Mass nonviolence
Even if he wakes up to a prison rollcall every morning for the rest of his life, Barghouti today appears to present a complete conceptual alternative to Abbas when it comes to key issues: reconciliation with Hamas, the immediate cessation of security cooperation with Israel, Palestinian Authority support for nonviolent mass protest against Israel and a boycott of Israeli goods. Barghouti thinks that the “intifada of knives” is a fatal mistake. In a conversation via a mediator who visited him in prison in late June, he told Haaretz that a popular protest should encompass hundreds of thousands of people from all the Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The protest has to be persistent and systematic, in order to create international pressure on Israel to return to the negotiating table and end the occupation.
“There is readiness for a struggle among the Palestinian people; they need someone to lead them,” Barghouti told his interlocutor. “I still unequivocally support the idea of two states for two nations. The PA can proceed in one of two directions today: to serve as an instrument of liberation from the occupation, or to be an instrument that validates the occupation. My task is to restore the PA to its role as an instrument of national liberation.”
Barghouti is regularly visited by Arab Knesset members, some of whom see him as a future leader. “He has an 86-percent support rating among the Palestinians,” says MK Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List of Arab parties. Odeh recently brought Barghouti the massive 1999 biography of Nelson Mandela by the British journalist and writer Anthony Sampson.
MK Jamal Zahalka, chairman of the Balad party, a faction within of the Joint List, visited Barghouti a week ago and relates that the latter viewed the collective run of the Arabs in the last Knesset election as a model for emulation, “for his aspiration to unite Fatah and Hamas in a nonviolent protest revolution. He is the best candidate for president. He has an enlightened worldview about women’s rights, for example,” Zahalka notes.
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