Marwan Barghouti, the world’s most important prisoner
There’s one Palestinian who could help end the conflict. He’s in an Israeli jail
1843 magazine July 27th 2024
By Nicolas Pelham
This spring I took a walk through the farming village of Kobar in the West Bank. Its low-rise buildings wound around shrubs and bushes; pale pink blossom was just starting to bloom on the almond trees. On the surrounding hillsides you could see Jewish settlements – neatly ordered rows of identical villas with red tiled roofs. In the months before my visit, armed settlers from places like these had been attacking Palestinian villagers, largely with impunity. The buildings of Kobar were covered in graffiti, some of which read “Death to Israel”.
Yet on the day I was there the mood in the village was cheerful. I was being shown around by the son of Marwan Barghouti, Palestine’s most famous prisoner. Arab Barghouti, a smartly dressed life coach in his early 30s, cuts a different figure to his scruffy, moon-faced father, whose image is stencilled all over the walls of Kobar. Palestinian drivers who spotted us flashed victory signs as they passed by. “One more week!” they shouted. The release of Arab’s father, everyone felt, was imminent.
Barghouti, a Palestinian politician, activist and militant leader, was convicted of murder by an Israeli court more than two decades ago for ordering operations that killed five civilians. Though he has been shut away from the outside world since then, he is more popular with Palestinians than any other politician. A poll published in March 2024 by Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian researcher, suggested that if there were an election he would win more votes than both his nearest rivals combined. When Hamas seized 250 Israeli hostages during a murderous assault on Israel on October 7th last year, it raised the possibility of a prisoner exchange in which Barghouti might finally be freed.
The Israelis seem to be contemplating such an outcome. Weeks before I was in Kobar, a senior Israeli intelligence officer had come to the home of Barghouti’s younger brother, Moukbil. The officer politely asked if the family had heard any news about the famous prisoner. Moukbil sensed that the Israeli, who obviously knew far more about Barghouti’s situation than the family, was fishing for insights into what might happen if he were freed. Would Barghouti protest? Seek office? Fight?
It is a strange moment in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By most measures the situation is bleak. The brief optimism sparked by the Oslo accords in 1993, which were supposed to usher in a Palestinian state existing peacefully alongside Israel, was extinguished years ago. The current round of fighting is the deadliest of any since the state of Israel was created in 1948: nearly 40,000 Gazans are reported to have been killed and around 1,500 Israelis. In both cases the dead are mostly civilians. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, shows no inclination to stop the campaign.
Yet Netanyahu remains under pressure to free the Israeli hostages, which will almost certainly mean an exchange. A mediator involved in discussions told me Barghouti’s name is second on the list of prisoners Hamas wants out. If he is released, the dynamics of the conflict could shift. Unlike the lethargic head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, he is widely respected. Hamas’s Islamist commanders speak of him with admiration, even though he is from a secular faction. And unlike them, he has a track record of campaigning for a two-state solution. He is said to speak Hebrew flawlessly and without an accent. Several Israeli politicians count him as a friend.
“The only leader who believes in two states and will be elected against any other competitor is Marwan Barghouti,” said Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. “It’s in our interest he’ll compete in the next Palestinian elections – the sooner, the better.”
There are many Israelis who believe Barghouti is not interested in peace now – if he ever was – and that his release will come back to haunt them. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s military leader, was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2011, and went on to plan the massacres of October 7th. “Barghouti is as bad as Hamas,” said one retired intelligence chief. “He didn’t change in prison. He became more extreme.”
In truth, it is hard to say what Barghouti believes these days. His most recent interview took place almost 20 years ago. The last known photograph of him – shackled, pale, stubbly, with thinning hair – is more than a decade old. Who is the man incarcerated beneath the high walls of Meggido prison? And could he really be, as some claim, the Palestinian Mandela?
The region known as Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans for hundreds of years until the British took it over in 1917. The British quickly found themselves enmeshed in a messy intercommunal conflict, exacerbated by the promises they had made to both sides. The land contained holy sites to which both Muslims and Jews claimed ownership, and both groups went on to oppose the British presence – violently at times.
In 1948 the British withdrew and the new state of Israel fought its Arab neighbours in a war for independence. During the fighting Israeli forces drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. They were not allowed back.
When an armistice was reached, Israel established itself within a boundary that became known as the “green line” (supposedly after the colour of the pen used to mark it on a map).
Barghouti was born just over a decade later in the West Bank, which fell outside Israel’s green line and was under Jordanian control. His family of nine lived crammed into a two-bedroom house; the sleek white Bauhaus buildings of Tel Aviv shimmered in the distance. There were few jobs to be had in the village: Barghouti’s father, who was a builder, sometimes travelled as far as Beirut in search of work.
In 1967, when Barghouti was nearly eight, the six-day war broke out and Israeli forces seized East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. The Barghoutis now lived under Israeli occupation. Their neighbours were beaten up or arrested for flying Palestinian flags. Military bases and Jewish settlements sprang up around their village. Israeli soldiers shot dead the family dog for barking.
According to childhood friends Barghouti became involved in the communist party, which was influential in the occupied territories at the time. While some parties called for the destruction of Israel, the communists believed in non-violent resistance and the two-state solution. After school, Barghouti would march round central Ramallah at the head of protests. When he wasn’t studying or protesting, he helped his father build an extension on their relatives’ house and tried to steal glimpses of the family’s daughter, Fadwa.
Over time Barghouti became frustrated with how little marching seemed to achieve, and began looking elsewhere. There were many different groups jostling to represent the Palestinian cause, mostly from abroad. The best known of these was the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) which was dominated by the Fatah movement. Fatah cadres operated in the shadows, launching violent attacks on Israel from their base in Lebanon. Increasingly, Barghouti came under their sway.
When he was 18, before he’d had the chance to get to know Fadwa, he was arrested in a night-time raid on his home in Kobar. Prison guards put a filthy bag over his head, stripped him naked and beat his genitals with a stick until he fainted, he later alleged. When he came round they taunted him that he’d be unable to have children.
According to his brother, Barghouti was accused of being part of a terrorist organisation and preparing Molotov cocktails. He spent the next four and a half years in prison.
Many of his fellow inmates were from big towns and, for the first time in his life, the village boy was surrounded by people who read books. Their families and lawyers smuggled them in, and the young prisoners studied together. As the end of his sentence neared, Barghouti told his brother to ask Fadwa’s father for her hand in marriage. After he was released in 1983, the couple tied the knot.
Barghouti enrolled at Bir Zeit, the leading Palestinian university, where he studied history and politics. But he didn’t renounce activism, and spent the next few years leading campus protests against the occupation. Before his first son was born, he was arrested again.
This time he was detained for six months. While there he acquired enough Hebrew to read the Israeli newspapers which were brought to the cells each day and answer his guards back with verses from the Torah. Some of his fellow inmates had enrolled in history classes at Israel’s Open University, and he devoured the textbooks. He read about how Jewish militias had set about creating the state of Israel: setting off bombs in cinemas and hotels in their campaign against the British; unifying splinter groups into a single army; acting ruthlessly in pursuit of their goals.
He was in and out of prison after that. In 1987 Israeli authorities decided they didn’t want Barghouti stirring up any more trouble so they shoved him across the border with Jordan. Fadwa joined him in Jordan’s capital, Amman, with their toddler. He warned her not to expect a conventional life just because they were no longer being harassed by Israeli soldiers. “When Palestine is free, I will be back as a family guy,” he said.
Not long afterwards an uprising broke out across the occupied territories. Known by the Arabic word for “shaking off” – intifada – it was a campaign of civil disobedience, strikes and protests, though it also involved stone-throwing and, later, shooting. Barghouti had by then become a senior figure in Fatah’s exiled leadership and travelled around the world raising money for the uprising. At home his family kept growing, and soon he had four children. The Amman years were the most peaceful of Barghouti’s life and, the way Fadwa tells it, the most boring.
In 1993 he won a reprieve – Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s leader, struck a deal with Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, which ended the intifada. Thanks to the Oslo accords – named after the city in which they were secretly negotiated – exiles such as Barghouti were allowed to return to the occupied territories. Many of them had spent decades abroad and were out of touch with the people they presumed to represent. Palestinians scornfully called them olim hadashim – “new immigrants” in Hebrew. Barghouti, who had been away from Palestine for only five years, acted as a bridge between the occupied Palestinians and their would-be leaders.
For the first time, Fatah was able to operate openly in the West Bank, and Barghouti organised rallies against the occupation without having to fear arrest. Surreally, he also found himself socialising with Israeli politicians. Western governments supported the Oslo agreement by hosting endless peace-building conferences. Israelis and Palestinians were thrown together in English stately homes, airport lounges and fancy restaurants. Some of them developed a genuine rapport.
Barghouti liked putting his fluent Hebrew to use. Following his election to the first Palestinian parliament in 1996, he enthusiastically attended gatherings of Israeli and Palestinian MPs. His infectious good humour at these events won him friends . “Between us we have 145 years in jail,” he said as he waved at the assembled Palestinian delegation at a beachside restaurant in Tel Aviv. “And I was the one who put you all there!” replied Gideon Ezra, a former Israeli intelligence chief.
Meir Shitreet, an Israeli parliamentarian from Likud, the right-wing party currently led by Netanyahu, was particularly taken with Barghouti. He still remembers a joke that he used to tell about Arafat. The Palestinian leader was reluctant to be associated with violence, the joke went, so when his wife prepared him a dish containing the tongues of songbirds, he ordered her to keep the creatures alive. The mutilated birds then perched at the window watching Arafat devour their tongues, and tweeted: “Thun of a thitch!” (It may have been funnier in Hebrew.)
When Shitreet fell ill during a peacemaking conference in Italy, Barghouti sat at his bedside all night. “He supported peace, totally,” recalled Shitreet. “Real peace with Israel. We became really friendly.”
A commander in Shin Bet also noticed the charismatic young activist, and dropped in on his house in Ramallah to introduce himself. The commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Farah, has had many cordial interactions with prominent Palestinians over the years: coffee with Ahmed Yassin, the paraplegic founder of Hamas, a Jewish new year card from Arafat. But it was Barghouti who left the best impression. “He was someone we could work together with in the peace era,” said Abu Farah. Barghouti’s door was always open, said his former assistant, Samer Sinijlawi, a touch pointedly. “He never said no to meeting any Israeli.”
Under the terms of the Oslo accords, the Palestinians agreed to recognise the state of Israel, but the Israelis agreed only to acknowledge the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. A state would come at the end of an “interim” process, the end date of which began to look hazy.
Islamist groups seeking to derail the peace process stepped up suicide-bomb attacks on Israeli civilians. In their talks with the PLO, Israeli negotiators seemed only to want to discuss clamping down on these militants, rather than charting the path to Palestinian statehood. “Our main concern was how to deal together with terrorists,” said Abu Farah of his many meetings with Barghouti.
Meanwhile, Jewish settlements expanded in the West Bank and Gaza, and brought armed Jewish zealots with them. Deployments of soldiers followed, and Palestinians wondered whether there would be enough unoccupied territory left in which to build their state.
As disillusionment set in, Barghouti toured Israel and Palestine, warning that moderates like him would be marginalised if the Oslo process failed to deliver a Palestinian state. By then Barghouti had been promoted to secretary-general of Fatah in the West Bank, a senior position in an organisation that was trying to be a resistance movement, a political party and a government all at the same time. He was given the task of running the Tanzim, the grassroots activists who had led protests during the intifada and now acted as Fatah’s muscle on the streets. (Arafat’s office paid their budget.)
Arafat, the head of the PA, was growing reclusive – the contradictions of his position were hard to reconcile. He promised the Israelis security and the Palestinians liberation, but struggled to deliver either. Increasingly Barghouti appeared at public gatherings on Arafat’s behalf. Some spoke of the young man from Kobar as a possible successor. “Arafat looked at Barghouti like his son,” said Abu Farah. “He was thinking of him as a future leader.”
In July 2000 Bill Clinton, the American president, hosted a summit to map out a final settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. The atmosphere was tense from the beginning, and talks broke down over the status of Jerusalem, among other intractable issues. Both sides knew violence would follow. The trigger was a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon, the leader of Likud, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of one of the most sacred mosques in Islam as well as Judaism’s holiest place. Barghouti was there waiting for him, with a posse of young men. They furiously denounced Sharon and hurled chairs at his security detail. The second intifada had begun.
Riots quickly spread across the West Bank. Barghouti said goodbye to five-star hotels and returned to more familiar territory: dodging Israeli gunfire in the back alleys of Ramallah.
Most mornings he would rally protesters and lead them to the checkpoint at the foot of Beit El, a settlement and military base on the outskirts of the town. Many protesters threw stones; Israeli soldiers responded with rubber bullets and sometimes live rounds. Occasionally Apache helicopters joined in. The protesters kept coming. After several weeks of mounting casualties, Palestinians started shooting back from the rooftops. Unlike the previous intifada, the second quickly spiralled into armed conflict.
Towards the end of 2000, Barghouti helped Arafat set up a military wing of the Tanzim, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. At first the brigade restricted itself to attacking settlements and soldiers in the occupied territories. This was enough to make Barghouti a target. A former Shin Bet commander said that plans were drawn up to assassinate him, but never carried out. Barghouti had some near misses however. Once a tank fired a shell at his vehicle as he was walking towards it, killing his bodyguard, which he saw as a warning. Each night, he slept in a different house.
His old Israeli friends tried to steer him away from militancy. “I warned him, I called him, I said ‘stay away, don’t touch terror’,” said Shitreet, who was by then justice minister. But Barghouti wanted to prove occupation had a cost. “I’m not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist,” he wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post. “I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country.”
He claimed to oppose attacks on civilians inside Israel, but within Fatah people were starting to worry the organisation looked weak compared with its Islamist rivals. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another militant group, were pursuing a relentless suicide-bombing campaign inside the green line. One of the most devastating attacks took place in the summer of 2001, when a militant blew himself up in a nightclub in Tel Aviv and killed 21 people, 16 of whom were teenagers.
Around that time Ron Pundak, one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo process, held a secret meeting with Barghouti in a safe house in the West Bank. According to a Palestinian present at the encounter, Pundak reproached Barghouti for his turn towards violence. Barghouti replied flatly: “We can’t lose the street to Hamas.”
Towards the end of 2001 the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade decided to start dispatching suicide-bombers to kill civilians within Israel. There could scarcely have been a less diplomatically astute time to adopt such a policy. Al-Qaeda had just killed nearly 3,000 American civilians on 9/11, and Israel persuaded America that its one-time partner, the PLO, was cut from the same cloth. With what some saw as the tacit acquiescence of the White House, Israeli tanks pummelled Palestinian towns and cities. Many Palestinians began to regret the adoption of violent tactics. By the spring of 2002 Barghouti himself was mulling a unilateral ceasefire, according to a diplomat who spoke to him at the time.
On April 15th Barghouti made the mistake of using a mobile phone that Shin Bet was tracking and revealed that he was hiding in the home of a Fatah official. According to Gonen Ben Yitzhak, the Shin Bet officer who ran the operation to capture him, commandos found Barghouti using his comrade’s mother as a human shield. But unlike other Fatah leaders, Barghouti was not assassinated. Instead his captors led him off in chains crowing, “We’ve caught the head of the snake!”
Moskobiya, a prison in the Russian Orthodox district of Jerusalem, has been used as an interrogation centre for over a hundred years. It was here that Barghouti had been held as a teenager. On his return in 2002, Barghouti immediately asked for a meeting with Shin Bet’s head, Avi Dichter, whom he knew personally. Quick to disabuse him of any illusion of status, the Israelis offered a junior interrogator instead.
Questioning began in the early evening and continued till mid-morning, day after day, week after week. Sleep deprivation and blindfolds were de rigueur. According to the account he gave his lawyers he was shackled to his chair in a stress position. When he leant back, nails pierced his skin. Within four months, the interrogators had compiled their case. He was accused of involvement in 37 attacks or attempted attacks. Among them was a shooting in a seafood market in Tel Aviv in March 2002, in which three civilians were killed.
Barghouti wasn’t directly involved in operational matters, so the case hinged on the degree of responsibility he had for enabling these missions. Much of the evidence against him was deemed too sensitive to be made public, but Abu Farah, the Shin Bet officer, said that during his interrogation Barghouti had confessed to ordering the operations. “He didn’t connect the wires of the devices,” said Abu Farah, “but he was the commander. He was the leader for those people.”
But Ben Yitzhak, the Shin Bet officer who helped arrest Barghouti, was surprised at the charge sheet. True, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was overseen by Fatah’s supreme committee, of which Barghouti was a member. But these cells were only loosely controlled, and other Fatah leaders were more directly implicated in military operations. (Barghouti himself has always denied supporting attacks on civilians inside Israel.) A little dismissively, Ben Yitzhak pointed out that Barghouti had no military background. “I never saw him as a big fighter,” he said. “He was always in politics.” Ben Yitzhak suspected the Israelis wanted to make an example of Barghouti because they felt personally betrayed by his espousal of violence. Abu Farah certainly seemed to feel this, complaining to me: “He did it after sitting with us. He was a partner.”
Barghouti was tried in a civilian court rather than the more opaque tribunals generally used for terrorism suspects. Perhaps by trying him as a common murderer, Israel hoped to make him seem less like a hero. The decision backfired: it gave Barghouti a platform, which he used to denounce the proceedings. From the moment he entered the courtroom, his hands clenched above his head as if in victory, he stole the show. His son Arab, then 13, was the only relative allowed into the gallery, and he leapt over the wooden benches to try to reach his father. Barghouti delivered a rousing speech in which he called himself a “fighter for peace for both peoples” – which prompted the judge to retort that a fighter for peace wouldn’t turn people into bombs.
For much of the two years of his trial, Barghouti was held in solitary confinement, in a cell little bigger than a photo booth. On June 6th 2004 he was summoned for sentencing. He was acquitted on 21 of the counts, but found guilty of involvement in five murders. His sentence was five life terms, plus an additional 40 years. Some still wonder whether his desire to play to the gallery cost him. “He could have got 20 years in prison. By now he would have been out,” said Sinijlawi, his former assistant. “We don’t want a symbol in prison, we want a leader.”
Barghouti remained in solitary confinement for several more years. In late 2005 the authorities began to let him mingle with the other inmates, possibly in the hope that he might check the growing popularity of Hamas. Once out of solitary, he turned the prison into a university, organising lectures from 9am to 5pm. “You’ve captured our bodies, not our minds,” he would say to the guards.
External examiners from universities in Israel and Palestine marked the inmates’ papers, and conducted vivas over mobile phones when possible (the prison authorities would sometimes interrupt the process as punishment). Over 1,200 inmates graduated under his programme.
Barghouti himself completed a doctoral thesis in Palestinian democracy, which his lawyer had to smuggle out one page at a time. He lectured, too, often on the books that captured his wide-ranging curiosity – the political economy of China or religious tolerance in classical Islam. Other prisoners called him “professor”.
Wardens usually allowed visitors to bring two books each time they came, but Barghouti traded other inmates’ allowances for chocolates he had bought from the prison shop. He managed to assemble a library of more than 2,000 volumes. “He loved history. He loved to read about Israelis, about the leadership,” said Yuval Bitton, who oversaw intelligence collection in prisons at the time. More recently Barghouti is said to have enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens”, a bestselling history of humanity.
Barghouti had a kind of celebrity status. Israeli politicians visited his cell. It was much harder for Palestinians to do so. If his wife wanted to see him she had to go through the arduous process of applying for a permit to enter Israel. She would get up at 5am on the appointed day, then undergo humiliating searches at checkpoints and prison gates – all for a 45-minute conversation behind glass that the authorities might cancel on a whim. For more than 20 years Barghouti’s family have seen him only in occasional glimpses.
In 2004 Arafat died. He had not been a particularly effective leader, but he had been a talisman for the Palestinian cause. His successor, Abbas, was a different figure. He had no background as a fighter, and his instincts were those of a cautious bureaucrat. According to one of his former ministers, he was anxious about angering the Israelis.
Under Abbas’s watch the PA started to resemble the bloated security states of the Arab world. Money donated by the Japanese government helped build a sleek compound for the presidential headquarters. Inside were barracks for Abbas’s 2,800-strong bodyguard and a helipad. Abbas acquired a private jet, but since his realm had no airstrip he was obliged to keep it in Amman.
Abbas hasn’t been associated with as much corruption as some Arab leaders, but for Palestinians struggling in refugee camps his life seemed a world away from theirs. “We’ve seen so little of him he might as well be in prison with Barghouti,” said one Palestinian journalist in Ramallah.
Barghouti had always been more outspoken than most about corruption in Fatah. After Arafat died he twice toyed with the idea of running from prison as an independent candidate in Palestinian elections, but was persuaded to return to the Fatah fold both times.
In 2006 his ability to work with other blocs in Palestinian politics was urgently needed. That year Palestinians were given a chance to choose their government for the second time. Hamas won the election by a crushing majority, shocking the world. Abbas had no desire to invite the Islamists into government, but it looked undemocratic for him to ignore the result.
Barghouti was well-placed to broker a solution. The prison he was in at the time, Hadarim, had been built to house Palestine’s political elite. Its main block had 80 inmates and contained both Fatah and Hamas leaders, including Sinwar, the future mastermind of the October 7th attacks. Together with Hamas representatives, Barghouti thrashed out a programme for reconciling the two factions, checking how Israel might respond to different kinds of power-sharing arrangements by discussing the proposals with his Israeli visitors.
In May 2006 the group released a statement that came to be known as the Prisoners’ Document. It called for a national unity government and “resistance” to Israel but, crucially, only in the territories it occupied beyond the green line. The document drew up the constitutional outlines of a Palestinian state: democratic, with equal rights for all, including women, and conforming to the pre-1967 borders. With Barghouti’s encouragement, Hamas seemed finally to have accepted a two-state solution.
Abbas, desperate to re-establish authority after Hamas’s election win, accepted the first step of the Prisoners’ Document and agreed to a national unity government. It comprised Hamas, Fatah and a smattering of independents. Salam Fayyad, an economist who had worked at the International Monetary Fund, was to be the finance minister.
But opponents of working with Hamas prevailed. America helped a Fatah warlord in Gaza set up new PA battalions designed to crush the Islamists. Hamas counter-attacked and Abbas’s forces had to flee. The national unity government collapsed.
In his rump fief, Abbas became paranoid. Poll after poll showed his unpopularity. Barghouti meanwhile became so beloved that Abbas’s allies could not be seen to undermine him, however much they would have liked to, and paid the requisite lip-service to his heroism. “No one can criticise him,” said one.
On October 7th 2023 Hamas and other factions breached the security barrier separating southern Israel from Gaza. Their fighters stormed kibbutzim, towns and a music festival, slaughtering more than 1,100 people. It was the bloodiest day the state of Israel has ever experienced.
It responded with unparalleled ferocity, not just in Gaza but also in the jails where Palestinian prisoners were kept. According to a prisoner who was released in February, inmates of one institution were forced to strip naked, kneel down and kiss the Israeli flag before mealtimes. “The sadism made Abu Ghraib [an Iraqi prison where American forces abused inmates] look like a picnic,” said the prisoner. At least ten Palestinians have reportedly died in custody.
According to his lawyer, Barghouti himself was put in solitary confinement, at times in complete darkness. Israel’s national anthem was piped into his cell at top volume all day. His books, television and newspapers were confiscated, and food and water severely rationed – he lost 10kg. The Israeli press reported that Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s hard-right security minister, suspended a prison guard for giving Barghouti food. The Israeli authorities say that Barghouti and other prisoners have been treated according to the law.
Barghouti’s wife and spokesperson, Fadwa, stopped speaking to journalists. “I don’t want to say anything to provoke anyone because I don’t want to put him in danger,” she told me in the only interview she has given since the start of the war in Gaza. “I’m very worried about his life.”
In recent weeks the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza have stepped up their campaign for a prisoner swap. Some have protested outside Netanyahu’s home. Even as it tries to crush Barghouti, the Israeli security establishment is having to grapple with what his freedom might mean for Israel.
Shitreet, the former justice minister, is convinced that Barghouti’s release would be in Israel’s interests. “If it would depend on me, I would release him, I would pardon him and give him the possibility really to be a leader and arrive at a Palestinian state, living in peace with Israel,” he said.
Abu Farah can’t make up his mind. “He would be a very good leader, he is very clever, he is very intelligent,” he said. “I think that we could make peace with such a leader.” Then he backtracked. “We don’t trust them. How can you choose somebody that was a terrorist to be the president of the Palestinian people?”
Fadwa said that her husband still believes in the two-state solution, and that this fact was inconvenient for Israelis who wanted to dismiss him. “The Israelis would prefer someone who says ‘we don’t want Israel’,” she told me.
The question is what he might be willing to do to achieve a Palestinian state. Opinions differ on this. Some Palestinian journalists say he now espouses non-violent resistance alone. Others, including the manager of the campaign for his release, Ahmed Ghneim, reckon he thinks violence is necessary under certain circumstances. “We’re not being occupied by soft power. It’s brutal occupation by force,” said Ghneim.
One Western diplomat who has exchanged messages with Barghouti said he has prescribed strict limits on militant activity, for instance, not targeting women and children and not conducting operations outside “the area of occupation”.
What is clear is that Barghouti is less inclined than Abbas to wait patiently to be handed a state. In 2016 a political ally unveiled papers smuggled from prison which he claimed contained Barghouti’s plans. They hinged on mass disobedience.
According to the papers, Palestinians should march in their hundreds of thousands on Jerusalem, the settlements and Israeli army posts, with young and old people in the front line. The occupation’s infrastructure – its walls, road-blocks, checkpoints and electricity pylons should be destroyed. Sure, the Israeli army might open fire. But, said Ghneim, “You can’t get your liberation for free. Abbas is afraid of the price.”
The past nine months have been deadly for Palestinians in the West Bank as well as those in Gaza. In the aftermath of October 7th, the Israeli army has been carrying out raids in its towns and cities, while settler violence has increased. Around 500 Palestinians have been killed.
When I went to Kobar, Israeli soldiers had recently pulled down the poster of Barghouti from the billboard in the village square. Nonetheless, when the intelligence officer visited his brother Moukbil in January he behaved with exceptional friendliness. At the end of their conversation the officer saluted Moukbil as “the brother of the future leader of Palestine”.
Up the road in Ramallah, I saw Abbas’s supporters gathered in restaurants beneath clouds of sheesha smoke, gaming out what they would do if Barghouti got out. What, if buoyed by the celebrations, he led the crowds to march on Abbas’s compound? “There will be a Palestinian civil war,” predicted a Fatah security chief, staring glumly into his coffee cup.
Officially, Abbas’s aides told me that Barghouti would have a “very important” role in the PA were he to be freed. But the current leader seems to be in no hurry to get his potential successor out of prison. Those close to the hostage negotiations said Abbas urged Qatari mediators to remove Barghouti’s name from the list of prisoner exchanges.
There is a reason that Hamas wants him released, apart from the prestige it would bring them. They see Barghouti as crucial to their political survival in post-war Palestine. A veteran Western diplomat thinks that Barghouti could broker a deal whereby the Islamists become members of a national unity government in exchange for recognising the state of Israel.
There is something bizarre about all the plotting going on around a man no one has seen for so long. Nelson Mandela emerged from his decades in prison wiser and more self-disciplined. No one knows what kind of transformation Barghouti has undergone. Most visits were cut off in 2016. Even his wife has not seen him for more than a year.
Bitton, the Israeli prison-intelligence officer, suggested that the Barghouti he knew in jail was less impressive than the icon whom Palestinians celebrate. He didn’t muck in with ordinary prisoners the way that Sinwar did. “He thought he was the big figure of Fatah. He always says he’s number one,” said Bitton. He added that Barghouti’s influence with other prisoners was quite limited.
Even if Barghouti doesn’t disappoint Palestinians, they might disappoint him. How many would heed him if he called for a march on Jerusalem now – especially given the greater tolerance that the Israeli army has shown for Palestinian casualties since October 7th? “People are with the movement in their hearts but with the company in their pockets,” said one Palestinian journalist, referring to the network of patronage through which the PA maintains its power.
For all his popularity, Barghouti lacks a base. His Tanzim are now led by an Abbas loyalist. “He essentially has no organisation,” said Shikaki, the pollster.
But for the peaceniks, there’s no one else who has Barghouti’s potential. “I don’t know if he’s Mandela, but he’s Barghouti, and he will be our partner in negotiations,” said Haim Oron, a former Israeli cabinet minister. “He spoke about the right of the Palestinians, and when I spoke about the right of Jews, he understood.”
Barghouti’s allies told me he has resisted the urge to despise his enemies, even after all these years of war and incarceration. “He wasn’t driven by hatred and revenge. He was purpose-driven,” said Qadura Fares, a former adviser. “He always knew that even with two states we both have to find a way of living in this bit of land together.” ■
Nicolas Pelham is The Economist’s Middle East correspondent
ILLUSTRATIONS DEBORAH STEVENSON