Palestine, December 16: Imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghuti believes that a Palestinian state will only be brought about through a combination of negotiations with Israel and popular “resistance.”
From the Israeli jail where he is serving five life sentences, Barghuti, who ranks higher in opinion polls than any other Palestinian leader, laid out his strategy for ending the Middle East conflict.
“The problem is not with the resistance or with negotiations, but what is important is to join them in a creative and innovative way, and not to practice one and abandon the other,” the 50-year-old Barghuti says.
“At the present time popular resistance alongside political work would be useful,” he added, without specifying whether that included armed attacks on Israel or just public demonstrations against its policies.
Barghuti’s approach reflects the balancing act he has sought between confronting the Israeli occupation and seeking a two-state solution through negotiations that have failed time and again over the past two decades.
The lifelong activist, who became fluent in Hebrew during past jail stints, supported the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. But he then emerged as the mastermind of the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, which came to involve scores of suicide bombings in the heart of Israel.
Barghuti said he never supported attacks on civilians inside the Jewish state and, in 2008, sent a letter to Israel’s Peace Now group calling for a “historic reconciliation” that would result in a two-state solution.
Barghuti was sentenced in 2004 to five life sentences for his involvement in deadly attacks. Even so, he is widely believed to be on the list of hundreds of high-profile prisoners demanded by the Islamist Hamas movement in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Gaza militants in 2006.
From his jail cell Barghuti has struggled to bridge the divide between his secular Fatah party and Hamas, and now views Palestinian unity as an essential first step towards resolving the region’s conflicts.
He has called on all Palestinian factions to return to the so-called prisoners’ agreement he helped draft in 2006 along with other senior jailed militants. That called for the establishment of a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem and was embraced by Fatah and Hamas but never implemented.
National reconciliation would be followed by presidential and parliamentary elections to form a “national unity government on a professional basis that does not intervene in political matters,” Barghuti says.
A recent poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) found that if Barghuti ran for president he would win 67 percent of the vote compared to 28 percent for Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya. That was a higher margin of victory than if Abbas were to run as the Fatah candidate.
His presence would also boost participation in elections from 62 percent to 73 percent, a reflection of his broad popularity.
“We Palestinians are very passionate, and whether (Barghuti) is the right leader or not the people are very passionate about him,” says Mukheimer Abu Saada, a political science professor at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University.
Barghuti says he would not make any decision on whether to run until a final date for the elections is set, but Abbas’s announcement last month that he will not seek another term could pave the way for the jailed leader’s rise.
Some have hailed Barghuti as the kind of leader who could unify Palestinians behind a historic peace deal, but his demands are hardly different from those of the Western-backed Abbas.
Like Abbas, he believes the Palestinians should not return to the negotiating table without a complete freeze of Jewish settlement growth and blames Israel and the United States for past failures.
“The negotiations over the last 20 years have failed because of the absence of an Israeli partner for peace and the absence of a fair international patron,” he says.
“In Israel there is no (F W) de Klerk, who ended the racist regime in South Africa, and there is no (Charles) de Gaulle, who ended the French colonisation of Algeria.”
—Agencies