With the Israeli occupation of Palestine soon marking 50 long years, and with Israel’s backer the United States unwilling or unable to rein in its excesses, Palestinians have had to turn to other means to resist. The latest is the mass hunger strike now taking place by more than 1,000 prisoners in Israeli jails.
If the reasoning for the hunger strike was not obvious – the mistreatment and torture in Israeli jails has been well documented – it was spelled out by Marwan Barghouti in a New York Times opinion column on Sunday. Deliberately evoking Nelson Mandela – Barghouti himself is often called Palestine’s Mandela – the article laid out the cruelties regularly inflicted on prisoners, many of whom are only children.
For decades, he wrote, Israel’s colonial system has sought “to break the spirit of prisoners and the nation to which they belong, by inflicting suffering on their bodies, separating them from their families and communities”. In reaction to that, wrote Barghouti, Palestinians were responding with the most peaceful form of resistance that there is.
For 15 years, Israel has kept Barghouti in prison. On Monday, he was moved to solitary confinement. But his reputation as the heir to Yasser Arafat has not been diminished.
At a time when Palestinians are increasingly jaded by the inability of their leaders, particularly president Mahmoud Abbas, to make significant changes to their lives, Barghouti, who belongs to the same political party as Mr Abbas, stands out as someone who could command genuine support among all sections of Palestinian society.
No wonder, then, that Israel fears him. Because Barghouti highlights two of Israel’s most pernicious lies: that there is no one to talk to on the Palestine side (when in fact it is the Palestinians who are still seeking a partner for peace), and that the resistance to Israel’s occupation is violent. As Barghouti shows from his cell, and Palestinians show every day, the majority choose non-violence.
