The Israeli public’s desire to bring home all of the hostages from Gaza is forcing hard choices for Israel’s rightwing government, which has tried to resist Hamas’s demands that Israeli hostages be exchanged for specific Palestinians held prisoner by Israel, including some who took part in the 7 October attacks on Israeli civilians. The situation has put a spotlight on one man in particular – the Palestinian nationalist Marwan Barghouti, who may be the most important prisoner of all.
Hamas, an Islamist group that has traditionally been bitter rivals with Barghouti’s secular Fatah faction, is now demanding Barghouti’s release from Israeli prison if Israel wants the hostages returned. Even if Israel refuses this demand, Hamas wins support from Barghouti’s supporters.
Barghouti has been in Israeli prison since 2002, where he is serving five life sentences plus an add-on of 40 years for his role in the Second Intifada, which included deadly terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Since then, Barghouti has renounced violence and strongly supported a two-state solution. In a court hearing in 2012, speaking in Arabic to his supporters, he called for “peaceful popular resistance [to] the occupation”.
By now it is well documented that for years the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pursued a strategy that allowed Hamas to rule and prosper in the Gaza Strip at the expense of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority created by the Oslo accords. Netanyahu preferred the more extremist Hamas because it has historically rejected a two-state solution and Israel’s right to exist, making it a non-starter as a negotiating partner.
Netanyahu, who governs with the most rightwing and messianic government in Israel’s history, believed he could keep a Palestinian state at bay by tolerating Hamas – allowing it to control Gaza, with the help of cash from Qatar and elsewhere – and thereby weakening and splitting the Palestinian movement. This myopic strategy, as shown by the latest outbreak of horrific violence, has proved deadly to Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Agreements like the Trump-sponsored Abraham accords, in which some Gulf states signed agreements with Israel that completely sidestepped the Palestinians, seemed to fortify Netanyahu’s belief that he could get away with his dangerous high-wire act.
But this was always an illusion. Even autocratic Arab regimes that tightly control their domestic political arenas eventually have to address the Palestinian issue. Similarly, without a demilitarized Palestinian state by its side, Israel will continue to sink into a disastrous, unsustainable apartheid-like situation as exists already in the West Bank, where Israel is an occupying force. A decision to share the land between two free and independent national homelands must be made to avoid an anti-democratic one-state reality.
Clearly, Hamas is not an option to lead a stable and peaceful Palestinian state. Yet its more viable rival, Fatah, has become corrupt and weak in its decades-long rule in charge of the Palestinian Authority, as neither an actual government nor a revolutionary force. The Palestinian Authority, where Fatah dominates, needs to be revitalized in order to gain credibility among the Palestinian people as well as shape itself back into a plausible negotiating partner for Israel and the other countries in the region.
For that, Fatah – and the Palestinian movement more broadly – needs a leader who is both popular among Palestinians and committed to a peaceful two-state solution. Even in prison, Barghouti has consistently been the person most likely to succeed Mahmoud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority and the leader of Fatah – often with a 30-point spread over other potential candidates, according to polling by the Ramallah-based political scientist and pollster Khalil Shikaki.
When I met Shikaki recently in Ramallah, he told me that even during the current war, with Hamas’s popularity rising due to prisoners’ releases, Barghouti has had a 10-point polling lead over the Hamas political chief, Ismael Haniya. Shikaki expects that lead to rise further after the war.
Despite pressure from the Arab states and the international community, the Netanyahu government is refusing to accept a day-after scenario for the current war that might include a path toward two states. Were Barghouti released from prison, it would be much harder for Israel to continue to sideline discussion of a negotiated and just peace; Netanyahu is already under severe strain due to domestic corruption charges and the discrediting of his government by the 7 October attacks.
The US and the UK are both now hinting at recognizing Palestinian statehood as the first step toward a day-after scenario. The British foreign secretary recently said it outright. And officials in the US Department of State recently told Axios on background that their office was reviewing options for the same.
I recently interviewed Qadora Fares, perhaps Barghouti’s closest political ally, in Ramallah, where he heads the Palestinian Authority’s ministry of detainees and ex-detainees affairs, which oversees the needs of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. “If Biden is serious,” he told me, “the United States has to recognize the Palestinian state to create an international reality, a new reality.”
There have been several well-known government-sponsored and international efforts to create two states through the years. One that was never tried – and has a good chance now – is the Saudi-sponsored 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which offers Israel full recognition in the Arab world in exchange for a Palestinian state. Barghouti, through his proxies, has reportedly accepted the parameters of this proposal. It is especially timely because the Saudis seem primed for regional leadership and are the region’s main bulwark against Iran, an avowed foe of Israel.
As the US, Britain, Europe and the governments of the Middle East work behind the scenes to make possible a postwar, “next day” reality, they are floating names for potential leaders to revitalize the Palestinian Authority; it is critical that the Palestinian people have agency in deciding their own future leaders. If Barghouti is released from prison, he may be both a leader that Palestinians want and the leader that the region and international community needs.
Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel/Palestine for a range of publications. She is the co-author of Our Hearts Invented a Place: Can Kibbutzim Survive in Today’s Israel?
