The “Palestinian Mandela” Lie: Why the Campaign to Free Marwan Barghouti is a Moral Fraud
Turning a mastermind of the Second Intifada into a saint won’t bring peace. It rewards terror.
The global campaign to free Marwan Barghouti should horrify anyone who still believes words have meaning and victims matter.
Within days of a Guardian article celebrating an open letter by more than 200 cultural figures calling for Barghouti’s release, the internet filled with praise for the “Palestinian Mandela.” Writers like Margaret Atwood. Actors like Ian McKellen and Benedict Cumberbatch. Billionaires like Richard Branson. All lending their moral authority to the idea that the man serving five life sentences for murdering Israeli civilians is actually a prisoner of conscience who holds the key to peace.
Pause and read that sentence again. Then ask a simple question.
Would any of these people have signed a letter calling for the release of an IRA commander convicted of ordering a pub bombing in Belfast? Would they have campaigned for a jailed neo-Nazi who orchestrated a synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?
Of course not. Yet somehow, when the victims are Israelis and the perpetrator is a Palestinian “resistance leader,” the moral compass spins wildly off its axis.
This is not a glitch in their worldview. It is the worldview.
Mandela Never Bombed Seafood Markets
Let’s start with facts that even Barghouti’s admirers do not seriously dispute.
In 2004, an Israeli civilian court convicted Marwan Barghouti on five counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, sentencing him to five life terms plus 40 years. He was found guilty of directing or authorizing specific terror attacks during the Second Intifada, including:
The June 12, 2001 drive-by shooting of Father Georgios Tsibouktzakis, a 34-year-old Greek Orthodox monk killed in his car on the road near Jericho. The court held Barghouti responsible for authorizing this attack.
The March 5, 2002 assault on the Seafood Market restaurant in Tel Aviv, where terrorists opened fire and threw grenades into a crowded civilian venue. Three people were murdered in that attack, Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi and police officer Salim Barakat, and 35 were wounded.
These were not battlefield deaths. They were premeditated executions of civilians in cars and restaurants.
Supporters of the “Palestinian Mandela” narrative like to glide over these details. They talk about “struggle” and “resistance” and “political imprisonment.” They rarely name the victims. They almost never describe the crimes.
Mandela’s record is not a fairy tale either. He co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress, which launched a sabotage campaign in 1961 against the apartheid regime. Mandela admitted at the Rivonia Trial that he had helped plan violent resistance. He did not pretend to be a pure pacifist.
But here is the crux that the open letter ignores. Mandela was imprisoned in 1962, long before the ANC’s armed struggle devolved into its bloodier phases in the 1980s. Mandela did not personally direct the bombing of civilian targets from a prison cell.
Barghouti did the opposite. He was not a figurehead swept up in a movement. He was the operational architect. He personally directed shootings and bombings at the height of the violence.
To collapse those histories into one sanctified word, “Mandela,” is not nuance. It is moral fraud.
Apartheid South Africa Was Not Offered a State and Told “No”
The other pillar of the Barghouti cult is the lazy, weaponized comparison between apartheid South Africa and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In South Africa, apartheid was not a security regime that arose after decades of terror attacks. It was a comprehensive legal order designed from the ground up to entrench white supremacy over a Black majority. Blacks were stripped of national citizenship. Forced into “Bantustans” that no one recognized as real states. Denied the vote. Locked out of land ownership, education and most professions. Subjected to pass laws, racial registries and a lattice of legislation whose explicit purpose was permanent racial domination.
There was never a serious, internationally backed offer of a sovereign, contiguous Black state alongside a white state that the ANC rejected and rejected and rejected again. Pretoria’s “homelands” policy was precisely the opposite. They were non-viable fragments used to pretend that Blacks were no longer the concern of the South African state while still exploiting their labor.
Now look at the Palestinian record.
Whatever one thinks of the lines on the map, it is simply a matter of public record that Palestinian and broader Arab leadership have repeatedly rejected partition plans and statehood frameworks that would have created an Arab or Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one. And with each rejection, they launched terror attacks on civilian populations in Israel.
A short and incomplete list:
The Peel Commission (1937): Proposes partition of Mandatory Palestine into a small Jewish state and a larger Arab state, with population transfers on both sides. The Zionist leadership, painfully and reluctantly, accepts partition in principle. The Arab leadership rejects it outright. The rejection was not merely diplomatic; it was kinetic. The Arab Revolt intensified, devolving into a bloody three-year campaign of ambushes, bombings, and terrorism targeting Jewish civilians and British officials alike.
United Nations Resolution 181 (1947): Recommends partition into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem internationalized. The Jewish Agency accepts the plan. The Arab Higher Committee and surrounding Arab states reject it. Instead of building a state, five Arab armies invaded the nascent State of Israel from all sides with the declared intent of a "war of extermination." The “Nakba” follows. So does a Jewish refugee crisis from Arab lands of similar scale.
The Allon Plan (1967-1970s): Immediately following the Six-Day War, Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon drafted a plan, adopted as the de facto operating principle by Prime Minister Golda Meir, to return the densely populated mountain ridges of the West Bank to Jordan. The logic was explicitly anti-expansionist regarding population. Israel sought to retain only the unpopulated Jordan Valley for strategic defense against invasion, while wishing to avoid ruling over a million Palestinians. But the Arab League met in Khartoum and issued its famous “Three No’s”: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it. The hand was extended; the fist was returned. The hand was extended; the fist was returned. This rejectionism culminated in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a massive, coordinated surprise invasion on two fronts designed to destroy the Jewish state on its holiest day.
Camp David & Clinton Parameters (2000-2001): Israel offers a Palestinian state on roughly all of Gaza and most of the West Bank with land swaps and a capital in East Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat says no, offers no counterproposal, and the Second Intifada, with suicide bombings against buses, cafes and Passover Seders, follows.
The Olmert Offer (2008): Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presents Mahmoud Abbas with an even more far-reaching offer, a near total withdrawal from the West Bank with one-for-one land swaps and a shared Jerusalem. Abbas does not even respond. The offer simply dies. In the vacuum left by this rejection, the conflict metastasized. The following years were defined not by counter-offers, but by the entrenchment of Hamas in Gaza, thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns, and a “Knife Intifada” in the West Bank targeting civilians at bus stops and intersections.
You can argue about the details. You can say the offers were inadequate. You can criticize Israeli leaders for their own hard lines.
You cannot pretend that this history does not exist and that every offer of peace was met with war and terror.
Black South Africans did not reject multiple internationally supported statehood offers and then spend decades trying to blow white civilians up in shopping malls. They were never offered sovereignty and told “no.” Palestinians were.
The entire apartheid analogy depends on amputating that century of rejectionism and aggression and freezing the story at whatever moment best serves the narrative. Cause and effect inverted. Choices erased. The truth is darker. They rejected partition not because the borders were wrong, but because they rejected the presence of a sovereign Jewish neighbor in any borders.
Gaza, Oslo and the Lie of Passive Victimhood
The same selective amnesia drives the attempt to equate conditions in Gaza and the West Bank with apartheid.
Israel’s security regime around Gaza did not appear because Jews woke up one morning and decided to be cruel. It hardened after years of rocket fire, suicide bombings and cross-border attacks, especially after Hamas violently seized control of Gaza in 2007 and made its charter and practice very clear.
The original 1988 Hamas Covenant calls for Israel’s destruction in explicitly religious terms, declaring that “Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam obliterates it” and rejecting any negotiated settlement as a betrayal. The 2017 political document softened some language for Western consumption but still insists that all of Palestine “from the river to the sea” is an indivisible Islamic trust and denies any legitimacy to a Jewish state in any borders.
After launching thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities, digging tunnels under the border, and finally perpetrating the October 7 massacre, Hamas has no credible claim to be under a “siege” that arrived out of nowhere. The closure and restrictions are harsh. They are also a direct response to repeated acts of war by a movement whose stated goal is the eradication of Israel.
Security fences are not pass laws. Border inspections are not racial registries. The moral and legal questions are serious. They are not the same questions.
In the West Bank, the current patchwork of Areas A, B and C and the split between Palestinian and Israeli control is not a racial caste system. It is the product of the Oslo Accords, which Israel and the PLO signed in the 1990s as a transitional framework toward a negotiated final-status agreement. Oslo created the Palestinian Authority, gave it full civil and security control over the main Palestinian cities (Area A), and shared control in Area B. Israel retained control in Area C, both for settlements and for security.
Oslo was supposed to last five years. It is still with us for one brutal reason. The years after Oslo were not used by Palestinian leaders to prove to Israelis that a demilitarized Palestinian state next door would mean peace. They were used by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to launch suicide bombings and shootings that killed more than a thousand Israelis and maimed thousands more.
Israel responded with targeted killings, raids into PA areas, and eventually the security barrier. None of that is pretty. All of it has a cause.
Calling this “apartheid” erases the core fact that these arrangements exist because every serious attempt at partition was answered by violence and rejectionism. It pretends that Palestinian society has had no agency. That nothing Palestinians did could possibly have influenced the structures that now govern them.
That is a comforting story for activists who want to assign root guilt to one side and endless innocence to the other. It is not a serious account of history.
The Barghouti Cult as Moral Inversion
Which brings us back to Marwan Barghouti and the people now campaigning to free him.
They know, or could know in five minutes, that he was convicted in a civilian court for orchestrating terror attacks that murdered named, identifiable people in cold blood. They know that he helped build and direct the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group that specialized in suicide bombings and shootings inside Israel during the Second Intifada.
They also know, or could know, that Palestinian and Arab leaders have had multiple opportunities over the last century to create a state in part of the land and have chosen, again and again, to prioritize the war to eliminate the Jewish state instead.
Yet none of this seems to matter when the chance arises to play out the familiar morality play. White South Africa. Black South Africa. Evil regime. Imprisoned liberator. The script is already written. All one has to do is swap the names.
Mandela, who did not order a single restaurant bombing, becomes interchangeable with Barghouti, who did. Apartheid, which denied Blacks the vote and stripped them of citizenship from birth, becomes interchangeable with a messy security regime that followed a century of rejected compromises and waves of terror.
In that script, Jewish civilians gunned down in their cars or blown up at dinner are not part of the story at all. They do not fit.
What does fit is the deep psychological need in the West to view Israel as the last remaining legitimate target for the kind of moral rage that used to be directed at white supremacists in the American South or Afrikaners in Pretoria. A world that arrived late to the real anti-apartheid struggle and the real civil rights struggle is now desperate to reenact them, this time on Instagram.
The Delusion of the “Only Partner”
Beyond the moral inversion, there is a strategic fantasy at play here. Western diplomats and cultural elites aren’t just engaging in historical revisionism. They are convincing themselves that Barghouti is the “Palestinian Biden,” a unifying figure who can bridge the gap between Fatah and Hamas and deliver peace.
This is a delusion.
They believe a man who built his career on torpedoing the Oslo peace process through terror is the one who will save it. Barghouti didn’t build bridges. He built the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. He didn’t preach coexistence during the Second Intifada. He preached escalation.
Releasing him wouldn’t be a pragmatic move to empower a moderate. It would be a reward for unrepentant terrorism. It would signal to every future terrorist that if you kill enough civilians, you won’t just get a state. You will get a fan club in London and New York.
Pressuring the Only Side that Ever Said “Yes”
None of this means Israel is above criticism. Any serious Zionist understands that Israeli governments, like every government around the world, have made real mistakes and committed real abuses.
But look at where the pressure is aimed.
The side that has said “yes” to partition multiple times, from 1937 and 1947 to the Clinton Parameters and the 2008 map, is the side the West keeps trying to squeeze harder. The side that has built a flawed but real democracy, with Arab citizens voting, serving in the Knesset and sitting on the Supreme Court, is the side targeted by boycotts and “apartheid” campaigns.
The side whose main opposition parties officially endorse a two-state solution and accept a Jewish and a Palestinian state living side by side is the side dragged before international courts. The side whose existential red lines are that it must not be destroyed and its people must not be massacred with impunity is the side told to “take risks for peace.”
Listen to this video. It’s 8 years ago. The Danish Ambassador insisting that Israel be subject to a double standard. I can’t possibly say it better than Caroline Glick.
Meanwhile, the movements that still chant “from the river to the sea Palestine will be Arab,” that write covenants calling for Israel’s obliteration, that pay stipends to terrorists and teach children that Jews are usurpers destined to disappear, face almost no sustained moral or material pressure at all.
Western “pro-Palestinian” activism has become an ecosystem in which:
Terror groups like Hamas are funded and hosted by states such as Qatar and Turkey. Their leaders live comfortably abroad while their people suffer.
“Respectable” NGOs and church bodies churn out reports about Israeli crimes while treating Palestinian antisemitism and rejectionism as a footnote.
Cultural elites sign letters for Barghouti’s release without once naming the men and women killed in the attacks he directed.
That is not a human rights movement. It is a moral inversion factory.
A Different Kind of “Mandela Moment”
If the world wants a “Mandela moment” in this conflict, it has to begin with the most basic moral clarity.
You do not build peace by turning convicted organizers of civilian massacres into saints. You do not advance coexistence by deliberately erasing a century of rejected statehood offers and calling the result “apartheid.” You do not reduce terror by giving platforms and prizes to the people who glorify it while insisting that Israel is the real problem.
A real Mandela moment would look very different.
It would start with a global consensus that there is no moral or legal right to seek the destruction of Israel. That any movement whose charter, sermons and television programming preach that goal is beyond the pale of civilized politics. That the world will isolate and punish those actors until they abandon that project and accept that the Jewish state is here to stay.
Then, and only then, can you ask Israelis to take real risks. Then, and only then, does the release of hardened prisoners become a possible tool in the service of a genuine political settlement, not a reward for unrepentant terrorism.
If you insist on invoking Mandela, at least honor what made him worthy of the analogy. He eventually chose to end the war once his enemy gave up on domination and accepted majority rule. He did not hold out for a South Africa “from the Cape to the Limpopo” cleansed of whites. He did not write charters about throwing them into the sea.
Mandela never ordered a gunman to walk into a restaurant and throw grenades at families having dinner.
Marwan Barghouti did.
The world knows how to tell the difference when the victims are not Jews.
It is long past time to ask why so many brilliant, educated, “progressive” people suddenly forget how.
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