Mick Hartley

Jonathan Sacerdoti at the Spectator on the Free Marwan Barghouti campaign:

The path to peace lies not through seasoned statesmen or regional experts, but through the collective judgment of Delia Smith, Stephen Fry, Benedict Cumberbatch, and naturally, Gary Lineker. They are joined by Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, Simon Pegg and a list of figures known for their contributions to film, fiction, and light entertainment: people with no background or expertise in jihadist Islamic terror movements, counter-extremism, Middle Eastern politics, or international law. Together, they have issued a letter calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti from Israeli prison.

Others happy to sign their names include Miriam Margolyes, Paul Simon, Naomi Klein, Sir Ian McKellen, Sting, Jarvis Cocker, Annie Lennox, Brian Eno, and Paul Weller…the list goes on. The usual suspects, you might say – always up for some easy virtue-signaling.

The letter, signed by more than two hundred ‘cultural personalities’, declares ‘grave concern’ at Barghouti’s continued incarceration, asserting that he has been denied due legal process and must be freed. The implication is clear: here is the Palestinian Mandela, wrongly jailed, broadly beloved, and uniquely placed to lead his people toward peace.

But the comparison cannot withstand scrutiny. Barghouti is not serving a political sentence. He is serving five life terms plus forty years for a series of violent crimes that left five civilians dead and many more endangered. His conviction was not for speaking out or holding office, but for directing lethal attacks carried out by bloodthirsty, religiously motivated terrorists under his authority.…

These planned, sanctioned attacks were executed within a chain of command in which Barghouti played a central role. The Tel Aviv District Court established, after a lengthy public trial, Barghouti’s operational responsibility, not just some symbolic affiliation.

The verdict did not rest on vague associations or ideological proximity. It rested on hard evidence, forensic scrutiny, and the specific legal requirement to demonstrate a direct link between the defendant and the attacks in question.…

To describe his record as anything less than deliberate, lethal wrongdoing is to strip the victims of their reality. The five people whose murders lie at the heart of his sentence were not abstract statistics; a monk driving on a quiet road, a woman stopping for fuel, diners at a restaurant and a policeman trying to save lives. Their deaths were the result of decisions taken by a man who held power in an organisation that made killing civilians a strategy. Whatever political narrative has grown around him since, these killings and the machinery of violence that enabled them, form the hard core of why he is in prison. They remain acts for which he bears direct responsibility, and which the court found to be not only unlawful but morally grave.

Yet none of this complexity appears in the coverage of the celebrity letter. The media largely echoes the petition’s language.

This absence of detail masks a deeper discomfort. For if Barghouti’s supporters were to engage honestly with the facts of his case, they would be forced to answer an obvious question: why him? Of all the possible figures in Palestinian politics, why choose a man convicted of orchestrating the killing of civilians as your heroic potential leader of a would-be ‘peace loving’ state? Could the campaign not have found someone with a less terminal CV? Perhaps a leader implicated in half as many murders – or, radical as this suggestion might be, none at all?

The answer is sobering. Barghouti retains his appeal not in spite of his record, but because of it. He commands loyalty within Palestinian society precisely because he embodies the strategy of terrorism as ‘resistance’. His political cachet derives from his status as a commander, not a conciliator. His image is built on the foundation that he is a man of action, not of compromise. And that, it seems, is what the movement demands.

The BBC, of course, has played its part in fostering this Barghouti martyr cult, with its October headline – Prominent Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti attacked by guards, family says. He was kicked and beaten, unconscious for hours, they said. The Israel Prison Service told the BBC: “These are false claims (fake)”. It all helps though in the drip feed fabrication of this tale of a resistance hero wrongfully imprisoned.

The accusations of Israel brutality against Palestinian prisoners have a long history, helped by the BBC’s willingness to believe anything that serves to demonise Israel. Back in December 2023, as I noted at the time, BBC reporter Lucy Williamson reported on the violence and abuse that Palestinians supposedly suffer at the hands of the Israelis in their jails. Eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal was interviewed by Williamson, and photographed surrounded by his loving family, with his hands bandaged up after the bones were supposedly broken by a vicious beating from the Israeli prison guards. Unfortunately for this story the Israeli Prison Service had a video of Nazzal being released from jail with hands unbandaged, looking fine.

Does anyone really believe that Barghouti was attacked by the guards? – apart from the BBC and, presumably, these “cultural personalities”. It’s all part of the Palestinian playbook.