Peter Himmelman - Substack
This week, a letter signed by more than two hundred prominent cultural figures revived a long-dormant campaign: the call to free Marwan Barghouti. For many readers, this may be the first time they’ve heard of him. For others, desperate to find a solution to the longstanding conflict between Israel and its enemies, he is a last-ditch —but utterly false hope.
Most people now chanting Barghouti’s name have only the vaguest idea who he is. They imagine a Palestinian Mandela imprisoned for his beliefs. The reality is different. Barghouti was one of the principal leaders of the Second Intifada, the violent campaign that deliberately targeted Israeli civilians in cafés, buses, and quiet streets. I remember that period not as a distant headline but as something my family and I lived through. We were in Israel during the bus bombings of the early 2000’s. We heard the sirens at all hours, felt the acute unease that settled over daily life, and saw people, like ourselves, rattled by the constant fear of the next explosion. Those memories stay with you. So when people speak of Barghouti as a misunderstood visionary, I recall those days and wonder what exactly they think he did.
He wasn’t imprisoned for dissent. He was convicted in an Israeli civilian court of five murders and one attempted murder—convictions supported by detailed evidence linking him to attacks carried out by Tanzim operatives under his command. His victims had names: Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis, a Greek Orthodox monk ambushed on the Jerusalem–Jericho road; Salim Barakat, Yoela Hen, and Eli Dahan, murdered in the Seafood Market restaurant attack; and Aviya Malka, twenty-one years old, shot dead while shopping for her wedding dress. These people vanish entirely in the fashionable narrative surrounding Barghouti. For some, they must vanish. Without their absence, the myth collapses.
So why, after two decades in prison, is Barghouti suddenly receiving the kind of attention celebrities reserve for wrongly accused death-row inmates? Why is his name surfacing now in petitions, open letters, and Instagram posts?
Three forces have converged.
First, Barghouti remains the most popular Palestinian politician alive—not despite his militancy, but because of it. Mahmoud Abbas is discredited; Hamas is feared or resented; the Palestinian Authority is widely seen as corrupt. Into that vacuum, Barghouti reappears as a fantasy: the imprisoned revolutionary, untainted by politics. A resistance fighter, pure of heart, shrugging off the shackles of a despotic colonial enterprise.
Second, after the horrors of October 7 and the grinding war that followed, Western diplomats are grasping for any figure who might “unify” Palestinians behind a negotiated settlement. They project onto Barghouti the qualities they need: legitimacy, charisma, and the ability to sell concessions that no other Palestinian leader can. At the same time, they either fail to recognize or simply ignore the inconvenient fact that a clear majority of Palestinians now reject a two-state solution altogether—not because it is unworkable, but because they believe the conflict should end with Israel’s disappearance, not compromise.
And third, our revered celebrities—actors, musicians, influencers—have discovered him. Mark Ruffalo, Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa, Roger Waters, and, sadly, even Paul Simon have signed on to the campaign for his release. Of the few signatories who spoke publicly, the brilliant musician Brian Eno remarked that “global solidarity” could free Barghouti just as it helped free Mandela. It’s a quotable line, prepackaged for public consumption—the hook to a hit song.
People can’t resist calling Barghouti “the Palestinian Mandela.” It’s a stirring comparison until you ask the only questions that matter: What murders of innocent civilians did Mandela plot? What innocent blood did he shed? What twenty-two-year-old woman, out shopping for her wedding dress, did he massacre?
None, of course. And the silence that follows those questions is telling.
What astonishes me is the insistence that Barghouti’s words—his belated talk of coexistence and “two states for two peoples”—should outweigh his actions. If a man arranged for civilians to be killed while they ate dinner or drove to work, why should his rhetoric now be treated as sacred? Why should the singsong peace-language he has occasionally adopted in prison be elevated above the lives he helped erase?
There is no answer that contains moral seriousness. This is about political convenience. Barghouti’s supposed transformation gives diplomats and activists a way to claim progress without confronting the profound ideological divide that defines the conflict. They cling to the idea that he can “deliver” the Palestinian street precisely because he has the credibility of a militant. It reassures them to imagine that the hardest problems can be softened by the charisma of a single man.
His popularity among Hamas supporters only deepens the irony. Hamas loyalists in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria admire him—not for his secular politics, but for his militancy. His imprisonment sanctifies him, imbues him with a purity he has never earned. If Hamas fell tomorrow, many of its supporters would still choose Barghouti. This should unsettle the Western imagination, but instead it seduces it: here, finally, is someone who can “unify” Palestinians, even if the unity is built on a desire to destroy rather than to reconcile.
Predictably, whenever Barghouti’s crimes are mentioned, someone reaches for the same tired counterargument: “What about Menachem Begin? Wasn’t he a terrorist too?”
The comparison dissolves the moment the facts appear. The King David Hotel in 1946 was not a civilian target; it was the British administrative and military headquarters in Mandatory Palestine. Multiple warnings were issued—by telephone, to the hotel switchboard, to the Palestine Post, and to nearby consulates. British officials dismissed them and refused evacuation. Civilians died because authorities ignored the warnings, not because the Irgun sought them out.
Barghouti’s attacks, by contrast, were designed to kill civilians. A restaurant. A roadway. A monk in a car. A young woman buying a wedding dress. These were not military targets. They were chosen precisely because they were undefended, precisely because they would produce fear. Equating the two is not moral reasoning; it is moral camouflage.
But the Begin comparison persists for the same reason Barghouti’s myth persists: it is easier to simplify history than confront its complexity. It is easier to believe that the right charismatic figure can undo a century of entrenched beliefs than to acknowledge that the conflict is not a puzzle waiting for a clever negotiator. It is a clash of narratives, identities, and irreconcilable demands. Barghouti’s admirers—especially the ones with guitars, Grammy awards, and photo shoots—seem to prefer mythologies in which terrorist murder ripens into reasoned statesmanship.
And so Barghouti becomes a vessel into which people pour their longing—diplomats for a negotiator, celebrities for a righteous cause, activists for a hero, and Palestinians for a symbol who reflects their rage without dealing with their constant failures. The people who matter most—the murdered, their families, the unalterable finality of their absence—are erased so that a new narrative can be funded, curated, and circulated.
Barghouti is not Mandela.
He is not a pacifist imprisoned for his beliefs.
He is a man convicted of murdering civilians, transformed by political desperation and cultural fashion into the protagonist of a Western fantasy about peace.
People chant his name not because of who he is, but because of who they need him to be.
