so it carried out a series of bombings and shooting operations against Israel, which resulted in Dozens were killed and hundreds injured.
Two days after the assassination, Barghouti sent a message to Sharon through an article he wrote in the American newspaper The Washington Post: “You want safety? You must end the occupation.” He told the Israelis, “The assassinations carried out by Sharon’s government will not bring you safety.” But he was careful to point out that “A Palestinian man who advocates peace.”
The Palestinian response to the Israeli policy of assassinations continued for many months, and bombings were successive in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and at the Israeli military checkpoints. The Al-Aqsa Brigades at that time rivaled Al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of the Hamas movement) in the quality of their operations, even though it had only been formed a year ago, and clashes returned to the streets. Palestinian cities, Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield and invaded the West Bank.
In mid-April 2002, Israeli newspapers were filled with pictures of the Secretary-General of the Fatah movement with the news of his arrest, while Israeli armored vehicles were moving into Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, and the rest of the West Bank cities.
In late August 2002, he was sentenced to five life imprisonment and forty years, isolated in solitary confinement, and his son Qassam was arrested. In 2003, the occupation transferred him to solitary confinement, in Ramla Prison, next to him was the prisoner Ahmed Barghouti, nicknamed “The Frenchman,” the leader of the Al-Aqsa Brigades, who had been detained since 2002 and sentenced to 13 life sentences and 50 years. And his neighbor was Abdullah Barghouti, one of the Hamas leaders who was sentenced to life imprisonment 67 times.
Marwan Barghouti learned Hebrew in his prison, reading in three languages, and encouraged the prisoners to complete their higher studies. The wife, Fadwa, also, contrary to stereotypes, is not the crying woman, but rather the activist and political leader, who travels around the world’s capitals to gather support for his release. The children, despite all the terrible darkness, are not motivated by hatred or a feeling of injustice, but by a sense of responsibility towards other prisoners.
In June 2003 Barghouti orchestrated a provisional Palestinian ceasefire. Palestinian officials said that Hamas, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Islamic Jihad had agreed to a three-month suspension of at-tacks against Israelis. The possibility of a breakthrough raised hopes for some progress toward peace on the 1,000th day of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel. Palestinian officials said the cease-fire specified that militant groups will halt "all attacks" against Israeli civilians. The tentative truce agreement was circulated among members of the radical groups in Damascus, Syria, and sent to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Marwan Barghouti, a top leader in Arafat's Fatah movement, the mainstream faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Barghouti and the PA could use his imprisonment much the same as South Africa's Nelson Mandela did to symbolize the struggle of his people.Detractors, however, say that with Barghouti at the helm, Israel could shun him and the PA as it did to Yasser Arafat. Israeli Foreign Minister Sylvan Shalom commented that he wants to see "A moderate Palestinian leadership that is taking the lead and moving towards a full implementation of the "Roadmap" (to Middle East peace)." But, as before, Israel also insists that any successor to Yasser Arafat dismantle terrorist groups and put an end to incitement and violence in the West Bank and Gaza.
On 01 December 2004 Barghouti reversed an earlier decision and entered the race for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, throwing the campaign into turmoil. But on 11 December 2004 Barghouti announced that he was pulling out of the upcoming presidential contest.
Sources in the Fatah movement told “i 24 news” channel that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was seeking reconciliation between the current Fatah leadership and the leaders of the prisoner Marwan Barghouti camp within the movement. The source added that President Abbas made it clear that Marwan Barghouti may be the best candidate to re-impose the Palestinian file on the international community’s agenda, especially since Barghouti enjoys the support of the majority of the movement’s sectors and movements, including the movement of the dismissed leader of the Fatah movement, Muhammad Dahlan. They believed that the choice of Barghouti enjoys popular consensus around him and may put Israel in a corner in everything related to the prisoner’s career himself and the future of the relationship with the Palestinian side and the Palestinian issue.
In June 2021 reports about the intention of the prisoner and member of the Fatah Central Committee, Marwan Barghouti, to run for the presidential elections, sparked countless discussions in Palestinian and even Israeli political circles, especially after... The visit of Hussein Al-Sheikh, a member of the Central Committee of the Fatah movement, to Barghouti in his prison, about which no official details were revealed except for the Sheikh’s statements, which contained public relations phrases and a general affirmation of the unity of the Fatah movement.
The main fear of Marwan and his movement, which has begun to form implicitly within Fatah, was his exclusion through the judiciary, that is, through the election law and the conditions that must be met by a candidate for the position of president, and that this can be done either by issuing new amendments to the election law through decrees in laws issued by President Abbas, or through the already existing law.
The Palestinian Election Law does not allow a single party body to nominate more than one candidate for the presidency, and therefore Barghouti cannot run through the Fatah movement, and this does not prevent him from running for the position, but it would refer him to Fatah central decisions, which prevent two of them from running for the presidency. Thus, his fate will be dismissal from the movement, and he has been informed that if he is dismissed, he will not remain under Fatah’s framework in the prisons,
President Mahmoud Abbas decided to postpone the elections, the date of which was agreed upon after dialogues with various factions, which considered that the procedure was " Cancel". It is not a postponement, contrary to what was stated in the announcement of the authority. The elections had been suspended since 2005.
Unfortunately, it was clear that the influence of several non-Palestinian parties in determining the positions of Palestinian faction leaders still plays the role of the dominant party in controlling the Palestinian path. . No Palestinian faction that is dependent on the will of a party outside Palestine will be able to do so. Especially when money is the basis of dependence, he must change the approach to his relations with the various factions, or clash with them, without a green light signal from the external source of funds.
This is the insurmountable obstacle that has prevented, prevented, and will continue to prevent, the various Palestinian factions from reaching a real understanding capable of actually ending every dispute that has no meaning other than that it is a kind of quarreling between people over the division of shares and positions of authority, or that it is a factional plot. It works on behalf of capitals, each of which has an agenda that concerns its interests, and does not concern it, whether closely or remotely, with the conditions of the Palestinian as a human being who needs to live his life normally, like any other person in the world.
Member of the Central Committee of the Fatah movement, the prisoner Marwan Barghouti, confirmed in August 2023 that the Palestinian Authority had turned into an authority without authority, and colonization without cost, in light of what he called “the continuation of the policy of ethnic cleansing, by the occupation, in addition to other colonial policies.” He stated as reported by the Journal of Palestine Studies, that “the colonial project, with its sects, parties, and currents, does not accept the minimum that was agreed upon by the main movement in the Palestine Liberation Organization as a basis for a settlement. However, after a quarter of a century of negotiations and attempts to reach a settlement, this project has arrived to complete failure."
Barghouti added, “The scene, Palestinian, is intertwined, in terms of the Palestinian political system that has crystallized in the past decades reaching the brink of collapse, and the fall of all its divided, powerless and failed components.” He considered that “the Palestinians are a resistance actor who, despite the series of ethnic cleansing, massacres, killings, arrests, deportations, exiles, torture, suffering, starvation, siege, and asylum, did not retreat from their right to freedom, return, and independence.”
Al-Barghouti spoke about the “Saif Al-Quds” battle, and stressed that it is “firm and conclusive evidence of what we have always affirmed, and some did not believe, which is that our Palestinian people have an inexhaustible reserve of struggle, and that their suffering and pain, no matter how great, have not and will never push them to give up.” About his inalienable national rights.
He added: “What our people need is to practice comprehensive resistance in the face of the Zionist project,” and said: “The last battle proved the principle that we have always called for, which is: (comprehensive resistance) in which the methods and forms of struggle are integrated, and their combined effectiveness is mutually reinforcing.”
He believes that the battle “revealed the inability, fragility and weakness of the Palestinian political system, and demonstrated that what we need more than ever is the production of a new political system whose only approach is to return to the people, and to complete the general elections in its three stages without delay, because the alternative is worse than Many people imagine, in addition to this, that this is a sacred right for a great people, and an emphasis on the principle of pluralism, the rule of law, public freedoms, the peaceful transfer of power, and the renewal of legitimacy and leadership.”
The Abbas movement within the Fatah movement worked strongly to exclude members of the Revolutionary Council close to the leader Barghouti, during the last meeting of the Revolutionary Council of the Fatah movement, which was held at the end of June 2023. Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed newspaper reported that the meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council had the maximum number of members who participated. The sources who attended the meeting explained that the exclusion came amid sharp criticism from the Fatah cadre, who preceded the meeting with public demands for the necessity of holding the movement’s eighth conference.
The Council excluded from its meeting Fadwa Barghouti, the wife of the prisoner Marwan Barghouti’s Central Committee member, Jamal Haweel, who is close to Barghouti, and Fakhri Barghouti, the freed prisoner who spent 34 years in Israeli occupation detention centers. They are all elected members of the Revolutionary Council. Fadwa, the wife of prisoner Marwan Barghouti, accused the leadership of the Fatah movement of not being loyal to her prisoner husband, in reference to his marginalization and lack of appreciation, which she believes is crushing him.
Al-Barghouti responded to a tweet by the head of the media office of the Fatah Mobilization and Organization Commission, Munir Al-Jagoub, on Facebook, in which he wrote: “They put chains on his mouth, tied his hands to the rock of the dead, and said: You are a murderer. They took his food, clothes, and jugs, and threw him into the death cell, and said: You are a murderer.” A thief! They expelled him from all ports, took his little lover, and then said: You are a refugee! Al-Jagoub’s tweet was a source of anger for Fadwa Al-Barghouthi, the prisoner’s wife, as she commented by saying that “loyalty is met with loyalty.”
The Palestinian Prisoners and Ex-Detainees Affairs Authority announced 17 December 2023 that the Israeli Prisons Administration transferred prisoner Marwan Barghouti from Ofer Prison. They isolated him for more than a week, and refused to reveal his whereabouts. In a statement, Palestinian human rights bodies held the Israeli authorities fully responsible for the life of prisoner Marwan Barghouti, noting that “the prison administration claimed that prisoner Barghouti was in the Ayalon-Ramla isolation detention center, and it later became clear that he was transferred to the isolation detention center (Rimonim).”
The issue of releasing the most famous Palestinian prisoner was gaining momentum in the West Bank , as the man sitting in Israeli prisons appears... Since his arrest in 2002, he has been a stubborn speaker on behalf of the Palestinian cause and at the same time open to dialogue with Israel. Researcher Yazid Sayegh of the Carnegie Middle East Center says that Barghouti “enjoys political legitimacy among the Palestinians, whether within his organization, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement ( Fatah ), or among sympathizers with other Palestinian factions.”
At this time, when Abbas has become unpopular in the West Bank, and Hamas is unpopular with the Israelis and Westerners after the October 7 attack, the world was searching for the man of the moment - according to the newspaper - “But Barghouti, despite the aura he enjoys, may not be the solution.” - According to researcher Yazid Sayegh - because success in negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian political solution first requires the support of the main Palestinian factions, and Barghouti may get it, but secondly, it needs the support of Washington and the European Union. Without the help of major foreign powers, no Palestinian leader will be able to reach a reasonable solution, not even Barghouti, as the newspaper comments.
The Swiss newspaper Lutan concluded that it is difficult to imagine Barghouti’s release despite everything, as researcher Sylvain Paul says, “Barghouti is hated in Israel after the October 7 attack, even in the leftist camp, and no one will want to release him, and even Israeli pro-peace activists They see it as impossible to trust a man who they do not know whether he still calls for armed struggle, and whether he recognizes the State of Israel within the 1967 borders?
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