A Tribute to Marwan and Fadwa Barghouti by Amber Poole

Imagine living in a place where the family dog is shot dead for barking, your husband is arrested for displaying a flag in front of the house, your eight-year-old son is seriously wounded, blinded in one eye, for throwing stones, and your wife dies in childbirth while awaiting clearance from a soldier supervising a barrier, otherwise known as a checkpoint. Imagine further that the water is controlled by an Occupier who doesn’t have your interest at heart.

What if you are a farmer who tends to a few acres of land with olive trees that satisfy your annual income, and one day, the Occupier decides to take this land from you by force, leaving you without sufficient income, for no crime committed? You are a farmer who owns this land, but the Occupier has the right to take it. They give you any excuse or no excuse for such an action.

Imagine something called a closure, defined here on Wikipedia:

The West Bank closure system is a series of obstacles including permanent and partially staffed checkpoints, concrete roadblocks and barriers, metal gates, earth mounds, tunnels, trenches, and an elaborate set of permit restrictions that controls and restricts Palestinian freedom of movement.

Shaden Abu-Hijleh was murdered by IDF soldiers during such a closure, sitting on her balcony, next to her front door, ensconced by a wall. Friday, October 11, 2002. Nablus. She was embroidering. They shot her while she embroidered, obeying the rules of the curfew. She embroidered. They opened fire on her, they murdered her in cold blood in front of her son and her husband, using explosive bullets. She died instantly, Shaden Abu-Hijleh, mother, grandmother, philanthropist, wife of a surgeon.

‘There is one side, the other side, and the truth.’ This is a popular figure of speech, which unfortunately falls far short of a solution to the reality of Occupation, given manufactured propaganda, bias, fear, apathy, and rage. This is not the path to truth. Television is not the path. An opinion is not the path. So how do we discern the path to truth? In Shaden’s case, the truth is that she was murdered, and no one was charged with the murder. No one. And we all know, in America at any rate, there is no such thing as egalitarian justice. There is justice for the poor, and there is justice for the rich. Justice for black and justice for white. There is no one side, two sides, but only the truth to the story. Shaden Abu-Hijleh, at the age of 62, was murdered in cold blood by an IDF soldier indoctrinated from birth to believe that all Palestinians are evil and uneducated vermin and if they are not exterminated, the Holocaust will happen again, and all the Jews will perish. This is the truth. But you would have to read Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Israeli Philologist and Professor. You would have to read the works of other Jewish historians, Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, and Palestinian academics, Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, to name but just a few of those far better educated than the media ever will be. It is a curiosity how Palestinians have become the new black man of my childhood. Whenever there was a crime committed in 1950s Houston, Texas, it was always believed to have been perpetrated by a black man. We, too, as children, were sold the bill of goods that black people were inferior to us white folk.

In my case, it has been thirty-plus years of attending conferences, lectures, getting to know Palestinians in Houston, in London, and now, in Gaza, and, not in the least, reading everything I can get my hands on. Most are only interested in the veneer of this story and can’t be bothered by a situation happening across the globe, but are perfectly content to offer an unsolicited opinion on the subject as if an expert or willing to dismiss the subject altogether, describing it as too complicated or troublesome, despite the starvation campaign against an innocent civilian population broadcast on social media. (Come on, you and I both know that not everyone in Gaza is a terrorist — whatever the hell that even means these days).

Since the Americans are supplying the guns, missiles, and bombs for such a slaughter, it would seem to me that the Americans are the ones who should be accused of terrorism, as it is defined – the unlawful use of violence. (Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that’s not my department says Wernher von Braun, as the late Tom Lehrer sang).

Marwan Barghouti has been in prison since April 15, 2002. According to Wikipedia:

The Inter-Parliamentary Union found that the "numerous breaches of international law" to which Barghouti was subjected "make it impossible to conclude that Mr. Barghouti was given a fair trial." The criticisms raised by Simon Foreman, the report's author, included the court's failure to consider the public allegations of torture; its authorization of incommunicado detention; prejudicial statements by the presiding judge; the transportation of Barghouti to Israel contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention; and the poor evidence for guilt. Foreman wrote, "According to the prosecution, only 21 of the prosecution witnesses were actually in a position to testify directly regarding Mr. Barghouti's role in these attacks. But none of these 21 individuals, in fact, accused him. About 12 of them explicitly told the court that he was not involved.” Concerning 'material' evidence, Barghouti's lawyer told Foreman that "no document originated by Mr. Barghouti had implicated him in the acts of which he was being accused."

Though there is much information and his reputation is powerful, some say he is the only one who could bridge the gap between religious and secular Palestinians, in any event, I don’t know much about Marwan Barghouti; his activity was under my radar during these years of study, but what I do know is how the death squads known as the Israeli Defense Forces work. I know that Barghouti has been tortured, verbally abused, and assaulted, psychologically and physically. He has been subject to the most inhumane treatments. Identical, in fact, to the way the Nazis treated the Jews during the Holocaust.

When Ben-Gvir, Israeli National Security Minister, stormed the prison cell (a solitary cell in which Barghouti has been held for these past two years) last week, confronting Barghouti in an unprecedented provocation, he disgorged the threat quoted here:

“Anyone who messes with the people of Israel anyone who murders our children who murders our women we will wipe them out." (I find this rather grandiose, considering it is Israel who has been killing Palestinians for the last century, in particular since October 7th, killing countless numbers of women and children.)

This is the way they operate by making the one who is occupied, who is imprisoned, think they are the only ones responsible, that Israel never even had a hand in swatting a fly. They present themselves as the righteous and the entitled of the region. And all because of a lie. Of lies that cannot be counted. Lies upon lies that have solidified over the last hundred years.

Marwan’s wife, Fadwa, and his children had to watch his humiliation on national television. She said:

"They are still, Marwan, chasing you and pursuing you even after 23 years in prison and in the solitary cell you’ve been living in for two years."
August 15, 2025, Middle East Eye.

I am not gifted in politics, but I am in emotional intelligence and the psychology of the human condition. I know suffering. There needn’t be an instrument of measurement if we transfer our personal suffering into the collective, which, by doing so, creates the empathy we lack to understand the global suffering of the world; at least it has this potential. By casting one’s understanding of suffering into the collective, I sense that we will have an easier time sharing in and with the suffering of others. At present, for example, some mothers have no feeling for mothers in Gaza. They don’t care that the mothers there are losing their children to starvation and violence. Some even feel it is justified. But let me step back from this exaggerated, irrational position, which cannot be negotiated as it is unconscious thinking, but rather ask if there is a way to bring yourself into the equation by posing the question if your children were hungry and they couldn’t eat, how would you feel?

Nobody can endure this kind of trauma without fighting back. If you read the truth about what happened to the Palestinians, you will understand their resistance, their fight, and their perseverance. But you must read. You cannot depend on social media. I urge you to investigate this story yourself, by reading the works of reliable historians. It will only be a matter of time before the tables turn, and one will be asking ‘How did we get here?’

“When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them. Europe of the Middle Ages hated them, but not us. Ferdinand and Isabella hated them, but not us. Hitler hated them, but not us. But when they took our entire space and exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of equality.”

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti | Foreword by Edward Said & Translated from the Original Arabic by Ahdaf Soueif