May 26, 2006 - For revolutionaries, there’s no better education than a few years in prison. They get a lot of time to think, to talk, to read and to write. Few repent in penitentiary, but many refine their ideology and arguments. A long list in the last century would include the famous and the infamous, from Mahatma Ghandi to Adolf Hitler, Menachem Begin to Saddam Hussein, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez among many, many others.
Such is the mystique surrounding jailed rebels that when Marwan Barghouti, the street-smart Fatah militia leader from the Palestinian West Bank, was captured by the Israelis in 2002 (instead of being shot or blown to bits like many others), conspiracy-minded Middle Easterners figured he was being held in reserve, a sort of ‘partner for peace’ on ice. His 2004 conviction on five murder counts dampened some of that speculation. But the diminutive, intense Barghouti keeps proving himself, from prison, a better national leader as a ‘lifer’ than many of his comrades who are still roaming free in Gaza City and Ramallah.
On the outside, the Palestinian government has been facing international isolation and bankruptcy since Hamas won legislative elections in January. Israel has elected a new government under Ehud Olmert’s Kadima Party to follow through with former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s plan for unilateral pullouts from some, but not all, of the Palestinian territories. With no negotiating partner, Olmert has argued, there’s no alternative but to dictate terms. Hamas and Fatah forces have been fighting running gun battles in Gaza, sliding toward civil war. Palestinian terrorism inside Israel continues to bring bloody retaliation. (Earlier this week, a Palestinian grandmother, mother and son died, and a 3-year-old girl was paralyzed, when an Israeli missile killed a notorious Islamic Jihad bombmaker on the same crowded street.)
But inside the special security wing for about 120 Palestinian inmates at Israel’s Hadarim prison, Barghouti has been conducting a quiet dialogue with top men from Hamas and other rival groups. On May 10, they issued what they called ‘A Covenant for National Reconciliation’ calling for a unity government. They also called for a unified national resistance using ‘all available means’ against Israel’s military occupation but said this should ‘concentrate’ on ‘the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.’ They emphasized political and diplomatic action.
Certainly the document fell short of Israel’s demands. When Olmert addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress this week, he was interrupted 38 times by applause, including 18 standing ovations, as he said, 'I extend my hand in peace to Mahmoud Abbas, the elected president of the Palestinian Authority.’ But the point seemed moot unless Hamas, currently in control of the legislature and the actual government, would recognize Israel’s ‘right to exist,’ renounce terrorism, dismantle the terrorists' infrastructure and accept all previous agreements and commitments.
The inmates’ initiative offers a way out. A national unity government downplaying the Hamas role could meet all those criteria for renewing talks. But for more than two weeks that ball tossed out of the prison yard at Hadarim just seemed to lie on the ground. Then, yesterday, Abbas suddenly, stunningly, ran with it. At a ‘national dialogue’ partly conducted over a video link between Gaza and Ramallah (since Hamas leaders from one part of the Palestinian territories are not allowed to travel across Israel to the other), Abbas delivered an ultimatum. Either Hamas agreed to the terms set forth in ‘the prisoners’ document’ in the next 10 days, or he would call a national referendum on it.
Abbas has calculated well, it seems. Polls show that Palestinians want peace talks that could lead to the creation of a Palestinian state, if it’s a viable one on all the lands Israel occupied in 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital. That’s just what the prison paper calls for, so it’s a good starting--or restarting--point for serious talks. A closer look at the big Hamas victory in the legislature last January, moreover, shows a major factor was Fatah’s foolish decision to allow two or more of its own candidates to run in many constituencies and split its votes. The actual margin of the popular vote was only 2 percentage points in Hamas’s favor. And Hamas has discovered since that governing is not easy by any measure.
‘The truth of the matter is that the Palestinians voted for Abbas for president [in 2005] because they wanted a two-state solution,’ says centrist Palestinian author Marwan Bishara, ‘and they voted for Hamas because Abbas was humiliated by the Israelis.’ (Neither Sharon nor Olmert had shown much interest in reaching out then, claiming Abbas was too weak.) Bishara thinks Hamas’ leadership outside prison will accede to the document that its leader inside prison, Abdel Khaleq Natche, signed onto with Barghouti. ‘Hamas understands that the road ahead is rocky,’ says Bishara. ‘A national unity government would introduce them to the world in a more positive way.’
And where does that leave the 46-year-old Barghouti? Still serving five consecutive life sentences for murder. But he came close to running for Palestinian president from jail last year, and he might yet do it again. Certainly he’s a stronger leader now than he was when he was free, and apparently a wiser one as well.