>
>ZNet Commentary
>A Palestinian Mandela? July 16, 2002
>By Charles Glass
>
>One place to look for the "new and different Palestinian leadership" that
>President George Bush demanded last Monday, is Petach Tikva Prison near
>Tel Aviv. In the solitary confinement of his cell, Marwan Barghouthi has
>been charged with terrorist offences against Israel and awaits trial.
>
>Ordinarily, Palestinians are tried in military courts, where forced
>confessions or the word of paid informers suffice for convictions, but
>Israel will try Barghouthi in a civil court so that justice will be seen
>to be done. The Israeli Ministry of Justice's implication is that military
>courts do not serve that function. Meanwhile, while awaiting trial,
>Barghouthi is waiting for his leader, Yasser Arafat, to speak on his
>behalf. That may be a long time coming.
>
>Arafat's silence over the fate of a young man who heads Arafat's Al Fateh
>organisation in the West Bank and is an elected member of the Palestinian
>Legislative Council surprises no one. In the latest opinion poll,
>conducted by the respected Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey
>Research, Barghouti received the highest number of votes, after Arafat
>himself, to become the president of Palestine.
>
>Barghouti's percentage was rising - eleven per cent last December,
>nineteen now -- while Arafat's is on the decline. Two years ago, when
>Barghouti was at zero, Arafat had forty-six per cent. Now, it's
>thirty-five. Many Palestinians said that, if George Bush had not offended
>them by saying Arafat had to go, Arafat's popularity would have fallen
>even lower.
>
>What Bush did for Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is doing for
>Barghouti. On 16 April, the day after Israeli forces arrested Barghouti at
>a friend's house in Ramallah, Israel's Foreign Ministry issued an Embassy
>Briefing for its missions abroad. It accused Barghouti of leading two
>organisations, Fateh's Tanzim and Al Aqsa Matryrs' Brigade, that were
>"responsible for over sixty per cent of the terrorist attacks carried out
>against Israel over the last year and a half."
>
>The reported treatment of Barghouti during his first forty days of
>detention -- when his lawyers and civil rights groups said he was
>brutalised and deprived of sleep during twenty hours of daily
>interrogations -- are turning someone who described himself as "a regular
>guy from the Palestinian street" into Palestine's Nelson Mandela.
>
>For Barghouti, that was not the expected outcome. Born in June 1959 in the
>village of Kafr Kubr near Ramallah, he was a street activist from his
>early teens. He took his high school diploma while in Israeli prison and
>founded Al Fateh's West Bank youth branch. His many terms in detention
>while at Bir Zeit University made him take eleven years to earn a degree
>in history and political science. By then, he had been deported to Jordan.
>
>That was 1987, the year the first uprising, or intifada, against Israeli
>occupation began. In 1989, Fateh appointed him as the youngest-ever member
>of its Revolutionary Council. He was meant to become another Arafat loyalist.
>In 1994, when he and other deportees came home under the Oslo accords,
>Barghouti became an enthusiastic advocate of that peace process. Appearing
>on public platforms with Israeli doves, including then Labour Justice
>Minister Yossi Beilan, he urged Israelis and Palestinians to embrace a new
>era of cooperation.
>
>The fluent Hebrew he learned in prison served him in reaching an Israeli
>audience.
>
>Barthouti began to speak against the Israelis for grabbing more
>Palestinian land to build settlements and to criticise Arafat's government
>for corruption and autocracy. When he stood for the Legislative Assembly
>in 1996, Arafat -- with the petulance that Tony Blair showed Ken
>Livingstone running for mayor of London -- would not allow him to run as
>part of Al Fateh. Barghouti won anyway as an independent.
>
>Barghouti's demands for accountability met with rebukes from Arafat. In
>May 1997, a scandal over missing funds prompted Barghouti to propose a no
>confidence motion in Arafat.
>
>When I met him six weeks into the second intifada that began in September
>2000, Barghouti told me the uprising was as much against the PA as the
>Israelis:
>
>"Of course, the Palestinian people are also frustrated from the policy of
>the PLO and the policy of the Palestinian Authority. And because of this
>way of negotiating, we don't believe it will lead to independence to put
>an end to occupation. And we gave the leadership time and the chance and
>the opportunity."
>
>The leadership, from which he had distanced himself, had blown it. For
>seven years, Palestinian ministers became rich, Palestinian security
>forces abused Palestinian rights and Israel went on building settlements.
>
>A tough and wiry little guy, Barghouti wore jeans, an open neck T-shirt
>and, when it was cold, a leather jacket. He was emerging as the Gerry
>Adams of the Palestinians: he went to every demonstration where kids threw
>stones at tanks and attended every funeral. As Adams' people had used the
>"Armalite and the ballot," Barghouti 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."
>
>When the Israelis assassinated his driver on 4 August last year, many
>assumed they were attempting to kill Barghouti. Sharon demanded that
>Arafat extradite him to Israel, something Arafat could not do and retain
>credibility. Then, on 15 April, Israeli forces surrounded the Ramallah
>house of a friend, Ziad Abu Ain, where Barghouti had arrived only forty
>minutes before. Barghouti's lawyer, Jawad Bulos, said the Israelis may
>have come to assassinate him, but that his quick and public surrender may
>have saved his life and those of the Ain family.
>
>Israeli and Palestinian rights organisations have protested the treatment
>Barghouti received during his first forty days of detention in Jerusalem.
>LAW, one of the groups, said, "He suffers from pain in his back and hands,
>cause by position abuse. Barhgouti's hands and legs are shackled to a
>small chair, angled to slant forward to that he cannot sit in a stable
>position. Due to nails sticking out of the chair on which he is forced to
>sit for prolonged hours his back is bleeding... [he] is deprived of sleep
>for twenty hours a day."
>
>Bulos says conditions improved after the transfer to Petach Tikva, but the
>authorities do not permit him visits from his wife, Rawda, who is a
>lawyer, or their four children.
>
>Marwan Barghouti may be the kind of leader the Palestinians would elect in
>a post-Arafat world, but it is doubtful he is the man Bush and Sharon
>would choose for them. Anyone selected by the US and Israel will have
>Barghouti, even in prison, to contend with.