Foreign Policy Terms Mass Murderer a “Dissident”

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions
17 August 09

Last week’s Fatah-party conference took a hard line on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, supporting continued “resistance” activities as well as the existence of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the organization’s terrorist branch. But while this did little to advance the cause of peace, it did provoke a boomlet for an evergreen Palestinian cause: agitation for the release of Marwan Barghouti from the Israeli prison where he is currently serving five life sentences for murder, plus another 40 years for attempted murder.

Despite his murder convictions, or should we say because of them, Barghouti was elected to the Fatah Central Committee at the convention, and it is possible this will lead to an even grander title in the party hierarchy for him in the future. This development spurs some on the Israeli Left as well as peace-process kibitzers elsewhere to renew calls for Barghouti’s release from prison. Their reasoning: Barghouti’s popularity, his relative youth (he’s 53), and a reputation that combines supposed moderation toward Israel with the respect of the most militant Palestinian factions, including Hamas, makes him the perfect peace partner.

A prime example of this kind of thinking is on display in the venerable pages of Foreign Policy, where Jo-Ann Mort contributes to the Barghouti buzz with a piece topped by a misleading headline, “Why a Jailed Dissident Is Palestine’s Best Hope.”

As for the headline, it would appear as though Foreign Policy’s editors have a rather strange definition of dissident, a term that generally conjures up images of repressed writers and human-rights advocates, not someone who planned and organized the murders of civilians like the three people gunned down while attending a bachelorette party at Tel Aviv’s Seafood Market restaurant in 2002. Dissent implies peaceful protest, not mass murder, even if the terrorists involved in this and other bloodthirsty outings conceived by Barghouti claim that their crimes were politically motivated. Mort, however, merely dismisses these details as “his alleged role in the second intifada.”

Mort reports that Haim Oron, the head of Israel’s far-Left Meretz party, has been visiting Barghouti regularly and that he vouches for the latter’s advocacy not merely of a two-state solution but also of a liberal Palestinian state alongside Israel.

There is a long tradition of Palestinians telling Jews and Westerners one thing while employing quite another rhetoric toward Israel when speaking among their own people. But the main mistake here is that Jews who project their own desires for a peace partner onto Barghouti don’t understand the dynamic that has made their boy so popular among his own people.

Rather than dismissing the atrocities Barghouti committed or treat his record as incidental to his prospects, as his apologists do, it is vital to understand that it is precisely because of his willingness to wantonly slaughter innocents on the streets of Tel Aviv that this man is a hero to his fellow Palestinians. The gruesome dynamic of Palestinian political culture rewards those who kill Jews and penalizes those who do not. Fatah’s need to compete with Hamas on this front required former leader Yasser Arafat to launch a terrorist offensive in which his own party’s stalwarts could emerge with the requisite amount of Jewish blood on their hands. Hence his decision to authorize the formation of a “new” terrorist group—the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade—and the decision to let Barghouti’s Tanzim group take part in terror attacks on Israeli civilians during the second intifada.

As the Jerusalem Post points out in a prescient editorial on the subject: “None of the advocates of Barghouti’s release has ever detailed precisely how or when he was transformed from a killer into a peace-lover. None can credibly explain why Barghouti’s own rhetoric, which so contradicts their assertions, should be dismissed.”

Of course they can’t. But the reason for these assertions has more to do with the desires of the Jewish Left—which has been so consistently discredited by the refusal of their Palestinian friends to make peace with Israel on any terms and within any borders that parties such as Meretz have been reduced to irrelevancy—than with the actual intentions of the Palestinians.

The question of whether murderers such as Barghouti ought to be exchanged for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit is one that bedevils Israelis, who must balance the imperative to ransom captives against the moral and security implications of letting a terrorist go free. But however that dilemma is resolved, the notion that Marwan Barghouti is the savior of Middle East peace is more a commentary on the delusions of his Israeli interlocutors and their cheerleaders elsewhere than on the realities of Palestinian politics.

Related: Barghouti Mania

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