For many Israelis, Marwan Barghouti is a terrorist rightly jailed for his role in the Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s who should spend the rest of his life in prison.
But for Palestinians, he is a freedom fighter who embodies their just resistance to Israel’s half-century occupation of their lands. And when Hamas has been setting out its conditions for freeing the remaining 130 Israeli hostages it holds in Gaza, Barghouti’s release was among them.
Hamas’s demand has cast Barghouti — the most popular Palestinian politician despite his 22-year incarceration — back into the spotlight at a time when western and Arab diplomats are debating how to revitalise the Palestinian leadership once the war between Israel and Hamas is over.
Negotiations for a second round of hostage swaps, where Israelis held by Hamas will be released for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, could bear fruit as early as next week, US President Joe Biden said on Monday.
That progress has been made possible by Israel finally agreeing to consider the release of so-called “heavy” prisoners, a reference to those jailed for the killing of Israelis, although it remains unclear whether they would be traded for civilians or for Israeli soldiers held captive.
“Marwan is the heaviest of the heavies,” said an Israeli official who was involved in Barghouti’s capture and trial. “Releasing him would be so politically expensive that it is seen as the final straw — when no other options exist to secure the release of our hostages.”
Israel is not at that point yet, the person said. For now, the indirect negotiations with Hamas — brokered by Qatar, and supported by US and Egyptian intelligence — have inched forward, with Hamas appearing to soften a demand for a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.
“It’s very complicated,” said Gershon Baskin, director of Middle East operations at the International Communities Organisation, who was involved in negotiating Hamas’s release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. “But there won’t be a deal unless there are prisoners who have murdered Israeli Jews released in it.”
Barghouti, 64, came to prominence as an activist during the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s. Israel deported him to Jordan, but he returned to the occupied West Bank in the wake of the 1990s Oslo Accords where he became the leader of the Tanzim, the armed wing of the Fatah faction.
Following the eruption of the second intifada in 2000, he was arrested and convicted of five counts of murder and membership of a terrorist organisation, after declining to offer a defence and refusing to recognise the Israeli court.
But despite his support for armed resistance, Barghouti also backed the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a position that prompted some Israeli politicians to view him as a possible partner. During his campaign for the Israeli presidency in 2007, the leftwinger Shimon Peres pledged to pardon Barghouti if elected, but never did.
“He believed in armed resistance, but also believed there was a time and place for it. He believed in reaching out to the Israelis, but also believed there was a time and place for that,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer who previously worked with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“He’s a person who very much believes in focusing on Palestinians first rather than working on the international community first. He wants to be a leader of Palestinians. His point isn’t to be a leader who is acceptable to the west.”
Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, said part of Barghouti’s appeal for Palestinians lay in the fact that he was regarded as someone who could unify them and bridge the gap between the West Bank and Gaza that has existed since Hamas ousted the Palestinian Authority from Gaza in 2007.
“There’s no other Palestinian candidate who can do as well as Barghouti,” he said. “He’s seen as someone who can make peace with the Israelis, because he can bring along with him the majority of the Palestinian public.”
But for many Israelis, and especially for the far-right politicians on whose support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition depends, the idea of releasing prisoners such as Barghouti is beyond the pale.
That stance has only hardened since Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack that triggered the current war. The cross-border raid was masterminded by Yahya Sinwar, one of the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners released by Israel to free Shalit.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the ultranationalist national security minister, said last month that his Jewish Power party would withdraw from the coalition — and thus deprive Netanyahu of his majority — if the government agreed to a “reckless deal”, and his far-right allies say they would also never assent to releasing high-security prisoners such as Barghouti.
“Let’s take a murderer and give him weapons and power and see what he does. I think we tried that in the past: it didn’t work so well. Why would it work again?” said Simcha Rothman, a lawmaker from the Religious Zionist party of Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet.
But as the war stretches into a fifth month and dozens of Israeli hostages remain in captivity, the pressure on Netanyahu’s government is mounting. Allies such as the US are pushing Israel to reach a deal. And families of those still held captive have been increasingly vocal in their demands that the government agree an immediate deal to bring their loved ones home.
Baskin said he thought there might be a “small chance” of an agreement being reached if Hamas made two concessions. First, it would have to drop its demand that Israel agree to a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal from Gaza at the start of any deal. Second, it would have to lower the number of high-security prisoners it was demanding be released.
“I think it might be possible to increase the number of prisoners released . . . but to reduce significantly the number of murderers,” he said.
Analysts said that Israel would also have to make concessions if a deal was to be struck. Michael Milshtein, a former intelligence official in the Israel Defense Forces, said an agreement without releases of high-security prisoners such as Barghouti was not on the cards.
“Hamas didn’t carry out the most dramatic campaign they’ve ever done in order to finish it by just releasing children and women,” he said. “I’m quite sure that they will insist that all the big, all the important [players] will be released.”
Additional reporting by Polina Ivanova in Jerusalem
