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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.
---
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
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