Uri Avnery
April 22, 2017
Palestine's Nelson Mandela
I HAVE a confession to make: I like Marwan Barghouti.
I have visited him
at his modest Ramallah home several times. During our conversations, we
discussed Israeli-Palestinian peace. Our ideas were the same: to create
the State of Palestine next to the State of Israel, and to establish
peace between the two states, based on the 1967 lines (with minor
adjustments), with open borders and cooperation.
This was not a secret agreement: Barghouti has repeated this proposal many times, both in prison and outside.
I also like his
wife, Fadwa, who was educated as a lawyer but devotes her time to fight
for the release of her husband. At the crowded funeral of Yasser Arafat,
I happened to stand next to her and saw her tear-streaked face.
This week,
Barghouti, together with about a thousand other Palestinian prisoners in
Israel, started an unlimited hunger strike. I have just signed a
petition for his release.
MARWAN BARGHOUTI is a
born leader. In spite of his small physical stature, he stands out in
any gathering. Within the Fatah movement he became the leader of the
youth division. (The word "Fatah" is the initials of "Palestinian
Liberation Movement, in reverse),
The Barghoutis are a
widespread clan, dominating several villages near Ramallah. Marwan
himself was born in 1959 in Kobar village. An ancestor, Abd-al-Jabir
al-Barghouti, led an Arab revolt in 1834. I have met Mustafa Barghouti,
an activist for democracy, in many demonstrations and shared the tear
gas with him. Omar Barghouti is a leader of the international
anti-Israel boycott movement.
Perhaps my sympathy
for Marwan is influenced by some similarities in our youth. He joined
the Palestinian resistance movement at the age of 15, the same age as I
was when I joined the Hebrew underground some 35 years earlier. My
friends and I considered ourselves freedom fighters, but were branded by
the British authorities as "terrorists". The same has now happened to
Marwan – a freedom fighter in his own eyes and in the eyes of the vast
majority of the Palestinian people, a "terrorist" in the eyes of the
Israeli authorities.
When he was put on
trial in the Tel Aviv District Court, my friends and I, members of the
Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), tried to demonstrate
our solidarity with him in the courtroom. We were expelled by armed
guards. One of my friends lost a toenail in this glorious fight.
YEARS AGO I called
Barghouti the "Palestinian Mandela". Despite their difference in height
and skin color, there was a basic similarity between the two: both were
men of peace, but justified the use of violence against their
oppressors. However, while the Apartheid regime was satisfied with one
life term, Barghouti was sentenced to a ridiculous five life terms and
another 40 years – for acts of violence executed by his Tanzim
organization.
(Gush Shalom
published a statement this week suggesting that by the same logic,
Menachem Begin should have been sentenced by the British to 91 life
terms for the bombing of the King David hotel, in which 91 people – many
of them Jews – lost their lives.)
There is another
similarity between Mandela and Barghouti: when the apartheid regime was
destroyed by a combination of "terrorism", violent strikes and a
world-wide boycott, Mandela emerged as the natural leader of the new
South Africa. Many people expect that when a Palestinian state is set
up, Barghouti will become its president, after Mahmoud Abbas.
There is something
in his personality that inspires confidence, turning him into the
natural arbiter of internal conflicts. Hamas people, who are the
opponents of Fatah, are inclined to listen to Marwan. He is the ideal
conciliator between the two movements.
Some years ago,
under the leadership of Marwan, a large number of prisoners belonging to
the two organizations signed a joint appeal for national unity, setting
out concrete terms. Nothing came of this.
That, by the way,
may be an additional reason for the Israeli government’s rejection of
any suggestion of freeing Barghouti, even when a prisoner exchange
provided a convenient opportunity. A free Barghouti could become a
powerful agent for Palestinian unity, the last thing the Israeli
overlords want.
Divide et impera –
"divide and rule" – since Roman times this has been a guiding principle
of every regime that suppresses another people. In this the Israeli
authorities have been incredibly successful. Political geography
provided an ideal setting: The West Bank (of the Jordan river) is cut
off from the Gaza Strip by some 50 km of Israeli territory.
Hamas got hold of
the Gaza Strip by elections and violence, and refuses to accept the
leadership of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), a union of
the more secular organizations which rules the West Bank.
This is not an
unusual situation in national liberation organizations. They often split
into more and less extreme wings, to the great delight of the
oppressor. The last thing the Israeli authorities are willing to do is
release Barghouti and allow him to restore Palestinian national unity.
God forbid.
THE HUNGER strikers do not demand their own release, but demand better prison conditions. They demand, inter alia,
more frequent and longer visits by wives and family, an end to torture,
decent food, and such. They also remind us that under international law
an "occupying power" is forbidden to move prisoners from an occupied
territory to the home country of the occupier. Exactly this happens to
almost all Palestinian "security prisoners".
Last week Barghouti
set out these demands in an op-ed article published by the New York
Times, an act that shows the newspaper's better side. The editorial note
described the author as a Palestinian politician and Member of
Parliament. It was a courageous act by the paper (which somewhat
restored its standing in my eyes after it condemned Bashar al-Assad for
using poison gas, without a sliver of evidence.)
But courage has its
limits. The very next day the NYT published an editor's note stating
that Barghouti was convicted for murder. It was an abject surrender to
Zionist pressure.
The man who claimed
this victory was an individual I find particularly obnoxious. He calls
himself Michael Oren and is now a deputy minister in Israel, but he was
born in the USA and belongs to the subgroup of American Jews who are
super-super-patriots of Israel. He adopted Israeli citizenship and an
Israeli name in order to serve as Israel's ambassador to the USA. In
this capacity he attracted attention by using particularly virulent
anti-Arab rhetoric, so extreme as to make even Binyamin Netanyahu look
moderate.
I doubt that this
person has ever sacrificed anything for his patriotism, indeed, he has
made quite a career of it. Yet he speaks with contempt about Barghouti,
who has spent much of his life in prison and exile. He describes
Barghouti’s article in the New York Times as a "journalistic terror
act". Look who's talking.
A HUNGER STRIKE is a
very courageous act. It is the last weapon of the least protected
people on earth – the prisoners. The abominable Margaret Thatcher let
the Irish hunger strikers starve to death.
The Israeli
authorities wanted to force-feed Palestinian hunger strikers. The
Israeli Physicians Association, much to its credit, refused to
cooperate, since such acts have led in the past to the deaths of the
victims. That put an end to this kind of torture.
Barghouti demands that Palestinian political prisoners be treated as prisoners-of-war. No chance of that.
However, one should
demand that prisoners of any kind be treated humanely. This means that
deprivation of liberty is the only punishment imposed, and that within
the prisons the maximum of decent conditions should be accorded.
In some Israeli prisons, a kind of modus vivendi
between the prison authorities and the Palestinian prisoners seems to
have been established. Not so in others. One gets the impression that
the prison service is the enemy of the prisoners, making their life as
miserable as possible. This has worsened now, in response to the strike.
This policy is
cruel, illegal and counter-productive. There is no way to win against a
hunger-strike. The prisoners are bound to win, especially when decent
people all over the world are watching. Perhaps even the NYT.
I am waiting for the
day when I can visit Marwan again as a free man in his home in
Ramallah. Even more so if Ramallah is, by that time, a town in the free
State of Palestine.
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