Will Marwan Barghouti be the Palestinian Nelson Mandela?

[Little Tich]

Source: Haaretz

Nearly a decade and a half after he began serving multiple life sentences for his role in the killings of the second intifada, Marwan Barghouti is still seen – among most Palestinians, many Israelis and world leaders – as the man who could lead his people to independence. Through a mediator, Barghouti tells Haaretz that he remains a staunch proponent of the two-state solution and that he intends to run for Palestinian president should elections be held.

On April 15, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz called the defense minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer. “The Shin Bet has tracked him down. We know where he’s hiding,” Mofaz told the minister.

“I don’t want him liquidated – just arrest him,” Ben-Eliezer implored Mofaz. In his view, the most-wanted individual would be the next leader of the Palestinians, after the Yasser Arafat era.

“If he tries to resist and fight, we will shoot him,” Mofaz told his boss, “but I’m willing to bet he will give up without a fight. He has no guts.”

In the months before he was located, Marwan Barghouti behaved like a hunted man. “We tried to eliminate him twice, we wasted his people right and left,” Avi Dichter, the head of the Shin Bet security service at the time, told Haaretz.

Read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.728135

Note: Long article, but worth a read.

[Little Tich]

1. More from the article:

Mass nonviolence

Even if he wakes up to a prison rollcall every morning for the rest of his life, Barghouti today appears to present a complete conceptual alternative to Abbas when it comes to key issues: reconciliation with Hamas, the immediate cessation of security cooperation with Israel, Palestinian Authority support for nonviolent mass protest against Israel and a boycott of Israeli goods. Barghouti thinks that the “intifada of knives” is a fatal mistake. In a conversation via a mediator who visited him in prison in late June, he told Haaretz that a popular protest should encompass hundreds of thousands of people from all the Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The protest has to be persistent and systematic, in order to create international pressure on Israel to return to the negotiating table and end the occupation.

“There is readiness for a struggle among the Palestinian people; they need someone to lead them,” Barghouti told his interlocutor. “I still unequivocally support the idea of two states for two nations. The PA can proceed in one of two directions today: to serve as an instrument of liberation from the occupation, or to be an instrument that validates the occupation. My task is to restore the PA to its role as an instrument of national liberation.”

Barghouti is regularly visited by Arab Knesset members, some of whom see him as a future leader. “He has an 86-percent support rating among the Palestinians,” says MK Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List of Arab parties. Odeh recently brought Barghouti the massive 1999 biography of Nelson Mandela by the British journalist and writer Anthony Sampson.

MK Jamal Zahalka, chairman of the Balad party, a faction within of the Joint List, visited Barghouti a week ago and relates that the latter viewed the collective run of the Arabs in the last Knesset election as a model for emulation, “for his aspiration to unite Fatah and Hamas in a nonviolent protest revolution. He is the best candidate for president. He has an enlightened worldview about women’s rights, for example,” Zahalka notes.

[shira]

2. You support Barghouti? n/t

[Little Tich]

3. Not really, but the article was interesting.

Israel has worked really hard to prevent a Palestinian state, and it seems as if it worked. The bi-national state will happen with or without Barghouti, but it might be less painful if he was allowed to help.

[shira]

4. There's a reason Hamas and Islamic Jihad love Barghouti...

It's because he's their kind of terrorist; a relentless and unrepentant Jew hating murderer.

That you think he'd help in the peace process goes to show how little you know of I/P.