COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle
A litmus test of Israel’s commitment to abandon genocide and start down the road towards lasting peace is whether they choose to release the most important of all the hostages, Marwan Barghouti.
During the past 22 years in Israeli prisons he has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian — a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resist the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
As reported last week, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas are all insisting Barghouti, the most popular leader in Palestine, be among the thousands of Palestinian hostages to be freed as part of the ceasefire agreement.
His release or retention in captivity will say volumes about which path the US and Israel wish to take: either more land thieving, more killings, more lawlessness or steps towards ending the occupation and choosing peace over territorial expansion.
Why is Barghouti potentially so important? Despite long years in Israeli jails, he is a political giant who bestrides the Palestinian cause. He is an intellectual and both a fighter and a peace activist.
He is respected by all factions of the Palestinians. He is by far the most popular figure in Palestine and as such he is almost uniquely positioned to complete the vital task of uniting his people.
Back in July last year the Chinese government pulled off a diplomatic masterstroke by getting 14 factions, including Hamas and Fatah, to successfully come together for reconciliation talks and ink the Beijing Declaration on Ending Division and Strengthening Palestinian National Unity. Now they need a unifying leader to move forward together.
Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas is despised as a US-Israeli tool by most Palestinians, 90 percent of whom, according to polling, want him gone. Hamas has represented the most effective resistance to Israel but the time may have come for them to accept partnership with, even leadership by, someone who can negotiate peace.
How Gaza and the West Bank is governed should be determined by the Palestinian people not by anyone else, especially not by Israeli leaders currently under investigation for genocide or US leaders who should join them in the dock for arming them.
The moment that Hamas releases three women hostages. Video: Al Jazeera
Hypocritical rejection of Hamas
Barghouti, however, could untie the Gordian knot that has formed around the West’s hypocritical rejection of Hamas on one hand and the Palestinian people’s determination not to be dictated to by their oppressors on the other.
Barghouti may also be a saviour for the Israelis. Their society has turned into a psychotic perversion of the great hope Jews around the world placed in the Israeli state.
As Israeli soldiers have shown us in countless Tik-tok videos the IDF has become an army of rapists and child killers — these very deeds celebrated by the highest political and religious leaders in the country.
Israel is now the greatest killer of journalists in the history of war, the remorseless destroyer of hospitals and their patients and staff, the desecrator of countless churches and mosques. Tens of thousands of women have been killed for the sake of killing.
Israel is guilty of the crime of crimes — genocide — and needs a way out of the mess it has created.
For all these reasons Marwan Barghouti is a very dangerous man to Netanyahu and the most fanatical Zionists. He believes in peace.
In my profile of him a year ago I quoted his wife, lawyer and activist Fadwa Barghouti: “Marwan’s goal has always been ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Marwan Barghouti believes in politics. He’s a political and national leader loved by his people.
‘Fought for peace’
“He fought for peace with bravery and spent time on the Palestinian street advocating for peace. But he also believes in international law, which gives the occupied people the right to fight for their independence and freedom.”
Alon Liel, formerly Israel’s most senior diplomat, proposed freeing Barghouti because he is “the ultimate leader of the Palestinian people,” and “he is the only one who can extricate us from the quagmire we are in.”
Marwan Barghouti has the moral, political and popular stature to reach out to the Israelis, to see past their crimes and to sit down with them. If only. If only. If only.
The horrible reality is Israel and the US have been led by war criminals who fail to grasp the fact that peace is only possible if they abandon the vilification of the Palestinian people and their leaders; that a better world is only possible if the Palestinians are finally given freedom and dignity.
It will be a relief to everyone to see the remaining few dozen Israelis held by Hamas and other groups released. They deserve to be home with their families.
It will be a relief that thousands of Palestinian hostages be freed, many of them, according to Israel’s leading human rights organisation B’tselem, victims of torture, sexual violence and medieval conditions. Hundreds of Palestinian child hostages — all of them traumatised — will be returned to their families.
All these are welcome developments. Strategically, however, Marwan Barghouti stands apart.
Uniquely suited to lead Palestine
Long considered the “Palestinian Mandela” — not least because of his 22 years of continuous imprisonment — the former Fatah leader, the former military leader, has attributes that make him almost uniquely suited to lead Palestine to freedom — if Israel and the US are prepared to abandon the Greater Israel project and accept peace can only come with justice for all.
That’s a big “If”.
Barghouti, returned to jail in 2002, after being convicted in what is considered by many scholars an illegal and deeply flawed Israeli show trial on five counts of murder. He denies the charges and does not recognise the court.
He has lived for more than 22 years in conditions far more barbaric than the great South African leader had to endure on Robben Island. According to Israeli human rights groups, family and international lawyers, Barghouti has been beaten, tortured, sexually molested and had limbs broken.
What hasn’t been broken is the spirit of the greatest living Palestinian – a symbol of his people’s “legendary steadfastness” and determination to win freedom from occupation and resistance to the genocidal forces of the US, Israel and their Western enablers like Australia and New Zealand.
Marwan Barghouti is the same age as me — 65 — and it fills me with horror that a man who has spent decades fighting for freedom, and, if possible, peace, has been subjected to the horrors of an Israeli gulag for so long.
I am not sure I would have had the physical or mental strength to endure what he has but — like Mandela — he kept his humanity and has remained an advocate for peace.
We should never forget that seven million Palestinians remain as hostages held in brutal conditions by the US and Israel. Most are hostages without human rights, political rights, territorial rights.
As Palestinians have pointed out: imprisonment is now part of Palestinian consciousness. But — as Marwan Barghouti has shown with his iron will, his human decency, his determination to continue to be an advocate for peace with Israel — you can imprison the Palestinians but not their struggle.
I’ll give the last word to his son, Arab Barghouti who told Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo this week, “My father used to always tell me that hope is sometimes a privilege, but being ‘hope-less’ is a privilege that we can’t have as Palestinians.”
In the same interview he also said:
“If any Israeli leader really wants an end to this and to have peace for the region, they would see that my father is someone that would bring that and is someone who still believes in the tiny chance left for the two-state solution.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
