Palestine’s Nelson Mandela (also see Marwan Barghouti)
Updated 2023-10-25
2023-10-10 Time to Free Palestine’s Nelson Mandela A prisoner exchange—which historical patterns suggest is likely—could, despite it all, reopen a path to peace. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded 1,027 Palestinian prisoners (280 of them serving life sentences) to obtain the release of a single Israeli soldier captured five years earlier. Israel now claims that Hamas holds 199 hostages. Meanwhile, an estimated 5,200 Palestinians languish in Israeli jails—and among them is one man who may hold the key to peace: Marwan Barghouti, considered by some to be Palestine’s Nelson Mandela.
Though Israeli authorities labeled Barghouti a “terrorist” after Israeli courts convicted him on five counts of murder, the idea of releasing him is far from a fringe position: Indeed, Alon Liel, formerly Israel’s most senior diplomat, has proposed just that. Deeming him “the ultimate leader of the Palestinian people,” Liel believes “he is the only one who can extricate us from the quagmire we are in.”
As Hebrew University professor Dmitry Shumsky has pointed out, it has long been the unannounced policy of Netanyahu to undermine the more moderate Palestinian Authority by bolstering Hamas, which shares his hatred of the two-state solution. As confirmed by a former Israeli Cabinet minister, Netanyahu actually propped up Hamas, approving the channeling of substantial funds from Qatar to the radical Islamist organization. Paradoxically, then, there has been a de facto alliance between the hard-line Netanyahu and Hamas, long irreconcilably opposed to the existence of Israel.
In this context, the popular and charismatic Barghouti has posed a unique threat to Israel and its persistent claim that it had no plausible interlocutor with whom to negotiate. The influential Israeli newspaper Haaretz captured the underlying dynamic well as far back as 2012, stating flatly in an editorial, “If Israel had wanted an agreement with the Palestinians it would have released him from prison by now. Barghouti is the most authentic leader Fatah has produced and he can lead his people to an agreement.” https://prospect.org/world/2023-10-20-barghouti-palestines-nelson-mandela/
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