[Ppnews] Prison Life of Marwan Barghouti - One Thousand Nights in Solitude

[Political Prisoner News]

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/27/one-thousand-nights-in-solitude/

December 27, 2011
The Prison Life of Marwan Barghouti
One Thousand Nights in Solitude
by JOSEPH DANA

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".

 From Jordan, Barghouti helped organise the First Intifada, relaying 
messages and tactics to Palestinians, mostly aligned with Shabibia, 
in the West Bank. After the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1994 
he returned to the West Bank as a member of the Palestinian 
Legislative Council (PLC), the parliament of the Palestinian 
Authority, and embraced the peace process wholeheartedly.

During his time as a PLC member, he maintained a tough stance on 
corruption inside Palestinian politics and won himself many enemies 
in the upper echelons of power in the West Bank and Gaza. Unlike many 
of his colleagues in the PLC, Barghouti was never appointed to public 
office and derived his political capital directly from the people who 
consistently provided him with strong electoral results.

For Kadoura Fares, the current president of the Palestinian Prisoners 
Association and former member of the PLC, Barghouti's pragmatic 
approach to peace during the 1990s demonstrated his overarching 
desire to end Israeli occupation at all costs. "We had a meeting with 
Israeli officials in Jerusalem in 1996," Fares told me in his 
comfortable Ramallah office adorned with paintings of the Palestinian 
national poet Mahmoud Darwish. "I was very worried because of the 
negative reaction of many Palestinians towards meeting with the 
Israelis, but Marwan calmed me down. He told me that it was the time 
for peace and we must pursue it despite the public pressure. He would 
always say that there is a time for peace and a time for resistance. 
It was a time for peace."

When Oslo collapsed and the Second Intifada engulfed Israel and the 
Palestinian territories in violence, Barghouti embraced armed 
resistance. He assumed a leadership position in Fatah's armed wing, 
coordinating attacks against the Israeli military in the West Bank 
and Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv. It is for these activities that 
Israelis understand Barghouti as a terrorist leader. His friends and 
colleagues maintain that his support of armed resistance as a vehicle 
to achieving an end to occupation was in line with the popular 
sentiments expressed on the street at the time.

"He got credibility for supporting armed resistance from the 
Palestinian street," recalls Laila Jamal, a member of the Palestinian 
Authority's media department from the village of Salfit in the 
central West Bank. "During that time, we saw the occupation in action 
and everyone supported armed resistance. He understood this and acted 
in line with the popular sentiment."

Barghouti was arrested by Israeli forces conducting sweeps in 
Ramallah in April 2002 while he was a sitting member of the 
Palestinian Legislative Council. He was quickly transferred to Israel 
for trial in a civilian court on multiple counts of murder including 
authorising and organising an attack in Tel Aviv in which many 
civilians were killed, attempted murder and membership in a terrorist 
organisation.

Citing the illegitimacy of the Israeli legal system over occupied 
Palestinians, Barghouti refused to accept the charges or stage a 
defence in the Tel Aviv court. During the drawn out proceedings, he 
delivered impassioned and researched speeches arguing that the court 
and the practices of the Israeli military in the West Bank were 
illegal under international law.

He never recognised the authority of the Israeli court system from 
his first statement to the judge in which he proclaimed, "I am a 
political leader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, 
elected by my people. Israel has no right to try me, to accuse me, 
judge me. This is a violation of international law. I have a right to 
resist occupation." Dismissing the allegation, Israel charged him 
with five life sentences for murdering Israelis and 40 years 
imprisonment for attempted murder, which he is currently serving.

Since his conviction, Barghouti has done what he knows best; actively 
campaigning for the reunification of Palestinian political factions. 
After the 2006 Hamas-Fatah split, which resulted in bloody infighting 
among the factions, Barghouti organised a prisoners' campaign with 
members of Hamas, Fatah as well as PFLP and DFLP that called for 
immediate reunification. According to those close to him, like Fares, 
his work on Palestinian unity is a reason why so many Palestinian 
politicians are afraid of his freedom and a possible reason why he 
was left out of the recent prisoner swap.

***

If there is one experience that has the potential to unify the 
Palestinian people, it is the experience of being a prisoner in an 
Israeli military jail. Barghouti's new book, One Thousand Nights in 
Solitude, is, at its core, a book about dealing with the Israeli 
prison system as a Palestinian. Reading like an instruction manual 
for coping with the experiences of interrogation and prolonged 
detainment, the book breaks new ground in the underreported subject 
of Israel's treatment of Palestinian political prisoners.

Israel's military court system has processed roughly 750,000 
Palestinians according to the Red Crescent, but exact numbers are 
hard to obtain. In fact, any sort of exact information about Israel's 
military jail system is difficult to find given its role as one of 
the primary Israeli mechanisms of controlling Palestinian dissent and 
nascent resistance to the occupation.

According to a recent expose by the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz, 
military courts have an astonishingly high conviction rate of 99.74 
per cent. Many Palestinian defendants are put through a programme of 
psychological and physical torture that often results in coerced 
testimonies necessary in the maintenance of a high conviction rate. 
Haaretz has also released reports seemingly confirming the widespread 
belief that torture is widely used and that Israeli military judges 
are often aware that information used in tribunals is obtained 
through psychological and physical torture.

"He is trying to create a civil resistance inside the military prison 
system," said Majad Abdel Hamid, a young artist and political 
activist in Ramallah. "If all Palestinians refused to recognise the 
legitimacy of the Israeli military court system, Israel would be in 
big trouble. This is partly what the new book is about."

Kept in solitary confinement for an extended period and put through 
various periods of psychological and even physical torture, 
Barghouti's book details the tenacity required to not wilt under such 
difficult conditions. In the first chapter, he describes in verbose 
language how Israel used various interrogators to coerce information 
out of him regarding senior Fatah leaders in the West Bank. This 
common procedure was extremely tough on Barghouti since, in the words 
of Sa'ad Nimer, "they wanted information tying Yasser Arafat to 
terrorism and they never got it from Marwan".

Following a political career best understood as leading by example, 
Barghouti sets out to demonstrate how Palestinians can achieve a 
meaningful non-violent resistance against the military court system. 
In addition to the practical information of surviving within the 
Israeli prison system, he details his arguments for Palestinian 
political unity as a means of resistance to Israeli occupation.

The book devotes great detail to his three years housed in a tiny 
cell (measuring one by 1.5 metres) in solitary confinement. It is 
from this experience that the title, One Thousand Nights in Solitude was born.

Fadwa Barghouti is a carefully appointed woman who has spearheaded 
her husband's awareness campaign since the beginning of his current 
imprisonment. From the same village of Kober, Fadwa is a distant 
relative of Marwan, sharing the same fourth-generation great 
grandfather. Sitting in her comfortable office overlooking the Muqata 
compound where Yasser Arafat was confined by Israeli forces at the 
height of the Second Intifada, Fadwa remains confident that her 
husband will be released soon, but is visibly upset at the recent 
failure by Hamas to gain his freedom. "I know why he was not 
released," she told me sipping sugary tea, "but I am not going to tell you."

Sitting under the ubiquitous photo of her husband surrounded by 
Israeli prison guards with handcuffed hands held high, she glowingly 
reports that he is using his time in prison to enrich himself intellectually.

He is a ferocious reader, consuming books in English, Arabic, Hebrew 
and French on topics ranging from French colonial rule in Algeria to 
the latest biographies of the former US president Bill Clinton and 
Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. He also has a 
deep respect for the work of Paulo Coehlo and the Israeli philosopher 
Yeshayahu Liebowitz. Additionally, Barghouti has written two books 
and completed his PhD from the University of Cairo entitled, The 
Legislative and Political Performance of the Palestinian Legislative 
Council and its Contribution to the Democratic Process in Palestine 
from 1996 to 2008. His doctorate, like the recent book, was smuggled 
out of jail one page at a time and took years to complete.

In addition to maintaining public and international pressure on 
Palestinian and Israeli leaders for the release of her husband, Fadwa 
has had to raise her family without a father. One of their three sons 
is now living in the United Kingdom while completing his higher 
education. His other two sons and one daughter live in the West Bank 
and are known in Ramallah for their active social lives and lack of 
interest in Palestinian national politics. Fadwa's dedication to her 
husband is demonstrated in the romantic language used to describe his 
meaning to the Palestinian people.

"Marwan Barghouti is the natural leader of the Palestinian people," 
Fadwa said. "In opinion polls, he is regularly shown to be the choice 
of Palestinians because of his adherence to the two-state solution, 
his fight against corruption and for the rights of women and 
democracy. The people want Marwan Barghouti to lead them in their 
fight against occupation."

Palestinians are exhausted from the emotional and physical toll of 
the Second Intifada. Most express dismay at the infighting that has 
plagued the political establishment since the 2006 fallout between 
Hamas and Fatah but offer little solution for dealing with it. There 
is also a sense that the political establishment is no longer working 
in the interests of the people despite the highly popular attempt to 
achieve statehood recognition at the United Nations earlier this 
year, which Barghouti supported from jail.

"I think what is needed now from the leadership is to have honesty 
and self-reflection. In a way, this is one of the strengths of Marwan 
Barghouti in that he is honest with Palestinians. He doesn't b******* 
us. We are sick and tired of Palestinian leaders who [do]," said Majd 
Abdel Hamid, who is part of the March 15th youth movement that 
demanded reconciliation of political factions earlier this year after 
the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia reshaped the Middle East. He 
does not support any Palestinian political party, like many in the 
March 15th movement, but believes that Barghouti has the power to 
open a new chapter in the Palestinian national struggle if only he is 
released from jail.

Dancing around the subject of the recent prisoner swap, Fadwa 
Barghouti remains confident that the current political leadership is 
afraid of a free Barghouti. For five years she was told by Fatah and 
Hamas leaders that her husband's freedom would come in the form of 
the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. But, at the last minute, a 
month before the controversial deal between Hamas and Israel was 
signed in Egypt, Barghouti, along with nine other senior political 
prisoners, were dropped from this list.

"I believe that there was a weak attempt in the prisoners swap to 
free my husband," Fadwa said, asserting that securing her husband's 
release was indeed possible. "I am talking about the Palestinian 
leadership of Hamas and Fatah. The people have been demanding his 
release for the last 10 years and they simply ignored the people's will."

Indeed, Marwan Barghouti is often cited as a potential replacement 
for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Barghouti along 
with Kadoura Fares and Mohammad Dahlan threatened to begin an 
independent party called Al-Mustaqbal (The Future) in 2005 after 
Abbas offered Barghouti second place in Fatah despite clear 
indications that Barghouti would win national election. Ultimately, 
according to Fares, Barghouti felt that a second party would harm 
Palestinian unity and ran on the Fatah party ticket, securing a seat 
in the PLC as a Fatah member.

Due to the belief that Barghouti would be part of the recent prisoner 
swap, the grassroots movement to free him has lost momentum in recent years.

But, according to Fadwa Barghouti, things have changed and with the 
release of his new book there are renewed efforts to pressure the 
Palestinian leadership to negotiate his release. The Free Marwan 
Barghouti campaign is planning to stage several demonstrations in 
March under the banner that Palestinians refuse negotiations with 
Israel without a free Barghouti to lead them.

"The pressure is on the politicians, all the politicians, to release 
Marwan if they want to move forward with negotiations with Israel," 
Fadwa told me. "Palestinians want their leader to move them forward 
and the political establishment will have to deal with this reality 
in the new year."

Whenever discussions arise about Marwan Barghouti in Israel or 
Palestine, one name is unavoidable: Nelson Mandela. In the 1990s, 
dovish Israeli politicians and political thinkers such as Uri Avenry 
began calling Barghouti Palestine's Mandela. The comparison is not 
without merit: both leaders have refused to swear off armed 
resistance, both have spent long periods of time in jail, unwilling 
to cooperate with authorities, and both have enjoyed a unique loyalty 
from their people that has transcended political affiliations. 
Israeli society will continue to see Barghouti as a symbol of the 
violent Second Intifada, but after his inevitable release, they will 
likely be seeing him sitting at a negotiations table working to end 
the conflict and dismantle the Israeli occupation.

After the statehood campaign in the UN that failed to achieve 
independence, Palestinians are left with a power vacuum and a tough 
road to reconciliation. Now, more than ever, a leader is required to 
bring Palestine's political factions together. When asked who might 
be the leader to open a new chapter in Palestinian politics, Kadura 
Fares paused, and took a long drag from his ever present cigarette, 
"it is not necessarily one individual who can do that with the snap 
of his fingers. Abu Mazen tried, he did a lot, but it was not enough, 
but I do think that Marwan could be the person."

Joseph Dana is a journalist based in Ramallah.

This article originally appeared in The National.





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