Keep Barghouti Locked Up

By FRIMET ROTH
Jerusalem

First published in the Jewish Press (New York) 28-Apr-06

Will last week's Tel Aviv suicide bombing bang some sense into this government's treatment of jailed terrorist Marwan Barghouti?

It's not very likely. Nothing, it seems, can derail Israel's plan to release Barghouti, a convicted murderer. Just one day before the Passover massacre in Tel Aviv, Israeli sources were widely quoted as asking the U.S. to release Jonathan Pollard in exchange for Barghouti's freedom.

This is nothing new. Israel's government tends to play the Barghouti card whenever it feels its back up against the wall. In the lead-up to the January elections for the Palestinian parliament, Israeli officials lavished Barghouti with perks. They were hoping to stave off a Hamas victory at the polls by empowering him and the Fatah party he leads. The plan failed and Hamas won in a landslide.

But the government of Israel is not fazed. It has now apparently found inspiration in a quotation from Samuel Beckett. The Irish Nobel laureate whose centenary is this year wrote: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Israel's government tried its best to catapult Barghouti to power. As a privileged prisoner, Barghouti was routinely permitted to conduct political meetings with high-ranking Palestinian and Arab-Israeli officials. He was once even granted a 30-minute phone conversation with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas from the prison warden's office. Shortly before the Palestinian parliamentary elections, Israel Prison Service head Yaakov Ganot approved a series of television interviews in which Barghouti dropped incendiary lines like: "I support the Palestinian intifada and Palestinian resistance." The word 'remorse' seems not to be in his lexicon.

Several prominent Israeli politicians, including Avraham Poraz, Meir Shitreet and Gideon Ezra, dropped broad hints prior to the Palestinian elections that Barghouti - whom they tout as a "moderate" - will soon be released. Spokesman for Israel's Prison Service, Ian Domnitz, has repeatedly referred to Barghouti as a "security prisoner".

Question for Domnitz: Since when are security prisoners sentenced to five consecutive life sentences plus forty years, as Barghouti was?

These lame tactics were, of course, in vain. The die had already been cast by Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. As Ari Shavit wrote in Haaretz several days ago: "The basic law of the Israeli-Palestinian jungle is that Israeli withdrawal does not restrain the conflict, but escalates it."

But true to Beckett's dictum, Israel aims to "try again" and "fail better". Will the Israeli public sit silently by? I fear it will. The groundwork for Barghouti's release has been impressively laid. We have been lulled into believing that the intifada of October 2000 is over. Contradictory statistics are conveniently ignored. How many know that during 2005, the year of the "Tahdia" - the declared calm, usually translated inaccurately as truce) - no fewer than 2,990 terrorist attacks were carried out against Israeli targets? They included 377 rocket attacks, 22% more than in 2004, before the 'calm'.

How many are aware that since January 2005, 36 civilian Israelis and 12 soldiers died at the hands of Palestinian terrorists? Or that in the first three months of 2006, 90 Palestinians trying to carry out suicide bombings were arrested. That is more than half the number of such interceptions in all of 2005.

Against a backdrop this bleak, why does Israel seem so hell-bent on making a mockery of its own judiciary? Two years ago, a three-judge criminal court adjudged Barghouti guilty of involvement in the murders of an Israeli woman and a Greek Orthodox priest and of direct responsibility for the murders of three other Israelis in a Tel Aviv shooting attack. The court also convicted him of involvement in a failed suicide bombing at the huge Malcha shopping mall in Jerusalem. Many more murders were attributed to his Tanzim faction, even though Barghouti could not be personally linked to them. And several of the Hamas terrorists who murdered my fifteen year old daughter, Malki, in August 2001 were sheltered by Barghouti himself.

Yes, Hamas and Barghouti have long maintained a close relationship, a fact the Israeli media and government have strikingly ignored, and perhaps even concealed. But Alastair Crooke, a former senior British Intelligence official, recently put it bluntly: "The close relationship of mutual respect between Hamas and Marwan has long roots that pre-date the Intifada. Neither, as far as I am aware, has made a policy statement of substance without advising the other in advance."

In its zeal to free Barghouti, Israel has crossed a sacrosanct red line. Previous prisoner releases have always excluded terrorists with "blood on their hands" in the famous Israeli expression. Now, with no debate and little fanfare, that line has been erased. By anyone's estimate, Barghouti's hands are plenty bloody.

In linking Barghouti's release to Jonathan Pollard's, the government of Israel is demonstrating gross insensitivity to the pain of terror victims. Can a spy be equated with a mass murderer? Plainly, the strategy is to blunt the protests that such a release would otherwise trigger. Pollard's release is a popular cause in Israel. Who dares to impede it?

But, I for one, am not that easily bought. I will not sit silent while the memory of my daughter and all the other innocents murdered by terrorists like Barghouti are spat on by our leaders.

Earlier this year, in an interview with Britain's Channel 4, Barghouti was asked whether he thought he would spend the rest of his days in an Israeli jail. "No, absolutely. I will be free…" he predicted. It is up to us to remind him and his active partners in terror that he is mistaken: Israel's justice system is not a farce. Israelis are not fair game. Terrorists do face retribution, even in Israel.

Unless we speak out, Barghouti will be released and our government will "fail better" than in the past. The consequences will be far grimmer than they were this Passover.

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Frimet Roth lives in Jerusalem from where she writes on a freelance basis about events in the Middle East. Following the murder of their daughter by Palestinian terrorists in August 2001, she and her husband established, and now co-manage, the Malki Foundation. She can be reached at frimet.roth@gmail.com