Marwan Barghouti: How campaign to free 'Palestine's Mandela' is inspired by anti-apartheid struggle

I’m sitting in Florence’s Nelson Mandela forum surrounded by veterans of the Italian Pro-Palestine movement. It’s over 30 degrees. We are here because seven Tuscan municipalities are recognising Marwan Barghouti as an honorary citizen. Arab Barghouti, Marwan’s son, received the award on his behalf. Arab is led into a glass replica of Mandela’s cell. The original cell on Robben Island is where in 2013 the campaign to free Marwan Barghouti, ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, was launched. The symbolic impact has the Italian Free Marwan Committee weeping.

“What is happening to Barghouti is exactly the same as what happened to me”, declared Nelson Mandela in 2002, shortly after Marwan’s arrest in Israel.

Mandela highlighted the similarities before anyone else had noticed. Since this moment, the campaign to free Marwan has drawn huge inspiration from the struggle to free Mandela.

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Barghouti has been in Israeli jail for 24 years following a trial that has been widely condemned as illegitimate and politically motivated. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, representing over 180 national parliaments, found “numerous breaches of international law” in his case, concluding it was “impossible to say that Mr. Barghouti received a fair trial.”

However, a lifelong freedom fighter, Marwan said: “If the price of my people’s freedom is my own freedom, I am willing to pay that price.”

Marwan Barghouti is Palestine’s most prominent political leader. He regularly polls the highest when Palestinians are asked who they want to lead them. This sustained popularity, despite more than two decades behind bars, underscores how Barghouti is almost uniquely trusted across Palestinian factional lines. Many international observers see him as the only figure who could credibly negotiate, and deliver, a two-state settlement. His imprisonment, supporters argue, removes the very person most capable of brokering peace.

The similarities between Marwan and Nelson Mandela are striking. Both political prisoners. Both convicted of violent offences by a state oppressing them. And the campaign to free both of them came to represent the freedom struggle of an entire people.

The tactics deployed to free Barghouti are fundamentally in debt to the worldwide campaign to free Nelson Mandela and the broader anti-apartheid movement. Songs, concerts, citizenship recognition, rally cries, and diplomatic efforts; all well-worn tactics consciously modelled on the South African struggle. They’re tirelessly re-deployed to fight for Marwan’s freedom and make him a household name.

It is no accident that it was South Africa who accused Israel of Genocide in the ICJ in December 2023. Or that South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa was the first sitting head of state to have signed this pledge calling for Marwan’s release. The pledge has also been signed by 200 leading cultural figures such as Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, and Paul Simon. After all, Mandela himself said: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Mandela was given honorary citizenship in over 40 municipalities, cities, states, and countries. The powerful tool of political and human rights activism was one of the many moves of international solidarity which worked to weaken the Apartheid regime’s imprisonment of the South African leader. The International Campaign to Free Marwan believes this will do the same.

Arab, Marwan’s youngest son, travels internationally to lobby governments, parliaments and the media, arguing that Marwan is essential to any post-war political settlement.

He says: “When freedom feels impossible, that is often when it is closest, if people refuse to give up. If you had asked those fighting apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, ‘will this system collapse soon?’ many would have said ‘no’. If you’d asked people in Ireland during the hardest years, or Algeria under colonial rule, they would have said ‘not in our lifetime’.

Oppressors learn from each other, so the oppressed must do the same. So, I’d argue the most essential learning we who work on the campaign can take from Mandela’s story, is hope. 

Since October 7th, people are more urgently asking who will forge a way forward for peace in Israel and in Palestine. And both Israelis and Palestinians believe Marwan Barghouti will be essential to building that peace. We’re making Marwan famous so that all the incredible global energy fighting for a free Palestine can find a powerful way to channel this.

Free Marwan. Free Palestine.

Alice Horrell is writing on behalf of The Campaign to Free Marwan Barghouti

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