Page by page, Marwan Barghouti’s anti-war tome walked out of prison

Dec 242011
 

Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza celebrated the return of their loved ones last Sunday as the final wave of prisoners were released in an exchange between Hamas and Israel. However, one prisoner was notably absent. Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Fatah leader known by many Palestinians as the “prince of resistance”, remains behind bars in Israel despite promises from the Palestinian leadership that his freedom would be secured through the exchange of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. On the eve of the prisoner swap, Barghouti released a 255-page book, written secretly behind bars and smuggled out via lawyers and family members, detailing his experience in Israeli jails.

Barghouti is a figure of towering reverence among Palestinians and even some Israelis, regardless of political persuasion. Yet, he was reluctant to begin a life in the political spotlight. In fact, the Israeli occupation came to him, his long-time friend Sa’ad Nimer noted during a long conversation in a dank Ramallah coffee shop. When Barghouti was just 15, living in the small village of Kober just outside Ramallah, Israeli soldiers shot his beloved dog during a military sweep of the village. From that moment on, Nimer said in a haze of nostalgia, the occupation was a personal issue for Barghouti.

A natural leader with admirable charisma and an unwavering hatred of Israeli occupation, Barghouti has been an active political leader since the early 1980s. At age 18, during one of his early stints in an Israeli prison for political organising, he was elected the prisoner representative, a task which required him to unify competing political affiliations of prisoners and negotiate with Israeli authorities. The appointment foreshadowed a long career of uniting Palestinians regardless of political agenda.

Despite his vocal support for the two-state solution and attempts at reconciliation with Israeli civil society, Barghouti has remained a puzzling and aggressive figure for Israel. “When Marwan got out of jail the second time [in 1982 at age 23], the Israelis did not know what to do with him,” said Nimer, who is the director of the Free Marwan Baghouti Campaign based in Ramallah. In the early 1980s, Barghouti was a primary organiser in the Shabibia movement, a Fatah-based student group that campaigned for better education standards in Palestine. The movement, still active in the West Bank, was a primary organising vehicle of the First Intifada.

While not overtly against the occupation, Barghouti’s early political activity was understood by Israel as a threat and he was deported to Jordan under extraordinary circumstances. According to Nimer, “Jordan was not taking deportees at the time, so the Israelis just put him on a helicopter and dropped him into the middle of the Jordanian desert, desperate to get rid of him”.
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  •  24/12/2011

Palestinians prisoners are out of jail, but not yet free

Dec 222011
 

RAMALLAH // Celebrations marking the release of 550 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails stretched into the early hours of yesterday morning, but life outside prison will not necessarily mean freedom from the long arm of Israeli authorities.

Just ask Fakhri Barghouti.

Mr Barghouti walked out of jail in October, part of the first phase of the Egypt-brokered swap of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for a captured Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group Hamas for five years.

A cousin of the imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, he discovered that liberation from an Israeli jail did not necessarily mean freedom from Israeli harassment – a cautionary tale for those prisoners released late on Sunday in the second and final phase of the exchange.

“Shortly after I was released, soldiers raided my house at 2am and gave me orders to come to the Ofer military prison the following day,” Mr Barghouti recalled from his home in Kober, a village near Ramallah. “It was all very threatening and they conducted a number of humiliating searches during the interrogation. The army wanted to send me the message that they are still in control. ”

Mr Barghouti, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1978 for killing an Israeli soldier with a knife near the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, said that many of his fellow prisoners who were released in the first phase of the swap have been subjected to similar searches and interrogations.

In one instance, Mr Barghouti said, Israeli soldiers raided the house of a recently freed prisoner and forced his family to stay outside for hours in the middle of the night, only to take him away for interrogation at Ofer.

Despite criticism from Palestinian officials involved in the exchange, Israel attached strict terms to the release of many of the prisoners. According to the Issa Qaraqe, the minister of prisoner affairs for the Palestinian Authority, most of those released in October are required to report weekly or monthly to Israeli authorities – an Israeli tool, Mr Qaraqe said, to track the movements of their former captives.

“It is like they were never really let out of jail,” said Kadoura Fares, the president of the Palestinian Prisoners Association in Ramallah. “I warned Hamas not to sign on to these conditions, which deprive prisoners their dignity to live in quiet freedom. But they did it anyway.”

Families of recently released prisoners have also paid a price. Israel has reportedly barred the relatives of prisoners from visiting them in Jordan, where they were deported after the release. Israeli authorities said the families were denied exit permits for unspecified “security reasons”.

A spokesman for the Israeli military refused to comment on the rules for freed Palestinian prisoners, saying “the information is spread across a number of departments including the ministry of defence”.

The release conditions have become a source of tension between the Fatah and Hamas. In the run-up to the prisoner swap, Hamas officials announced that they would not accept an agreement with Israel that included strict conditions on freed prisoners and the deportation of former prisoners.

In the end, however, they agreed to a deal stipulating that more than 200 prisoners would not be able to return home to the West Bank upon their release.

Eighteen prisoners from East Jerusalem and the West Bank were deported to the Gaza Strip for a period of three years, according to the Palestinian prisoner-rights organisation Addameer. Another 146 prisoners were transferred to Gaza for an indefinite period, and 41 were exiled to Jordan and other neighbouring countries.

“Hamas is claiming that conditions on recently freed prisoners and deportations were not part of the agreement. But in fact they were part of the officially signed document. Now they are trying to deny responsibility for these conditions,” Mr Qaraqe said.

Fakhri Barghouti is happy to be back with his people but has a hard time reconciling life under occupation and the conditions placed on his movement.

“I left prison but the occupation is still here. I have more freedom than in prison, but it’s still the same occupation,” he said. “It’s just that I have more freedom of movement.”

Published in The National on 20 December 2011

  •  22/12/2011

US-made tear gas becomes fatal ingredient of protests

Dec 222011
 

Residents of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank have been demonstrating, each week for the past two years, against the slow encroachment on their land by Israeli settlers.Gathering in the village centre on Friday afternoons, villagers along with Israeli and international activists attempt to march, under the watchful eye of soldiers, to a disputed agricultural spring which was confiscated recently by Israeli settlers.

Often protesters never even reach the edge of the village; crowd-control measures by the military regularly include barrages of tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinian villagers claim that hundreds of protesters have been injured, some seriously, in the Nabi Saleh demonstrations. But no one had been killed there – until last week.

The death of 28-year-old Mustafa Tamimi may seem to have little in common with the more numerous deaths of protesters in Cairo over the past few days. Indeed the demonstrations are different from each other in many ways. But in protests from Tunis to Cairo to little Nabi Saleh, the use of tear gas by authorities, and the increasing number of related fatalities, has become a common thread in recent months.

Mr Tamimi’s injuries occurred amid a fairly common occurrence in the West Bank: protesters were throwing stones at armoured Israeli vehicles. As the demonstration slowed towards the end of the day, one Israeli jeep stopped as it was making its way out of the village. The vehicle’s back door opened wide enough for a tear-gas launcher, known to Israeli soldiers as a “ringo”, to fire a single canister of the gas.
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  •  22/12/2011

The long road ahead for Palestine’s statehood aspiration

Nov 302011
 

On September 23, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman and PA president, officially submitted Palestine’s application for full membership in the United Nations, with a bold speech delivered to the General Assembly. During the address, cities throughout the West Bank were alight with excitement. Young and old celebrated almost as if the UN had already granted Palestine full membership to the international governing body. Palestinians appeared to momentarily disregard the daily burden of Israeli occupation and instead embrace the euphoric vision of independence, political rights and a state of their own. Yet, as is all too often the case, their euphoria was short-lived. The day after was met with the sharp reality of an interminable status quo.

For nearly two decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been characterised by a cycle of endless negotiations and episodic violence. Given the entrenchment of Israeli occupation, seen most clearly in its continued building of settlements in the West Bank, few observers see the viability of an equitable two-state settlement arrived at through negotiations.

The PA is now firmly engaged in what is perceived by many in the West Bank as a last-ditch effort to save the negotiations process by elevating their status inside Palestine and in the international community, thereby strengthening their position in relation to Israel.

Viewed from the standpoint of a negotiated two-state solution, the Palestinian statehood bid is not far-fetched, extreme or irrational. But the question remains, do the majority of Palestinians still believe in a process that has brought increased dispossession and a fracturing of the Palestinian political body?

“The Palestinians have lost confidence in the negotiations. How to get confidence again … I believe, this is the challenge,” says Ahmad Queri’a, former prime minister of the PA and current member of the executive committee of the PLO. Sitting in his office in Abu Dis on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, Queri’a noted: “I believe that we need to think about a new mechanism for negotiations.”

Underlying the statehood bid is a mounting crisis of legitimacy for a Palestinian leadership that has been unable to bring an end to the occupation through negotiations. According to a report released by the International Crisis Group in early September, this predicament has only been enhanced by the increasing economic strain being experienced by the PA, and the renewed motivation for change inspired by the Arab Spring.
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  •  30/11/2011

Replacing the peace narrative with discussion of rights

Nov 302011
 

Non-violent methods being used by Palestinians and their international supporters are helping to reframe the conflict from a discussion of peace vs. violence, into a struggle for rights under Israeli occupation.

Next week, a group of young Palestinians will board Israeli settler buses in the West Bank with the intention of traveling to East Jerusalem. The activists will likely be greeted by fully armed Israeli settlers, as well as soldiers. The threat of Israeli violence has not deterred Palestinians who maintain that they are prepared to pay a price to highlight Israel’s segregationist policies in the West Bank.

While not officially segregated, Israeli bus lines often pass through Jewish-only settlements which dot the rugged West Bank landscape. Palestinian entry to Jewish settlements is strictly forbidden, unless, of course, Palestinians are engaged in construction of the settlements, most of which are considered illegal under international law.

The upcoming protest event is being labelled by organisers as the Palestinian “Freedom Rides”. In the early 1960s, white and black activists boarded segregated buses in the American south in an effort to draw attention to the racism of Jim Crow legislation. The protests caused panic in the south and helped chip away at segregation in the US. Palestinian organisers hope that the same effect will take place in the West Bank although they understand that their battle begins with challenging the narrative of the conflict.
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  •  30/11/2011
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