Barghouti's Run. posted by Richard Seymour

Via Jews Sans Frontieres , Marwan Barghouti is back in the running for the Palestinian presidency. This can only be good news. Fatah has long since ceased to be capable of running a serious campaign to defend Palestinian rights, and Barghouti's promise to "achieve peace on the basis of justice, freedom, the return of Palestinian refugees, and freedom for our prisoners" is a welcome break from the sad, slumbering quiescence of the Palestinian leadership in recent years. One hopes Barghouti has some sense that the Palestinians cannot win this fight alone, and that the strategy of suicide bombings is an absolute failure. Clearly, the latter is not emerging from nowhere, and it isn't an argument that Barghouti can win overnight and without some loss of credibility.

To quote from Jacqueline Rose's recent superb article on the topic:

According to Eyad El-Sarraj, the founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, today's suicide attackers are, for the most part, children of the first intifada. Studies show that during the first uprising, 55 per cent of children saw their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. Martyrdom - sacrificing oneself for God - increases its appeal when the image of the earthly father bites the dust. 'It's despair,' El-Sarraj states baldly, 'a despair where living becomes no different from dying.' When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of pride. 'In 1996, practically all of us were against the martyr operations,' Kamal Aqeel, the acting mayor of Khan Yunis in Gaza, explains. 'Not any longer . . . We all feel that we can no longer bear the situation as it is; we feel that we'd simply explode under all this pressure of humiliation.'

Only by overcoming the sense of isolation which Palestinians feel, by committing to an international campaign of solidarity, will it be possible to stop young Palestinians wasting themselves and attacking targets which bear no immediate relationship to their oppression. Many attempts were made by sympathisers with the Palestinian cause to persuade Arafat to pursue an internationalist campaign, but he preferred to consolidate a fiefdom under Israeli tutelage. Barghouti's base is different, and one hopes he can articulate a different kind of politics.