Israel’s most influential Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti remains both a symbol and a controversy. Photo / Getty Images
Marwan Barghouti was already viewed as the world’s most important prisoner before he was allegedly beaten by Israeli guards last month.
For many Palestinians, he has long represented their best chance of achieving a state of their own.
A significant number of Israelis – particularly those officials who have met him – think he could hold the key to lasting peace in the Holy Land.
Then, in the middle of last month, Israel inadvertently struck a blow that further burnished the legend of Barghouti, the 66-year-old peace-activist-turned-militant leader who has languished in its prisons for more than 23 years.
What exactly happened is in dispute.
According to five Palestinian prisoners released last week as part of a ceasefire deal, guards beat and kicked him unconscious on September 14, breaking four ribs.
To family members, the alleged assault is proof that Israel is determined not only to hold on to its most valuable Palestinian prisoner – even as it frees hundreds of others – but perhaps even to kill him and deprive Palestinians of their most credible leader-in-waiting.
“I fear we are watching his slow-motion assassination,” said Barghouti’s younger brother, Muqbel.
Before October 7, 2023, when family visits were still permitted, he always found his brother in good spirits.
Marwan kept fit, studied and taught other prisoners. But since the Hamas massacre that day, he said, Barghouti had been beaten four times.
Israeli officials denied the allegations, insisting that Barghouti had never been physically harmed, though Itamar Ben-Gvir, the hardline Security Minister who visited him in prison, could not resist boasting about how much tougher he had made prison life.
“The allegations made by the arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti are false, but, at the same time, we are proud that Barghouti’s conditions completely changed during my tenure,” he said.
Whatever the truth, the allegations are only likely to strengthen the credentials of a man who could yet become the next President of the Palestinian Authority, whether or not he remains behind bars.
No other political figure from either Hamas or its secular rival Fatah comes close to matching his popularity.
Were there a Palestinian presidential election – something that has not happened in more than 20 years – polls suggest that Barghouti would win more votes than his two closest challengers combined.
Many former senior Israeli officials argue that, whatever his record of violence, there has never been a more articulate Palestinian proponent of Israel’s right to exist.
Israel has reportedly come close to releasing him – convicted in 2004 of ordering attacks that killed five civilians – on several occasions, most notably last year, only to back away at the last moment.
Speculation rose again last week when Hamas placed him at the top of the list of prisoners it wanted freed, even though Barghouti never belonged to the group and has deplored everything it stands for. Israel refused.
So who is Marwan Barghouti – saviour or fiend, partner in peace or cunning trickster? A Palestinian Mandela, or a new Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 massacre?
And in refusing to release him, has Israel missed an opportunity – or dodged a bullet?
Time has worn the house where Barghouti was born to rubble, but the ruins beside a dusty street in the West Bank village of Kobar still command a charming view over the terraced valley below.
Through the leaves on an olive tree, beneath which two donkeys bray in the afternoon heat, one can clearly make out the terracotta-tiled villas of the Jewish settlement of Ateret.
For the Barghouti family, its construction in 1981 was another sign of Israel’s growing territorial ambitions since seizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan during the Six-Day War of 1967.
Barghouti was nearly 8 when the tanks first rolled in. His political awakening came two years later, when Israeli soldiers, irritated by the family dog’s barking, shot it dead.
Muqbel Barghouti, then 4, solemnly watched as his brother buried the animal with his own hands.
“He was heartbroken,” he said. “It was really more his dog than anyone else’s, and its death left a huge scar on him. It was his first experience of the cruelty and injustice of occupation.”
As he grew, Marwan Barghouti embraced resistance, first of the non-violent sort with the Communists, later as a member of a Fatah militia carrying out violent attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank.
Arrested in a raid in Kobar when he was 18, he spent his twenties in and out of Israeli jails, studying politics, learning Hebrew and reading accounts of how Jewish militias drove out the British through bombings and sabotage to create the state of Israel.
During seven years of exile in Jordan, he helped co-ordinate the largely non-violent First Intifada, or uprising, that paved the way for the Oslo Accords of 1993, and joined the triumphant return of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) to the West Bank.
Few within Fatah, the PLO’s dominant faction, championed Oslo’s promise more passionately than Barghouti, recalls Yossi Beilin, the left-wing Israeli minister who initiated the secret talks leading to the accords. The two men met often.
Barghouti also reached across the aisle.
Meir Sheetrit, a Likud legislator, took a delegation of party colleagues to Italy in the early 1990s to meet him. Like many Israeli officials, Sheetrit, who later served in several Likud cabinets, was struck by the Palestinian’s flawless Hebrew and dry humour.
“We made a deep connection,” he recalled.
“He made jokes about Arafat. I made jokes about Israeli leaders. We became friends, and I had the impression that he was a strong supporter of peace with Israel – in my opinion, the strongest. I’ve not changed my mind.”
Yet the promise of Oslo soon curdled. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the Oslo Accords, was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995.
A year earlier an Israeli settler shot dead 29 Palestinians at prayer in a mosque in Hebron.
The election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 all but stalled the peace process. Jewish settlements kept expanding.
Hamas, then in its infancy, attracted popularity with a campaign of suicide bombings.
Impatient Palestinians turned on Arafat, Barghouti – seen as the ailing Arafat’s successor – and Fatah, accusing them of doing nothing to counter Israel.
By 2000, with the more dovish Ehud Barak now in office but still little sign of progress, Barghouti’s patience had run out.
Yossi Beilin, then justice minister, recalls him arriving for a meeting in May that year with a warning: “If there is no progress in the peace process, there will be violence”.
Beilin begged him to be patient, but the Palestinian was immovable. “The horses are already out of the stable,” he said.
Four months later, the Second Intifada erupted. This time, non-violence was no longer an option.
Barghouti played a central role in establishing Fatah’s armed wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which killed hundreds of Israelis before the uprising burned itself out in 2005.
He continued to insist his ultimate aim was peace: “I’m not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist,” he declared. “I do not seek to destroy Israel but to end its occupation of my country.”
Israel attempted to kill him several times before seizing him in Ramallah in 2002.
At his trial two years later, he refused to mount a defence, rejecting the court’s legitimacy.
Acquitted of orchestrating 33 attacks that killed 21 people, he was convicted of ordering three that killed five – including three diners shot dead at a seafood restaurant in Tel Aviv.
Ever since, Israelis have debated whether he should be freed. Some question the evidence; others believe he resorted only to violence after being outflanked by Hamas – and that his heart was never truly in it.
But sceptics abound. One former intelligence officer calls support for his release “dangerous, deluded romanticism”.
Another cites the example of Sinwar, who was freed in 2011 only to mastermind the October 7 attacks 12 years later. Barghouti may have become further radicalised in prison, they argue.
Yet both Sheetrit and Beilin argue that Barghouti’s continued imprisonment is not about risk, but politics.
As long as Netanyahu’s coalition depends on pro-settler hardliners, releasing Barghouti – a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and two-state ideals – is unthinkable.
It is a view shared by Palestinian officials.
“They don’t want to release him because it would appear like a big victory for the Palestinians,” said Sabri Saidam, a member of the Fatah central committee.
“Barghouti is an icon. Releasing an icon would be seen as a major setback by Israeli settlers.”
Muqbel Barghouti, longing for the day his older brother is freed, insists Israel has nothing to fear.
“Marwan remains convinced that there is no other choice for the Palestinian cause but to continue talking to the Israelis and working for two states – one for us and one of them,” he said.
“He doesn’t want revenge. He knows what needs to be done. He wants to talk to Israelis, not fight them.”
The tragedy, he says, is that no one in the Israeli Government wants to talk to him.
In South Africa, he adds, Nelson Mandela was able to assuage white fears because FW De Klerk, the country’s white president, had the courage to face down the right and take the gamble to free him.
“We have a Palestinian Mandela,” Barghouti said.
“What we need now is an Israeli De Klerk willing to free him and pave the way for an era of reconciliation so we can finally have two states for two people.”