PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Marwan Barghouti’s long walk to Palestine’s freedom
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
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Ben Reiff
Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Ben Reiff, Deputy Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
Before we dive in, a quick reminder that what we do would not be possible without you, our readers and listeners. If you believe in our mission and would like to support our work, head over to 972mag.com/members and find out how to become a member of +972 or make a one-off contribution.
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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 between Israel and Hamas. 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.
Born in the village of Kobar, near Ramallah, in the then Jordanian occupied West Bank, Barghouti was seven years old when Israel seized the territory in the 1967 War. Military bases and Jewish settlements soon sprung up around his village; neighbors were beaten or arrested for flying Palestinian flags; and Israeli soldiers shot the Barghouti family’s dog for barking.
At 15, Barghouti joined the Palestinian political movement Fatah and was briefly jailed for the first time. He subsequently co-founded Fatah’s youth wing, became a prominent student organizer, and spent four years in prison from the age of 18. After the First Intifada broke out in the late 1980s, he was deported to Jordan before returning to Palestine amid the Oslo Accords of the 90s, during which he was elected to the newly formed Palestinian Legislative Council.
Despite his initial optimism, he grew disillusioned with the peace process as Israeli settlement construction wound up rather than down. When negotiations collapsed and the Second Intifada broke out in the early 2000s, he became one of its primary leaders, asserting the right of Palestinians to resist occupation including by force of arms. After surviving at least one Israeli assassination attempt, he was arrested in 2002 as Israeli forces besieged Ramallah. He was tried in an Israeli court — in what his family and lawyers have described as a show trial — and eventually convicted of five counts of murder and membership in a terrorist organization, and sentenced to five life terms plus 40 years in prison.
Barghouti has served his sentence in multiple prisons, often in solitary confinement. Still, he has remained politically active, continuing to espouse opposition to Israel’s occupation and support for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. Over time, he has become an almost mythical figure in Palestinian politics, consistently topping public opinion polls for hypothetical presidential elections, demonstrating an unparalleled ability to unify a deeply fragmented population. Yet despite Hamas proposing his name for release amid recent Gaza ceasefire negotiations, he remains behind bars.
Israel’s prison authorities have prevented Marwan from speaking to the media for over a decade, but today I’m speaking to his son, Arab, who is helping to lead the campaign for his release. Thanks for joining us, Arab.
Arab Barghouti
Thank you so much for having me.
Ben Reiff
So let’s start with the most recent developments. In December, your brother received a phone call from someone claiming they had recently been released from prison, informing him that Israeli guards had brutally tortured your father, breaking his ribs and teeth, and cutting off part of his ear. What can you tell us about this phone call and what you were later able to ascertain about your father’s condition?
Arab Barghouti
My brother did receive that phone call, and it was an anonymous phone call for someone who’s claiming that he was just released from prison, and it was terrifying, the stories that he talked about, as you mentioned. Unfortunately, we waited four long, long days until the lawyer was given the right to go and visit him. And when the lawyer visited him, the news about what had been said in that call was not true.
But at the same time, the previous assaults were true. He said that he has gone through seven different assaults since the seventh of October. Mostly those assaults happen and occur when he’s getting transferred from prison to prison, because that’s the responsibility of a unit transferring Palestinian detainees, and it’s called Nachshon unit, and they’re known to be the most vicious and aggressive against Palestinian detainees.
I think that it was a bittersweet feeling, the fact that the horrific things that they mentioned didn’t happen to him. But at the same time, the fact that he’s still suffering from starvation, it’s very difficult for him to sleep on his right side because of the injury, broken ribs and so on. But at the same time, we heard that he’s healthy to a certain extent and very strong mentally, which is something that is always good.
Ben Reiff
Who do you think was behind that phone call then?
Arab Barghouti
I have no idea. Honestly, like it happens in here, a couple of other Palestinian detainees families also reported similar calls.
Ben Reiff
As a kind of intention to break people’s spirits, or?
Arab Barghouti
Exactly, it’s to intimidate, basically, to intimidate the family. And you know, talking about other detainees’ families, I think that the last two years have been an absolute nightmare for everyone who has a loved one inside prison. And it’s unbelievable the numbers, when you think about it, the amount of families that are going through what I’m going through.
Ben Reiff
How does communication with your father work? I mean, both for you and your family and for his lawyers. And has that changed over time?
Arab Barghouti
What you need to know is that my father, when he went to prison in 2002 he was put in solitary confinement for three years in a row. That included brutal interrogation that he went through the court process, the trial process, and so on. When he was out of solitary confinement, he went to Hadrian prison, and that’s where he stayed, 16, 17, 18 years of his time.
I personally used to visit my father before I turned 16 once a month, and it was only me and one year older sibling, because we were less than 16. Under Israeli law, a Palestinian is an adult at 16, and Israeli is at 18 only. So when I turned 16, I would see him once every two to three years. I haven’t seen him in more than three years. None of the family members has been able to see him in three years. The lawyer used to see him every week, and then after October 7, everything changed. And I think it’s been really tough on him, because the lawyer has only been able to see him for a few times and that’s it.
Ben Reiff
Yeah. As you said, conditions for Palestinians in Israeli prisons have always been harsh, but the election of this far right Israeli government in late 2022 and Itamar Ben Gvir’s appointment as National Security Minister — which placed him in charge of prisons — escalated the treatment of prisoners to a new level of cruelty and brutality, which intensified further after October 7.
We know of around 100 Palestinian prisoners who have died in captivity over the past two years, amid countless testimonies of systematic abuse be it torture, sexual violence, deprivation of food, water and sunlight, as well as a deliberate policy of allowing the spread of skin diseases. There’s also a bill going through Israel’s Knesset right now that would bring in the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis out of nationalist motives.
In the context of all of this, does your father’s high profile make you worry that he could be a target, or do you feel that his visibility on the international stage and the potential for Western outrage should anything happen to him, maybe offers some measure of protection?
Arab Barghouti
Honestly, he has been targeted. If you look at the last two years, you will find assaulting him several times, breaking his bones, torturing him, starving him, and putting him in solitary confinement, even though he has nothing, obviously, to do with October 7 tells you everything that you need to know.
The fact is, since, as you mentioned, since Ben Gvir took charge of the prisons, his mission became making the lives of Palestinian detainees a living nightmare. And it started before then, but after October 7, he unleashed. He thought, “now I have the protection and the cover to do whatever I want,” and that’s exactly what he did.
You’ve mentioned killing almost 100 Palestinian detainees, and they get killed by beatings, actual beatings. If you go to some stories, you’ll find that people, their skulls broken by the beatings and the batons that they used against them. And these are detainees inside prison, they don’t present any danger. Starving them or medically neglecting their health issues, and they die.
In the last two plus years, my father did lose weight, did get all these assaults and so on. And we need to ask ourselves, why? And in my opinion, the answer is very clear, it’s because of his influence, it’s because of his impact, it’s because of how he’s accepted amongst the Palestinian people, because the current Israeli government doesn’t want peace. I don’t think it’s a debate anymore if they want peace or not. They fear having a unifying Palestinian leader with credibility, with legitimacy, and getting their credibility from the people and not from anywhere else. I think that he’s someone who’s proven that he can unify the Palestinian people, and at the same time, he supports coexistence and moderate solutions and so on. In my opinion, that’s exactly why he represents the biggest threat, because he’s not a security threat — and he’s never been — he’s a politician, but he’s a political threat.
Ben Reiff
We’ll get more onto the kind of political threat that he represents to Israel. But first, I want to ask you also, back in August, Ben Gvir posted a short clip on social media in which he’s seen speaking to Marwan inside prison and threatening him in Hebrew, which is a language your father learned while inside prison, and in the video, he says, among other things, “you will not win.” This was the first time that the public had seen your father in almost two decades. How did you and your family learn about this incident and what was it like to see that video?
Arab Barghouti
I remember that I was sent this video by a friend, and he sent me that video. Honestly, the first few seconds, I was confused why I was sent that video, because I didn’t know that was my father. I couldn’t recognize him from the video at the beginning, and it took me a few seconds to understand what was going on. It was a shocking moment, for sure, for me, and for the family. It was very frustrating the fact that Ben Gvir is the one who does it. He’s a, you can tell he’s a textbook bully with what he did. Taunting a man who’s in a cell tells us everything we need to know about this man’s character. Of course, I was angry, frustrated, disappointed by everything, including the international community, who is seeing a Palestinian legitimate leader getting taunted and threatened by a convicted terrorist by Israeli standards — like you can understand how that’s hard. He’s sanctioned by many countries and so on, and yet there’s no protection.
The message that is reaching us is that Palestinians just don’t matter, because here he is threatening and taunting the most popular Palestinian leader, the leader that Palestinians look up to, and it’s a calculated move. He wanted to provoke the Palestinian people and to show us that if I can humiliate your leader, I can humiliate you all. But then I reminded myself with my father’s discussion always between me and him, and he always reminds me that this is a relationship between the occupied and the occupier. And at the end, when you look at it and zoom out, I think that it’s a great, perfect, actually, representation of the struggle. Because here you have Ben Gvir, who represents perfectly the current Israeli government, and the great face for it. And here you have my father, who, when his people are being starved, assaulted and so on; he’s being starved and assaulted, and he’s a perfect representation of the Palestinian struggle, and embodies that struggle.
Ben Reiff
How have your father and other prisoners responded to the escalating brutality of their treatment by Israeli prison guards? And where does this leave the prisoners’ struggle in general?
Arab Barghouti
With my father, of course, he responded with the best way he knows, which is resilience. He’s been in prison for more than 30 years of his life, seven years of exile. He has encountered many Ben-Gvirs in his life, and he knew exactly what he was signing up for. If you go back to the early 80s when my father proposed to my mother, he told her that I’m not going to be an engineer or a doctor, I’m going to be a politician, and a politician in Palestine pays a very steep price if you want to do the right thing. That’s why the response by him, I’m sure, is going to be resilience, faith, he’s a very kind person. He understands this very well.
But honestly, the rest of the Palestinian detainees issue as a whole has been left alone. Has been left helpless, because if you’re Palestinian, if you want to advocate or to stand by your people, you don’t know where to start. Do you start with the genocide in Gaza? Do you start with the settler terrorism in the West Bank? Do you start with the Palestinian detainees? Do you start with the Palestinians inside Israel who are getting discriminated against every single day, the Palestinian diaspora who are not able to come back to Palestine, the Palestinians in Jerusalem and so on. This is why, unfortunately, they were left helpless. They were killed, they were assaulted, they were abused, they were tortured, they were raped, they were all of that in front of the whole world.
Ben Reiff
You mentioned your mother, Fadwa, who has long campaigned for your father’s release and for the rights of all Palestinian prisoners. In the past few months, your family has stepped up this international campaign. Can you describe how the campaign has evolved over the years and what it looks like today?
Arab Barghouti
The campaign was founded in 2002 right after my father went to prison, and my mother is the one who founded that campaign. It focused locally and grassroots. At the beginning — I would say the first decade between 2002 until 2013 — she went to Robben Island, Nelson Mandela’s cell, and she launched the international campaign for his release, alongside leaders like Desmond Tutu, Ahmed Kathrada, and many others, supported by Jimmy Carter, Angela Davis and many other Nobel Peace Prize winners. I think after that, it gained international prominence, and people started understanding who Marwan Barghouti is and what he represents to the Palestinian cause.
You need to remember that he’s been the most popular Palestinian leader for more than 20 years. So in Palestine, he’s already been known since the days of the Second Intifada, where he became the face of that uprising. But internationally, it wasn’t the case until his trial, which Israel gave it so much importance, media importance, but I think they were not happy with the results, because that cemented him as someone who’s a Palestinian Mandela, as people call him.
But in general, I think that after 2013 had the hunger strike and after the 2017 hunger strike, that was, I would say, a really good, great achievement by the Palestinian detainees. They went 1500 of them, 42 days in a hunger strike, and achieved a lot. But then we got restricted as a campaign a lot after October 7, we didn’t want to go for that, because we were hoping that he would be released in the exchanges that happened.
And after he didn’t, we thought that, of course, we want to go for a global campaign, and it wasn’t released or relaunched by us. It was relaunched by international activists, especially from London, but also in Italy, France, South Africa and many other places who are still doing that. And in the next few weeks, we have a lot also under the campaign, because we want to raise the awareness about who Marwan Barghouti is, and the campaign’s name is “Free Marwan, Free Palestine,” because we want everyone to understand that we’re talking about a leader who embodies the whole of the Palestinian struggle. His release will contribute to the freedom of the Palestinian people, but also to peace and stability in the region.
Ben Reiff
Who are you targeting with this campaign? I mean, is it aimed at the global public? Is it aimed at US policymakers, the Gulf states? Which Avenue do you think has the most potential for getting results?
Arab Barghouti
I think it’s a bit of both, because you can’t go publicly without worrying and caring about political stuff. What I mean by political, I mean building bridges with different governments, Arab governments, Western governments, the American administration, of course, is very important, and making sure that they understand that there is a way out of this. They shouldn’t keep spoiling the Israeli government and giving it exactly what they want under the excuse that the Palestinian people, we don’t have a partner for peace within the Palestinian people, because it’s a lie, and it’s a lie that’s been used for so many years to just sabotage any chance for peaceful solution that will secure, of course, the end of the occupation and the freedom of the Palestinian people.
I think postponing that is postponing the perpetual violence that will never end unless the Palestinian people have our own freedom and independence. I think that we want to show that path politically. Now the public stuff is different, we want to make sure that people just raise the awareness and make sure that people understand this importance for the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause, to give them a platform to keep and to continue the support for the Palestinian cause. I think the end of the brutal bombardment of the Israeli government in Gaza is not the end of the Palestinian suffering. We’re all still suffering in different ways, and he represents a pathway that can get us out of all of this.
Ben Reiff
The Hamas attack of October 7 and the Israeli military onslaught on Gaza has really brought the Palestinian prisoner issue back onto the global agenda, I think, and particularly in the context of negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the release of prisoners in exchange for Israeli hostages. For some of this time, Marwan’s name appeared to be on the table with Hamas campaigning for his release, and even President Trump suggesting that his name was under consideration. But ultimately Israel refused and he was not included in the final deal. Can you describe what that period was like for your family? I mean, the hope, the uncertainty, and then ultimately seeing him excluded from the list?
Arab Barghouti
I don’t know how I can express the period that we’ve gone through, because it’s years of waking up every day, expecting that you might get a phone call that my father got hurt. You get into a stage where you don’t understand where you’re living, what, why, you’re living. It’s a very, very, very tough thing to go through, to be honest with you. Normalizing assaulting my father and beating him is something that I don’t know how you can deal with for any human being, not only for myself. Seeing my mother, who is, as I said, she’s the reason why he is recognized nationally and internationally, a successful lawyer, a very respected person within the women rights movement in Palestine and for heading his campaign and so on. She’s also a human and we’re human beings as Palestinians.
I think that going around and traveling everywhere, one of the things that I really thought was unfair to the Palestinian people, is that narrative that, being impressed with the Palestinian resilience and so on. That’s not something that we want to be about all of our lives, about suffering, about resilience, about taking on the pain and and and so on. We’re humans like everyone else, and we want to have a future. We want to have dreams and fulfill those dreams. We want to have a sustainable economy. We want to have a safe place for our children to be raised and to live in safety and security. But then you wake up to the facts around you, and the facts are fact: a genocide is happening in Gaza, settler terrorism is all over the West Bank, and detainees, and having my father go through what he went through.
I always say, I really wish I was unique in this experience. The problem is that this is an average Palestinian experience, especially in the last few years, because look at what’s happening in Gaza. Can I go to the people of Gaza and start complaining about what’s happening with my father? Or to the people who lost all their farms and lands in the West Bank by settler terrorism? So it’s just tough, but then what’s the choice? The choice is you either put all of these facts in front of you as a reason and the justification to give up, or you decide that giving up is not an option. And that’s exactly what my father has taught me. You need to delete hopelessness from your dictionary so you would never complain about what’s happening, because we’re suffering for a noble cause and it’s worth it.
Ben Reiff
Was your family in contact with Hamas during these negotiations? And can you tell us about what that relationship looks like?
Arab Barghouti
When we say Hamas, you need to understand that there is the political side of Hamas — in Qatar and Turkey and so on — who are in contact with the Egyptian Government, the Turkish Government, with the Qatari Government, Jordanians, everyone in the region. We have our contact with them, like, what’s happening, to try and get information, like all the other detainees families, and making sure, “Is it happening? Is he going to be on the list?” And so, yeah, on that level, of course we were.
Then the deal happened, and he was not a part of it. It was a big blow, not only for us as a family, but I think personally, to the whole of the Palestinian cause that the Israeli government got away with not releasing him. You need to remember that 800 Palestinians with life sentences have been released in the last 14 years since the Shalit Deal, and they keep excluding his name time after time after time. You gotta ask yourself, like, “why?” Because, if it’s, “he did this, he did that,” the other 800, according to the Israeli courts — which I don’t trust, or judicial system — they said that these 800 have way more complicated cases than my father. So why do you release them and not release him? That’s where you will understand that his position within the Palestinian people, and the fact that he’s a unifying figure, the fact that he supports a political solution and coexistence, because they prefer extremists — extremists are easy to cancel. Of course, “we don’t have a partner for peace.” Or they prefer someone who’s weak, and get their strength from them, from the Israeli government. That’s why people need to understand this point, and once they understand this point, they will understand that his release is one of the most important issues in Palestine at the moment.
Ben Reiff
What about the Palestinian Authority? There have been reports that Mahmoud Abbas has tried to prevent your father’s release at various points because it would likely pose a threat to his leadership.
Arab Barghouti
Personally, I don’t think that the Palestinian Authority had any say in the negotiations in the first place. I think these are just rumors to break the Palestinian people internally, I’m not going to say that I give the benefit of the doubt for the Palestinian Authority, because as a Palestinian I’ve never voted before in my life. That’s a crime. You know, if you’re 35 or under in Palestine, we’ve never voted before. We’re talking about 60, 70% of the Palestinian people have never said “this is the leadership that we want.”
I wouldn’t follow those rumors that they, you know, said, “don’t release him,” and so on. But that doesn’t mean that they’re doing their job in general, because, as I said, I represent a generation that is very critical of the Palestinian Authority. I think, personally, that the Palestinian Authority should not be targeted, as you know, to collapse the Palestinian Authority, because you need an agency to represent the Palestinian people. That’s the generational problem that you have in Palestine: you have a whole generation that despises the current Palestinian Authority. So what’s the solution? The solution is having a general election, because that’s where you will have a functional political system. We haven’t had a parliament in 18 years, and when you don’t have a parliament, it means that it’s your legislative council, so you have a dysfunctional political system. In order to solve all of that, elections would be very important, not only to bring a new leader, but also to bring democracy, the whole democratic process, to have youth participation in power, woman participation in power, and so on.
Ben Reiff
I want to go back a little further now. So when your father was first arrested in 2002, he denied having directed the attacks for which he was charged, but he declined to offer a defense at his trial because he didn’t recognize the Israeli courts, jurisdiction or legitimacy, and he also described it as a political show trial. Can you explain why?
Arab Barghouti
it’s because exactly what he said, it was a political show trial. I think that these are not my words: If you go to the independent legal bodies that went, and lawyers did go and attend his trial at the court, and they said that “it would be impossible to say that Marwan Baruch has been given a fair trial.” Because, first of all, there were many violations of international law when they kidnapped him from Ramallah. First of all, they took him from Palestinian territory and put him in Israeli territory, which is against international law. The second thing is that they did not respect the international law that says that my father is a Parliament Member with immunity, so he shouldn’t be arrested. If they want to arrest him, they should talk to the Palestinian Authority, and they should do it on their behalf, that’s the law.
The other thing is that when you look at his case and trial, first of all, the witnesses that they brought, 80% of them were disqualified because they had nothing to say about him. Of the 20% that left, only 12 of them were talking about relevant issues and the 12 that we’re talking about did not actually say that he was involved in any planning. They said that, “yes, we were seeing him, seeing his interviews, seeing his speeches in the streets, we would get motivated, we would do this, we would do that.” You know, there are many examples.
He was saying to the judge, “I’m a freedom fighter.” The judge replied, “A freedom fighter doesn’t blow up children.” Imagine you’re on the second day of the trial you call [accuse] someone as if they literally bomb children. So what justice are you going to get from that trial? The other thing is that you need to remember that seven different ministries with their ministers would attend that trial. So do you think, after all that importance and the media and Sharon and Mofaz and all these personalities, the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister and so on being involved, do you think that really justice would be served?
Of course, it was a political trial, and the reason for that political trial and the purpose of it was two things: The first one is to label the Palestinian leadership as terrorists forever, and the second thing is to make sure that they put the whole of the Palestinian struggle on trial. That for them was the point where, okay, we proved that, “okay Marwan Barghouti is a terrorist, which means that the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinian struggle overrode, is based on terrorism.” And that’s why we would never approve, or even recognize that trial. And you need to remember that the Israeli judicial system is full of flows. More than 800,000 Palestinians have been in prison for the last 58 years, with 99.7% conviction rate and with having the Palestinians under administrative detention, which is illegal by international law. 1/3 of that number are under administrative detention. I don’t think that any sane person would really trust the Israeli judicial system against the Palestinians.
Ben Reiff
And still, as you kind of alluded to there, I think in the years leading up to your father’s arrest, there was evidently a shift in his strategy from advocating non-violence to defending the legitimacy of armed resistance. In a 2002 op-ed in the Washington Post, for example, he wrote, “While I strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor, I reserve the right to protect myself to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom.” How do you understand the shift that he underwent? And do you think it’s one he still stands by?
Arab Barghouti
Listen, I wouldn’t call it a shift personally. I would call it the fact that he was brave in the peace process, and he was brave in the struggle for the Palestinian rights and that’s the kind of leader that he is. It’s not like he’s, you know, shying away from anything. Until today, he would tell you that he was supportive of the Palestinian uprising in the Second Intifada, and he did call for the Palestinians rights of resistance, but resistance against the Israeli occupation. He made it very clear and he was always opposing the targeting of civilians, on the record and off the record.
If you look back, you will find that he always bases all of his political work on international law, and international law does give the right of the Palestinian people to resist the occupier in the occupied territories, and that’s exactly what he’s been advocating for. Now, he’s always said that anyone who can get their rights through political solutions and chooses anything else would be a fool, because for him, if we can get our rights by political solutions, this is the most favorable method. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to give up on our right of resistance when we’re occupied and living under apartheid and so on. I think that he understands that every period needs its tools, and that’s why I really think that he’s someone who can bring the Palestinian together into what tools, what methods, what direction, what vision are we going for.
Ben Reiff
And on that note, in 2006, four years into your father’s current prison term, he co-authored a historic text known as the “Prisoners Document,” which was signed by imprisoned leaders of all five major Palestinian factions — that’s Fatah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It was seen as an attempt to bridge deep divisions in Palestinian politics, and it expressed a unified call for an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders and the rights of return for Palestinian refugees, as well as for reform of the Palestine Liberation Organization as a vehicle for bringing that vision to fruition. Tell us about your father’s involvement in that process and what he hoped the document would achieve.
Arab Barghouti
I think it was one of the most important achievements of his political career, which is gathering the Palestinian factions on signing a document and it was — until today — the only document that was signed by all Palestinian factions altogether. And it was historical, because, you know, you would never dream of having Fatah Hamas and all of the Palestinian factions signed on to a document that had a clear political vision based on the ‘67 borderline, and building and establishing the Palestinian state on the ‘67 borders.
I think it was a very important step to show the international community that we’re not only waiting for initiatives, we’re willing to take initiatives to help the international community help us. You know, it’s a great achievement, because we don’t need to reinvent the wheel once we start working on the Palestinian unity, because you already have the basis for that, and we can build on that at any time, anytime soon.
I think that it’s very unfortunate that the international community decided to isolate the PA back then because Hamas won the elections and basically collapsed. That was the start of the Palestinian division that started in 2007 and the collapse of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and the rest is history, a dark history. In my opinion, it was because of the decision of the Western governments to isolate the Palestinian Authority until it collapses. They could have easily started working with the Palestinian Authority back then, and Hamas would have been a political party and we would have the Palestinian unity.
Ben Reiff
For many years now, public opinion polls have shown that Marwan is the most popular leader in Palestine, surpassing any potential candidate from Fatah or Hamas, including since the so-called ceasefire in Gaza. There’s some irony, I think, in the longevity of his popularity, despite the fact that he hasn’t been able to speak or write publicly for years, and no one knows the extent to which his views have changed while inside prison. What can you tell us about his politics today? For example, as far as you know, is he still committed to some form of two state solution, which, for many Palestinians, feels like a kind of relic of a bygone era?
Arab Barghouti
I don’t think he’s attached to the two state solution as a solution itself. He’s attached to Palestinian freedom, and I think that he’s flexible on the solutions, but he’s not flexible on the objective. The objective is very clear, as I said, Palestinian freedom, sovereignty, living in dignity. Then we can discuss how we can make that happen. He’s someone who is very well educated, he holds a PhD in Political Science, he wrote books, he reads between eight to 10 books a month, he is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic and English and some French. He truly understands how things work, and understands Israeli politics more than anyone that I know, and I think that he will be able to bring the Palestinians together.
He always said, “we need to worry about what we can control. And we can control being unified. We can control building our institutions. We can control not having corruption within our institutions. We can control having a democratic process respected by everyone, respecting opinions and freedom of speech, women’s rights.” He’s always been a huge supporter of women’s rights and equality in Palestine and so on. So to answer your question, of course, he’s a politician and wants to get to a political solution, but I will wait for him to speak about his politics, his political views at the moment.
Ben Reiff
And you mentioned there are a lot of things, I think, from your father’s history and from his generation that it seems important to you to kind of carry forward into today. Are there things you see differently today from your father’s generation?
Arab Barghouti
Yeah, of course. I think it’s very different, our struggle is very different. I mean, if you go back to the 80s, you will find that there were way more initiatives, political initiatives and youth initiatives as well, that were more present. Universities like Birzeit University, for example, graduated all the political leaders that led Palestine afterwards, and he was one of them. He was the head of the student council of Birzeit three times in a row. But also it was different, because, you know, we’re now we’re occupied in a different way. We’re getting bombarded. We’re getting killed at a rate that is unbelievable.
I think the tools that we need to use are different from the tools that they used. We need to work on awareness around the world; it’s really making a difference. We want to make sure that we have a sustainable economy. We want to make sure that we build and aspire to build a successful state and so on. So I think that we have differences. Our generation doesn’t like the word “two-state solution” because it’s, as you mentioned, it’s been used to hypnotize us into believing that there will be a solution without having anything. But I think the struggle continues in different ways.
I think that my father’s biggest pain is the fact that myself and my generation are still going through this. And I remember that he sent a letter once to Ahmad Manasra, the Palestinian kid who got tortured inside Israeli prisons, and he basically apologized to him. He told him “I’ve always struggled and sacrificed so you and your generation don’t have to go through what you’re going through at the moment, and I apologize for that.”
Ben Reiff
In 2021 when the first Palestinian presidential election since 2005 was supposed to take place, your father threw his hat into the ring and was leading in the polls before Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas ultimately called off and indefinitely postponed that election citing Israel’s refusal to allow voting among Palestinians in East Jerusalem. How did your father react to that? What do you think this episode said about the state of the Palestinian political system?
Arab Barghouti
To be honest with you, it’s a very sad story. I think that the 21 elections would have changed everything that we’re living in today. We had so much hope. We started working on campaigns. We were very hopeful — the younger generation as a whole. It wasn’t a secret that my father was going to run for the presidential elections, and as you mentioned, he had great chances to win.
I think it would have put the Palestinian cause in its right place, because we’re occupied, and once you have a President inside prison, you would understand the whole cause. You will understand what’s happening. It will bring that to light. But it’s not about him. That’s the problem — that it wasn’t about him, the problem with what happened. It was about the democratic process and respecting democracy and having a new Palestinian political system and so on. And it’s very, very sad that it didn’t happen, to be honest with you, because we would have been in a way better place politically.
Ben Reiff
And that political system, as you’ve kind of characterized it there, obviously it’s crippled by Israel’s occupation. It’s divide and rule politics, and it’s also beset by corruption and division internally. This is obviously not a system that’s serving Palestinians today. What would meaningful reform of the institutions and culture of Palestinian politics look like, and what’s required in order for that to happen?
Arab Barghouti
I think the most important thing is to take charge and to take full responsibility for our faith, and we can do that by electing a new leadership. I get back to the same idea of elections, not because it’s the only answer, but it’s the most important answer.
In the last few months, I’m sure you’ve noticed all the solutions that get thrown at us are coming from the West, are coming from the international community, are coming from Israel itself, but I think that we’re more than capable of initiating initiatives that can really change the status quo and can unify the Palestinian people into something that we all accept. We need to take into account that the Palestinian people have gone through a lot in the last few years, and you need to deal with the PTSD of what has been happening, if you can, of course. I always say, “we just need the space to have our PTSD in peace.”
I think that the idea after having the elections is that that’s where you will start working in a whole different way, internationally, diplomatically, culturally, making sure that Palestinian culture is everywhere. People are in love with Palestinian culture. The branding, if you want to call it, of Palestine — making sure that we tell the people what free Palestine means. Because one of the things that I noticed is that many activists, pro-Palestinian activists, do is that they want to impose certain solutions — they might be radical, they might be the opposite of radical — on us.
I really appreciate their support, and I really think that their support is essential for us to have our freedom and future dreams. But at the same time, no one has the right to come and tell us how we want to live, what we want for our future, and so on. So I would really like it if people respect that.
One of the things that are happening, for example, people from Gaza, they come out and they say that, “I’m tired of this, I can’t do this anymore. Just do anything to stop this suffering and so on.” And people will start attacking them, “you’re not resilient enough. You’re not like this. You’re not like that.” I mean, you need to stop, we need to worry about what really makes a difference. And what really makes a difference is Palestinian unity having a democratic process. And from there, I promise you that you will have a whole new generation with new blood, new ideas, that will come and rebrand the whole of the Palestinian cause and Palestinian politics exactly where it needs to be
Ben Reiff
In the international media, your father is often described as a Palestinian Mandela. While this symbolism is obviously powerful, I think it’s fair to say that the analogy ignores a lot of differences between the South African context and the Israel-Palestine context. Not least the fact that there is not a unified Palestinian Liberation Movement behind Marwan, and the fact that Israeli politics appears a long way off from being able to produce a de Klerk type figure.
But I suppose the reason we still hear it so much reflects the reality that the Palestinian National Movement finds itself in a kind of strategic bind without any clear direction, almost waiting for some kind of savior figure with the stature and popular legitimacy to reunify the movement, drive it forward, and finally end Israel’s occupation and apartheid. With all that being said, what is it about your father as a potential leader that Palestinians are so drawn to, even after all these years? And what do you think he would say to those who argue that ultimately, he’s still part of the old guard of Fatah, which is bound to Oslo, and therefore he’s unable to lead on an agenda of true liberation for Palestinians?
Arab Barghouti
You said it. He was in prison 23 years ago, so if you’re 30 or under, you don’t know my father at all, and yet they keep voting for him, or favoring him in polls. I think this tells you a lot, because he never promised the Palestinian people with building roads or infrastructure or anything like that. He promised one thing: If the price of my people’s freedom is my own freedom, I’m willing to pay that price. This is something that we truly appreciate. He did, and is paying that price until today. But it’s not only the sacrifice, okay, because the Palestinian people, we all sacrifice in our own way.
It’s the political thinking, it’s the political agenda, it’s the vision. He’s one of the people who are visionaries, and understands how to build a state, how to use politics, how to use all of that.I think this is very important for any person, because it’s a really, really tough job to unify the Palestinian people, to work on a vision, with all the restrictions and challenges that we go through from the international community and especially from Israel. I think he’s capable of doing that.
At the end of the day, I want to make sure that people understand that I’m not advocating for my father to be a leader of Palestine, because that’s for the Palestinian people to decide, and that’s for him to decide if he wants to go to elections or not. What I want is, first of all, to get my father back into my life, having him meet his six grandchildren that he’s never met before, fulfill the promise that he gave my mother 42 years ago, and he told her that, “I promise you that when Palestine is free, we will live a normal life,” and to be back in in my life. The second thing that I want, as any other person in the world, I want my people to flourish, I want my people to live in peace, to live in safety and security, and, most importantly, freedom and dignity. This is why I advocate for my father’s campaign, because I do think that it can contribute to that, which is his release.
Ben Reiff
I think that’s an excellent place to finish. Arab, thanks so much for joining us today.
Arab Barghouti
Thank you so much.
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Ben Reiff
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