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Over 9,000 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli prisons and military detention centers, many of them without charge or trial. An additional 2,000 were released in October as part of the Gaza ceasefire deal. So vast is the scale of Israel’s incarceration enterprise that around 40 percent of Palestinian men in the occupied territories have been imprisoned or detained at least once in their lives.
While the majority of their names will be unfamiliar to most, the name of one Palestinian prisoner stands out above all others: Marwan Barghouti.
After coming of age as a political leader in the Fatah movement and being elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in the 1990s as an advocate of the peace process, Barghouti would later become one of the faces of the Second Intifada. He survived at least one Israeli assassination attempt before being arrested and convicted in 2002 for involvement in an attack that killed five people, charges which he denies. Over two decades later, he is still being held in Israeli prison.
Over the years, Barghouti has become an almost mythical figure in Palestinian politics. He consistently tops public opinion polls for hypothetical presidential elections even from behind bars, demonstrating an unparalleled ability to unify a deeply fragmented population. Perhaps for that very reason, Israel has refused to release him, even as it released hundreds of other prisoners serving life sentences in exchange for hostages in Gaza.
While Barghouti has been prevented from speaking to the media for over a decade — in addition to facing repeated abuse and long periods in solitary confinement since October 7 — his family are doing all they can to secure his release. In this episode of The +972 Podcast, we meet his son, Arab.
In a wide-ranging conversation covering the major milestones in his father’s political career and time in prison, Arab explains why Israel sees his father not as a security threat but a political threat, why Marwan is attached to certain objectives rather than specific solutions, and why his release would contribute to the freedom of the Palestinian people as a whole.
