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Here is a film that offers something not generally on offer in the media: an envisioning of the future and a road map, or part of a road map, out of the present situation in Israel and Palestine. It’s about Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, an initial supporter of the 1993 and 1995 Oslo peace accords who became progressively disillusioned with the slow choreography of international consensus, and was ultimately imprisoned in 2002 for authorising deadly attacks on Israel. Barghouti’s position is not that he is innocent, but that an Israeli court has no right to try him.
During the long years since, he has gone on hunger strike, been beaten and abused in captivity; his grownup children have themselves been targeted and arrested and his wife Fadwa has been repeatedly refused permission to visit him. But the film shows that something else has been happening as well: the Mandela-isation of Barghouti, a process which the Israeli forces themselves may well come to see as convenient, when in some future time they need an internationally accepted figure with whom to negotiate.
It is precisely the injustice and judicial cruelty, and the decades-long accretion of international prestige and news value, that is grooming Barghouti for a future of political respectability. Placing a future leader in prison is a process of incubation, insulating them from the banal business of mistake-making and grubby deals and embarrassments that all active political leaders find piling up on their CVs. In his cell, Bargouthi is isolated from all this, although it doesn’t make the experience any less grim.
The comparison between Barghouthi and Mandela is something explicitly promoted by the former’s admirers, and this film indicates something that Mandela’s mainstream-centrist admirers might prefer to forget: Mandela believed in and espoused political violence as a possibility, long after his release. A clip here from a Mandela speech in Gaza in 1999 shows him saying: “Choose peace rather than confrontation, except in cases where we cannot move forward. Then, if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.” In Britain, where Martin McGuinness finally had a meeting with the Queen, this is a paradox with its own resonance. A sombre film with a message of realpolitik.