Palestinian Defiance

Iwas born in Jerusalem, in 1954, but I spent my childhood here in Ramallah. My family is from Deir Ghassaneh, a village about fifteen miles away, near Bir Zeit; but after 1948, my father became the municipal engineer for Al Bireh, adjoining Ramallah. The Barghouti family, a large one, has always been very political, very active. Under the Mandate, my grandfather and his brother were jailed by the British. During the 1950s, the whole village was part of the left opposition to Jordanian rule. It was the beginning of the Nasserite movement, of Pan-Arabism; the influence of the Jordanian Communist Party and other left forces was also very strong. I grew up surrounded by internationalist, progressive literature—our family’s viewpoint was always shaped by opposition to social injustice, rather than by nationalism. My father used to speak to us of his Jewish comrades in Tiberias or Acre. All through my childhood, I heard talk of prisons. I’ve been told that the first time I went to a prison I was two years old, taken to visit one of my uncles who’d been jailed—for political reasons, of course. Then during the 1960s there were many waves of mass demonstrations and protests.

Those few days reshaped me. I felt a huge amount of responsibility. My childhood ended then. We were now under occupation. It was the beginning of a life mission: how do we become free? The feeling of injustice was very strong. Though still a child, I felt the whole world sitting on my shoulders. There was also the sense of failure—that the Nasserite approach had failed, and we had to find something else. How had such a tiny country as Israel been able to beat all the Arab armies? How to explain the gap between the grand speeches and the reality? It was a lesson never to be cheated by propaganda again. Some gave in to defeatism—Nasser had it wrong, it was better to adopt a pro-American stance—but our position was: no, we have to resist, but in a stronger, better way. I’ve never felt I was fighting for the liberation of the Palestinian people on purely nationalistic grounds, one people against another. It was a fight against oppression, against occupation.

In Moscow. I went in 1971 and had to stay there for the whole seven years to complete my training, because the Israeli army would harass anyone studying abroad if they tried to come back, and I’d been very active in the student movement. Naturally I followed the events at home—it was a very harsh period. I came back as soon as I’d finished my training, in 1978, and specialized in internal medicine and cardiology at Maqased Hospital in Jerusalem, the best one in Palestine at the time. I was still politically active, of course, in the Palestinian Communist Party, but at that time all political activity was banned, every movement was underground. We were part of a new form of resistance to the Occupation that developed after Jordan crushed the Palestinians during the ‘Black September’ of 1970, putting an end to the first phase of armed struggle. The new movement was one in which the people were democratically involved in decision-making. This is a period that has not been properly studied, as the media’s attention was concentrated on the plo’s adventures in Lebanon or Tunis. People did volunteer work, helping with the olive harvesting or assisting the medical crews. By the end of the 1970s, several resistance committees had been formed: the National Guidance Committee, which coordinated activities, the Palestinian National Front, as well as local committees across Palestine. This was where the embryo of the first Intifada took shape.

An important turning point came when Sadat addressed the Knesset in 1977 and the Camp David Accords were signed the following year: a ‘peace’ agreement, without solving the problem of the Israeli Occupation! We realized then that we couldn’t rely on Egypt, Syria or any other country, that we could expect nothing from outside. We would have to be self-reliant, self-organized. Resistance would have to mean defying the Occupation, defying the Israeli rules.