1959 -
Palestinian activist and parliamentarian.
Born in the West Bank village of Kubar, Barghuthi joined al-Fatah at age fifteen and helped form Shabiba, its youth group in the West Bank. After six years of Israeli imprisonment, he was deported in May 1987. While in exile, he was elected to the Revolutionary Council of al-Fatah in August 1989. Exile also saw him finally finish the B.A. studies in history and political science he had begun at Bir Zeit University eleven years earlier, which had been interrupted by his imprisonment and deportation. He later earned an M.A. in international relations from Bir Zeit in 1988.
As a result of the Israeli - Palestinian peace process, Barghuthi returned from exile in April 1994 and became secretary-general of al-Fatah's Higher Committee in the West Bank. He supported the peace process and tried to mobilize Palestinian support for it. In January 1996, he was elected to the Palestinian Council as an independent when Yasir Arafat, head of al-Fatah, refused to let him run as a candidate for the movement. Barghuthi grew vocally critical of the abuse of power in the Palestinian Authority over which Arafat presided, even presenting a no-confidence motion in the legislature in April 1997. He became one of the most popular and important political figures in the West Bank, and as a dynamic young West Bank insider was seen by some Palestinians as a possible replacement for the aging Arafat and the PLO outsiders who had returned with him from exile in 1994.
With the intense Israeli-Palestinian fighting of the al-Aqsa Intifada, which began in October 2000, Barghuthi broke with other al-Fatah figures and supported the Palestinians' use of arms against the Israelis. Israel accused him of leading both the Tanzim, a Fatah militia, and Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant movement implicated in terrorist attacks against Israelis. In April 2002, Barghuthi was arrested in Ramallah by Israeli forces and became the highest ranking Palestinian seized to date. He was put on trial in an Israel civil court, rather than the usual military tribunal, in June 2002 to face charges of murder. Barghuthi refused to recognize the court's standing and continued to call for change in the Palestinian Authority.
— MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH
