How the World Is Being Asked to Canonize a Dynasty of Violence
There is a campaign sweeping through the salons of Western celebrity culture, the halls of international NGOs, and the streets of European cities. Posters go up in Marseille. Benedict Cumberbatch signs open letters. Nobel laureates lend their names. The message is seductive in its simplicity: free Marwan Barghouti, Palestine’s Nelson Mandela, a unifying moderate, a man of peace imprisoned by an oppressive state. It is one of the most audacious acts of historical fabrication of our time, and the world is falling for it.
Let us be precise about what is actually being demanded. The international community is being asked to release a man convicted of five murders, sentenced to five life terms plus forty years by a court of law, and celebrated precisely because of, not despite, his role in orchestrating violence during the Second Intifada. This is not a miscarriage of justice being corrected. It is a miscarriage of memory being engineered.
The Mandela Comparison Is an Insult to History
The campaign’s central rhetorical move is the comparison to Nelson Mandela. It was launched, with calculated symbolism, from Mandela’s cell on Robben Island. Desmond Tutu signed the declaration. Jimmy Carter lent his name. The imagery was irresistible and entirely dishonest.
Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for his opposition to a system of racial segregation. Marwan Barghouti was convicted for his direct involvement in the planning and execution of terrorist attacks that killed Israeli civilians, at a restaurant, at a gas station, on a hiking trail. Mandela renounced violence as a condition of his release and led his nation through a negotiated transition. Barghouti, from his prison cell, has consistently endorsed armed resistance and refused any such renunciation. The comparison does not flatter Barghouti. It degrades Mandela.
The parallel also conveniently erases the central question: what, exactly, would Barghouti do if released? His supporters claim he would negotiate peace. His own record and statements suggest he would do what he has always done, mobilize violence under the banner of resistance and dress it in the language of political legitimacy. That combination, the armed militant who speaks the grammar of statehood, is not a solution. It is the problem in its most dangerous form.
The Mandela comparison carries a deeper dishonesty still. South African apartheid formally ended in 1994 with the country’s first democratic elections. It was a living, documented system of racial segregation that the world rightly condemned. Within three years of its collapse, the Islamic Republic of Iran was already working to weaponize its memory, repurposing the moral weight of a genuine crime against humanity and redirecting it at Israel. The word “apartheid,” as applied to Israel, was not borrowed organically from anti-apartheid veterans. It was deliberately transplanted by a theocratic regime with its own strategic agenda, through a sequence of international meetings that the public has largely never heard of, culminating in one of the most consequential and least examined diplomatic scandals of the past three decades.
From Tehran 1997 to Durban 2001: How a Slur Was Manufactured
In December 1997, Ayatollah Khamenei inaugurated the eighth summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Tehran, the first time Iran had hosted the gathering. Presided over by President Khatami and attended by 53 Muslim states, the 1997 Tehran OIC summit was the moment Iran formally positioned itself as the leader of the Muslim world’s confrontation with Israel. Palestine and the explicit goal of “confronting Zionist aggression” sat at the top of a heavy agenda of 142 resolutions. The documents that emerged criticized Israel for “reinstating an atmosphere of war,” urged member states to reconsider any normalization with Israel, and reaffirmed support for the Al-Quds Fund, described in the final communiqué as supporting the “steadfastness and Jihad of the Palestinian people.” This was not diplomatic language chosen carelessly. It was a declaration of intent, made by a regime that has never distinguished between Palestinian statehood and permanent armed conflict, because permanent armed conflict has always served its purposes better than any state ever could.
Iran then set about using the United Nations as the vehicle to translate that political agenda into international legal and diplomatic language. The opportunity came in the form of the World Conference Against Racism, initiated by the UN General Assembly that same year and scheduled to convene in Durban, South Africa in 2001. Iran maneuvered itself into the chairmanship of the drafting committee. The final regional preparatory conference for Asian countries was held in Tehran in February 2001. Iran refused to grant visas to Israeli diplomats, Jewish organizations, Kurdish representatives, and Bahai NGOs until after the last flights from Paris and New York had already departed, making attendance physically impossible. Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who was organizing the conference, had personally pledged that Jewish and Israeli representatives would have the right to attend. Their travel documents were processed only after the planes had left. The fix was in before the first session opened.
The document that emerged from that Tehran preparatory conference accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” of implementing “a new kind of apartheid,” “a crime against humanity,” and “a form of genocide.” It declared that Zionism was “based on racial superiority.” Irwin Cotler, one of the most distinguished international jurists of his generation, called it “one of the most scurrilous indictments of Israel since the end of the Second World War.” Much of that Iran-authored document then became the template for the NGO declaration at the Durban conference itself. Delegates from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria subsequently insisted on carrying its language into the final Geneva preparatory sessions, and also demanded that the word “Holocaust” be pluralized wherever it appeared in the text, deliberately diluting its specific historical meaning.
The Durban conference opened on August 31, 2001, eleven days before the September 11 attacks. It was the moment this manufactured framework went global. The United States and Israel walked out. Colin Powell denounced the draft declaration’s language as hateful. Yet the conference proceeded, and the “apartheid” label it institutionalized continued its march through international civil society, human rights organizations, university campuses, and celebrity open letters, until it became the unquestioned moral backdrop against which campaigns like Free Marwan now present themselves as self-evident justice.
The process did not stop at Durban. At the 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, Libya under Gaddafi chaired the preparatory committee. Iran served as vice-chair. The only head of state who appeared was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, who opened the proceedings by declaring that “World Zionism personifies racism.” European delegations walked out. The pattern was no longer deniable. Across three conferences spanning more than a decade, the Durban process had revealed itself as a project with a single consistent purpose: not the elimination of racism in the world, but the elimination of Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world. It is the foundation on which the Free Marwan campaign rests, and it was built by the same regime that funds Hamas, arms Hezbollah, and has called for Israel’s destruction from every available podium for forty years.
The Barghouti Clan: A Family Business Built on Blood and Contradiction
The campaign asks us to focus narrowly on Marwan. Doing so requires ignoring what the Barghouti name actually represents, an extended family network whose members have, across multiple fronts, made Palestinian statehood harder at every turn.
Consider the full picture. Abdullah Barghouti is the Hamas master bomb-maker responsible for the Sbarro pizzeria massacre in Jerusalem in 2001, which murdered fifteen people including seven children, and a string of other attacks that killed dozens of Israeli civilians. He sits in an Israeli prison serving multiple life sentences. No celebrity open letters for him. The optics are harder to manage when the victims are children eating pizza.
Then there is Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), the man who has built a career telling universities, artists, and corporations around the world to sever ties with Israel. He was born in Qatar. He was raised in Egypt. He is not a Palestinian refugee by any stretch of the definition. He holds Israeli permanent residency, obtained voluntarily through marriage, and lives comfortably in Acre, inside Israel. He obtained his Master’s degree from Tel Aviv University, the same institution he campaigns the world to boycott, and pursued his PhD there while the university protected his academic freedom and shielded him from students who petitioned for his removal. In 2017, the Israeli Tax Authority arrested him for hiding approximately $700,000 in undeclared income, speaking fees and a technology executive’s salary concealed in bank accounts in Ramallah and the United States, while he enjoyed the residency rights, healthcare, and civil liberties of the state he has devoted his life to delegitimizing.
This is not resistance. It is parasitism dressed as principle. Omar Barghouti has constructed a global movement demanding that others sacrifice economic ties with Israel while he personally exploits every benefit that Israeli society and law affords him. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is structural, and it tells you everything about the moral foundation on which the broader campaign rests.
And now we have Arab Barghouti, Marwan’s son, appearing via video link at solidarity conferences in Marseille, flanked by Sinn Féin politicians drawing spurious comparisons to Bobby Sands and the Irish hunger strikers. The dynasty perpetuates itself. The next generation is being groomed not for diplomacy, not for governance, not for the hard work of building institutions that Palestinians desperately need, but for the performance of victimhood on the international stage, the romanticization of imprisonment, and the cultivation of grievance as an identity.
What the Campaign Actually Achieves
Proponents of Barghouti’s release argue that he is uniquely positioned to negotiate a settlement, that he commands respect across Fatah and Hamas, that he could unify Palestinian factions, that he represents a path out of the current catastrophe. This argument deserves to be taken seriously, and then rejected on its merits.
Palestinian political culture has for decades been organized around the elevation of resistance over governance, of symbolic defiance over institutional competence, of the prisoner and the martyr over the administrator and the builder. It is precisely this culture, nurtured and embodied by figures like Marwan Barghouti, that has repeatedly led the Palestinian people to the brink of statehood and then pulled them back from it. Camp David in 2000. The Olmert offer in 2008. Again and again, maximalism and the romance of armed struggle have trumped the possibility of a state. Releasing Barghouti and crowning him the savior would not break this cycle. It would consecrate it.
There is also something deeply troubling about the global left’s appetite for this campaign. Celebrities who would never sign a letter celebrating a convicted murderer in any other context enthusiastically do so here, because the framing, colonialism, apartheid, resistance, activates a moral reflex that bypasses factual scrutiny. The victims of Barghouti’s actions, the Israeli civilians murdered in the attacks he orchestrated, are edited out of the narrative entirely. They have no names in the open letters. No celebrities tweet about them. Their deaths are, in the accounting of the campaign, simply the acceptable cost of resistance. Calling that justice requires a very particular kind of moral blindness, one that has become, in certain circles, a badge of honor.
Iran’s Real Agenda: Not Liberation, but Islamization
There is a final deception embedded in all of this, and it is the most consequential one. The Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime that authored the “apartheid” framework at the 1997 Tehran OIC summit, that used the Durban process to launder it into international legitimacy, that funds Hamas and Islamic Jihad, that chaired the UN’s drafting committee in order to redirect a conference against racism into a conference against Israel’s existence, has never been invested in Palestinian freedom. It has been invested, systematically and deliberately, in the Islamization of the Palestinian cause.
This distinction matters enormously. Palestinian national identity is not inherently religious. The Palestinian national movement was historically secular, led by leftists, Christians, and Arab nationalists alongside Muslims. Yasser Arafat was corrupt and often catastrophically wrong, but his vision of Palestine was not a theocratic state. The Iran-backed project has spent decades working to erase that secular tradition, replacing it with the language of religious warfare, martyrdom, and permanent jihad. Hamas, Iran’s primary Palestinian client, does not want a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It wants the elimination of Israel as a precondition for any political settlement. Iran funds that project not because it cares about Palestinians living in dignity, but because a permanent conflict on Israel’s borders serves Iranian regional strategy and gives the regime a cause around which to organize the Muslim world, as Khamenei demonstrated so clearly in Tehran in 1997.
The Palestinians who have suffered most from this project are Palestinians themselves. Gaza under Hamas governance is not a society being prepared for statehood. It is a population being managed as a permanent front line, its civilian infrastructure instrumentalized as cover for military operations, its young men recruited into a cause that promises them martyrdom rather than a future. When Iran speaks of Palestinian liberation, it means liberation from the possibility of compromise, from the possibility of coexistence, from any political settlement that would actually deliver a Palestinian state and end the conflict that Iran requires for its own regional influence and domestic legitimacy.
The Free Marwan campaign, consciously or not, serves that same project. Barghouti’s appeal is that he is presented as a bridge between secular Fatah and Islamist Hamas. Seen from Tehran, that is not a moderate position. It is the ideal one: a figure who can launder the Islamization agenda in the language of Palestinian nationalism, who can make the international left feel that armed resistance is progressive rather than theocratic, who can extend Iran’s reach into the West Bank just as Hamas has extended it into Gaza. The Durban framework gave the world the vocabulary. The Free Marwan campaign gives it the hero. Both were built on the same lie.
The Real Tragedy
The genuine tragedy in all of this is what the Barghouti myth costs the Palestinian people themselves. Every year spent celebrating imprisoned militants is a year not spent building the civil institutions, the rule of law, the economic infrastructure, and the culture of compromise that a viable Palestinian state would require. Every international dollar channeled into the Free Marwan campaign is a dollar not spent on Palestinian hospitals, schools, or governance reform. Every young Palestinian taught that Arab Barghouti appearing at a conference in Marseille represents their future is a young Palestinian being failed by their own leadership class.
Marwan Barghouti is not Palestine’s Mandela. He is the embodiment of a political culture that has sacrificed Palestinian welfare on the altar of permanent resistance. His family is not a dynasty of liberation but a case study in how violence, hypocrisy, and the manipulation of Western guilt can be packaged and sold as heroism. And behind the campaign to free him stands a theocratic regime in Tehran that does not want Palestinians to be free. It wants them to remain, permanently, a weapon.
The world is being asked to call that solidarity. It is worth thinking carefully about who benefits when we do.
by Rawan Osman
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