[ Marwan Barghouti has been in an Israeli prison since 2002]
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TIME TO FREE PALESTINE’S NELSON MANDELA  
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Jerome Karabel
October 13, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ Marwan Barghouti has been in an Israeli prison since 2002 _

'Free Marwan Barghouti' Lisbon 2018, by Itmostt (CC BY 2.0)

 

After Hamas’s brutal massacre of over a thousand Israel civilians
and Israel’s massive military response, peace may appear
inconceivable. Certainly, few would blame those unwilling to forgive
the shocking violence of days past. Yet peace does not demand
forgiveness of the unforgivable—and shattering events have a way of
producing unanticipated consequences.

A prisoner exchange—which historical patterns suggest
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likely—could, despite it all, reopen a path to peace. In 2011, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners
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of them serving life sentences) to obtain the release of a single
Israeli soldier captured five years earlier. Israel now claims
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Hamas holds 199 hostages. Meanwhile, an estimated 5,200 Palestinians
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in Israeli jails—and among them is one man who may hold the key to
peace: Marwan Barghouti, considered
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some to be Palestine’s Nelson Mandela
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Though Israeli authorities labeled Barghouti a “terrorist” after
Israeli courts convicted him on five counts of murder, the idea of
releasing him is far from a fringe position: Indeed, Alon Liel,
formerly Israel’s most senior diplomat
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has proposed just that. Deeming him “the ultimate leader of the
Palestinian people,” Liel believes
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is the only one who can extricate us from the quagmire we are in.”

_MORE FROM JEROME KARABEL_
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As early as 2008, polling data revealed that Barghouti was far more
popular
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Palestinians than any other possible leader, including President of
the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail
Haniyeh. But his very popularity was a problem for Prime Minister
Netanyahu.

As Hebrew University professor Dmitry Shumsky has pointed out
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it has long been the unannounced policy of Netanyahu to undermine the
more moderate Palestinian Authority by bolstering Hamas, which shares
his hatred of the two-state solution. As confirmed by a former Israeli
Cabinet minister, Netanyahu actually propped up
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approving the channeling of substantial funds from Qatar to the
radical Islamist organization. Paradoxically, then, there has been
a de facto alliance
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the hard-line Netanyahu and Hamas, long irreconcilably opposed to the
existence of Israel.

In this context, the popular and charismatic Barghouti has posed a
unique threat to Israel and its persistent claim that it had no
plausible interlocutor with whom to negotiate. The influential Israeli
newspaper _Haaretz_ captured the underlying dynamic well as far back
as 2012, stating flatly in an editorial
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“If Israel had wanted an agreement with the Palestinians it would
have released him from prison by now. Barghouti is the most authentic
leader Fatah has produced and he can lead his people to an
agreement.”

_Both Mandela and Barghouti arrived at a hard-won recognition that,
after years of relentless struggle, they would have to learn to live
with their longtime enemy._

The parallels between Barghouti and Mandela, while imperfect, are
striking. Barghouti has spent 27 years in prison and in
exile—precisely the number
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years Mandela spent in a South African prison. While imprisoned,
Mandela’s convictions drove him to learn Afrikaans, the language of
his captors. Barghouti, in turn, has spent his time in jail
becoming fluent in Hebrew
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Critically, both men advocated for peaceful coexistence with—not the
annihilation of—their adversaries.One should not romanticize.
Neither Mandela nor Barghouti were devotees of Mahatma Gandhi or
Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent philosophy; both believed that
armed resistance to oppression was sometimes justified. As early as
1953, Mandela advocated armed resistance; classified by the South
African regime as a “terrorist,” he six times refused offers of
release conditioned in part on his renunciation of violence. And while
Barghouti rejected violence in the early years of the Oslo peace
process, claiming
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1994 that “the armed struggle is no longer an option for us,” he
later embraced armed struggle as he watched Israel expand settlements
in the West Bank and consolidate control. But by 2012, Barghouti
admitted that the turn to violence during the Second Intifada had been
a grave error, and has repeatedly stated
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he supports only unarmed resistance.

Crucially, both Mandela and Barghouti arrived at a hard-won
recognition that, after years of relentless struggle, they would have
to learn to live with their longtime enemy. Recognizing, as he put it
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his eulogy of Mandela, that they must “defy hatred and … choose
justice over vengeance,” Barghouti supports
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in exchange for an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967,
permanent peace between Israel and Palestine as “independent and
equal neighbors.” As such, he stands in stark contrast to Hamas’s
leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who steadfastly refuses to recognize Israel.

Like Mandela, Barghouti earned the respect of his people through
decades of sacrifice and commitment to the cause. And despite his over
two decades in prison, Barghouti remains popular among Palestinians in
both Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Fatah-controlled West Bank. Indeed,
a December 2022 poll by the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey
Research showed that if Barghouti were to run in a presidential
election, he would defeat Haniyeh in a landslide victory
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Barghouti’s release would hardly guarantee an expeditious or smooth
peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians; entrenched
animosity and the continued occupation of Palestine by more than half
a million
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settlers spread out over 199 settlements and 220 outposts may well
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Excruciating concessions must be extracted from both sides,
necessitating a receptivity to compromise that would no doubt arouse
fierce, and possibly violent, backlash. Yet both the Israelis and the
Palestinians must ultimately choose: either an endless escalation of
the cycle of violence and hatred or a grudging recognition that they
must find a way to live together.

Though the intensifying conflict between Hamas and Israel is a genuine
tragedy, the exchange of prisoners that will likely follow the carnage
presents a historic opportunity that neither side can afford to miss:
Israel must free Marwan Barghouti, the only Palestinian with the
authority and vision to bring peace within the ambit of possibility.

_JEROME KARABEL [[link removed]],
professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is
the author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and
Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and several other books.
The recipient of many awards, he has written for The New York Review
of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times,
and Le Monde Diplomatique._

Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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with the permission. © The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2023. All
rights reserved. 
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* Marwan Barghouti
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* Israel
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* Palestinians
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