Can Marwan Barghouti be the Palestinian Nelson Mandela?

Hamas leaders have declared that any ceasefire deal in Gaza must include the release of Marwan Barghouti, a popular Palestinian leader who has been in an Israeli prison since 2002. In fact, Barghouti might be the key to more than a ceasefire; he may well be the best hope of reviving the two-state solution.

Now 64 years old, Barghouti has been a member of Fatah, the dominant faction within the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), since he was a teenager. He co-founded Fatah’s shabiba (youth movement) decades ago, before rising to lead the Tanzim, Fatah’s grassroots cadres that uphold the organisation’s local-level leadership. Though he has spent more than two decades in an Israeli prison, he remains well-known and widely respected among Palestinians.

I first met Barghouti in the 1980s with my cousin, Mubarak Awad, an advocate of nonviolent activism. Given his interest in the effectiveness of nonviolent struggle, Barghouti had been given the Arabic edition of Nonviolent Soldier of Islam, a translated biography of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an ally of Mahatma Gandhi in the Indian independence movement. Barghouti was keen to learn not only about Khan, but about anyone, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr., who might offer useful insights into how to achieve Palestinian liberation.

This intellectual quest shaped Barghouti’s leadership of the First Palestinian Intifada that began soon after. The massive protests began as a nonviolent uprising aimed at “shaking off” (the translation of intifada) Israeli occupation; violence erupted only after the killing of four Palestinian labourers in Gaza. Barghouti became too high-profile for Israel’s liking, and he was arrested for incitement and later expelled to Jordan.

During this period, Barghouti began to see the weaknesses in Fatah’s structure. Palestinians needed to be preparing for statehood, he concluded, so Fatah had to become a political party. It was a bold idea – and a controversial one. When I mentioned the prospect to Fatah’s founder, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, during an interview in Tunisia, he became furious.

A liberation movement like Fatah could “represent all Palestinians,” Arafat declared, unifying right and left, religious and secular, behind a single aim: liberating Palestinian lands. But as a political party, it would have to create a platform and take a stance on all manner of issues, leading to division and weakness. He then abruptly ended our interview, leaving me slack-jawed.

I have since come to believe that Arafat’s angry lecture was really intended for Barghouti and other young Palestinian leaders in the West Bank with whom I was in contact. And there may well have been some wisdom in it: a fragmented Fatah has, after all, struggled to contest elections against the united Hamas.

In 1994, Barghouti was permitted to return from Jordan under the Oslo Accords that the PLO had negotiated with Israel. But he was no fan of the Accords, doubting Israel’s commitment. And, in fact, far from returning Palestinian lands in exchange for peace, the Accords allowed hawkish Israeli leaders to quadruple the number of Jewish settlers in those lands.

After being elected to the Palestinian Authority’s new parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council, in 1996, Barghouti began advocating actively for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, having learned Hebrew in prison and then building relationships with Israeli politicians and peace activists in order to further the cause. (He also campaigned against corruption in Arafat’s administration and human-rights violations by its security services.)

Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning Palestinian journalist, is a former professor of journalism at Princeton University.