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200+ Luminaries Back Demand for Israel to Free Marwan Barghouti
The Israelis want the Palestinian leadership weak and divided, and they have succeeded in arranging for this outcome.
Dec 03, 2025
Two hundred prominent literary, cultural and political figures have signed an open letter demanding the release from Israeli prison of Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti 66, is widely thought to be one of the few figures who could unite the Palestinians and lead them to statehood. Israel has imprisoned him for 23 years after a trial most observers consider extremely flawed to say the least. Israel is apparently preparing to go on an execution spree against Palestinian prisoners, some of whom are held without charges or trial for indefinite periods of time.
The star-studded list of signatories includes Margaret Atwood of “The Handmaid’s Tale” fame; Mark Ruffalo a.k.a. the Incredible Hulk, Philip Pullman, author of “His Dark Materials;” Paul Simon, who knows a thing or two about bridges over troubled waters; Benedict Cumberbatch a.k.a. Dr. Strange; Sting, who knows when someone’s watching you; artist Ai Weiwei (who was once arrested and held without charges for 81 days himself); television personality and author Stephen Fry; billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson; and other prominent writers and culture figures.
The campaign is being likened to the effort to free Nelson Mandela from the prisons of Apartheid South Africa in the late 1980s, which presaged the end of Apartheid itself.
Palestinian leadership is a mess, though this is largely the fault of Israel and the United States. Occupied people are often divided and ruled by outsiders, who bribe and spy and set honey traps. They turn any successful indigenous leader into either a collaborator or a terrorist. They damage the local economy and so set the stage for societal failure. The Oslo Accords of 1993 turned the Palestine Liberation Organization, which gave up its chief bargaining chip by recognizing Israel, into a tool for policing Palestinians to keep them from rising up over being brutally occupied. As a result, the PLO is now widely hated. Not to mention that the Israeli refusal to allow elections to be held after 2006 has ensured that the Palestine Authority leaders became a corrupt gerontocracy.
Hamas was alternatively bankrolled by the Israelis or at their behest and cooped up in a large open air concentration camp, a combination that made them dangerous rather than complacent and as a result they committed the horrors of October 7, 2023, ensuring that no Israeli or American government could deal with them ever after.
The Israelis want the Palestinian leadership weak and divided, and they have succeeded in arranging for this outcome.
Bargouti has none of the taint of corruption and collaborator status that now clings to the PLO, since although he is a member of Fateh he has been in prison for the bad old days. He has from his youth been opposed to Hamas.
Barghouti was born in 1959 in the hamlet of Kober in Ramallah governorate. His wife Nadwa is an attorney and women’s rights activist.
Barghouti in his teens joined the Communist Party and participated in peaceful demonstrations. As historian Joel Beinin showed in his Was the Red Flag Flying There? Marxist Politics and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in Eqypt and Israel 1948-1965, the Communist Party was one of the few political vehicles in Israel and Palestine that had both Israeli and Palestinian members, since Marxism rejects nationalist chauvinism.
The Israeli-Palestine problem, however, did not seem to him likely to be resolved by sitting around the campfire singing the Marxist equivalent of Kumbaya, and he gravitated to Fateh, the leading group within the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat. In 1978, the Israelis arrested Barghouti when he was around 19, apparently just for being associated with the PLO. They imprisoned him for four years. He finished up his high school degree at Prince Hassan High School in Bir Zeit by completing correspondence courses from prison.
After he was released in 1982, when he must have been about 23, he went to Bir Zeit University and did a BA in History and Political Science. Then he did an MA at Bir Zeit in International Relations. During the 1980s he was active in campus politics and was elected head of the Bir Zeit University student council.
In 1987, the Israelis expelled him to Jordan, which is a war crime. That is, an occupying power is forbidden in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 of displacing members of the occupied population. He had to remain in forced exile until 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the PLO and the latter recognized Israel, ending the state of conflict between the two in principle.
On his return to his homeland, Barghouti landed a teaching position at the main Abu Dis campus of al-Quds University in Jerusalem. In the 1990s, Barghouti was known for having good relationships with Israelis. He rose to become secretary-general of Fateh in the Palestinian West Bank, and then was elected to the Palestinian parliament established after Oslo. He established the secular Tanzim paramilitary to combat rising fundamentalist Hamas militants. He was seen as a young comer in Palestinian politics, as someone on whom the old guard like Yasser Arafat depended. But he was also critical of the corruption that arose in the Palestine Authority.
But during the Second Uprising (Intifada), the relationship between the Israelis and Palestinians again turned violent. In 2002, Barghouti wrote an op ed for the Washington Post entitled “Want Security? End the Occupation.” He said,
- “Over the past 15 months, Israel has killed more than 900 Palestinian civilians, 25 percent of them under the age of 18.”
He added,
- “I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating only what every other oppressed person has advocated — the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else. This principle may well lead to my assassination.”
Thereafter, a militant Fateh wing committed violence in Israel, killing dozens of Israelis and the Israeli authorities tagged Barghouti as involved, though they never made public what evidence they had of his involvement. In 2004 he was sentenced to five life sentences.
I am a severe critic of terrorism in the sense of targeting civilians for political purposes. But in the real world of politics, people who deploy that tactic sometimes do have a political comeback. Menahem Begin, who boasted of machine-gunning down innocent Palestinian women and children at Deir Yassin in 1948, became prime minister of Israel and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Ahmed al-Shara, formerly head of an al-Qaeda offshoot, who was imprisoned by US marines in Iraq, and who certainly committed a ton more terrorism than Begin, was just recently an honored guest in the Trump White House. Nelson Mandela himself committed political violence in his youth, for which he was imprisoned; he was no pacifist. Released from prison, he became president of South Africa and urged reconciliation.
In prison Barghouti finished a doctorate in political science in 2010 and is known for having argued for restraint and against violence to his Palestinian audience on the outside.
His advice to the Israelis in 2002, which, to say the least they haven’t heeded, is still the best advice. If you want security, end the occupation. If Barghouti could help do that, it might save Israel from its own most self-destructive instincts — which are at the moment sinking it.
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FIFA Can No Longer Be Silent on Israel's Human Rights Atrocities in Gaza
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Jun 26, 2025
Although you might not know it from reading mainstream media in the U.S., Gaza continues to be under siege. Israel has installed a blockade of humanitarian aid, weaponizing food for everyday Gazans who desperately need it, while the Gaza Humanitarian Organization—a shadowy, Israeli-backed organization that relies on private US security contractors—continues to slow-roll the delivery of food. Securing basic foodstuffs has become akin to “a perverted Squid Games” where all too often death is the outcome, according to Dr. Mark Braunner, a volunteer at Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
With U.S. media attention swiveling away from Gaza and toward Iran, this is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Enter a gaggle of leading legal experts and scholars who this week ramped up pressure on FIFA, the world’s governing body for soccer, demanding that its Governance Audit and Compliance Committee address a well-documented complaint against Israel for holding matches in settlements inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
FIFA has long demonstrated a conspicuous deference toward Israel. FIFA has consistently looked the other way when it comes to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, even when doing so means ignoring its own stated commitments to human rights.
It’s past time for football federations across the globe to stand up for freedom and legal rights. With tyranny on the rise globally, sport can help raise awareness that we need to draw the line on injustice.
Let’s be absolutely clear: Israel is carrying out human-rights atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, bombing hospitals, killing Palestinians as they attempt to collect aid, barring doctors from entering Gaza, green-lighting the most aggressive expansion of West Bank settlements in decades. It’s no wonder that Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently characterized Israeli actions as “war crimes.”
On the football front, the Israeli Football Association (IFA) has staged matches in occupied Palestinian territory. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian players and coaches while engaging in the systematic destruction of sport facilities, even converting Gaza’s storied Yarmouk stadium into a temporary interrogation site. These actions violate numerous FIFA Statutes.
FIFA’s response? One might say crickets, but crickets actually make noise. For more than a decade it has foot-dragged investigating good-faith claims against Israel. As Fair Square, the London-based rights group, asserted, “FIFA’s ongoing failure to enforce sanctions against the Israeli Football Association despite long-standing and irrefutable evidence that the IFA is in violation of FIFA Statutes is further evidence of the organisation’s ad hoc and selective enforcement of its rules.”
FIFA’s inaction is a grim example of what Henry Giroux calls “The violence of organized forgetting.”
FIFA’s free pass for Israel is deeply hypocritical. In February 2022, only a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine, both FIFA and UEFA, Europe’s governing body for soccer, moved swiftly to suspend Russian football clubs and national teams from all competition. In a joint statement, FIFA and UEFA insisted that “Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine.” And yet, no such solidarity has been forthcoming for Palestinians.
The main reason FIFA and UEFA stood up in the face of Ukraine’s invasion was that numerous European countries refused to take the field against Russia in World Cup qualifying matches. Leaders from places Poland, Sweden, England and the Czech Republic insisted that the powerbrokers of soccer take principled action, forcing FIFA and UEFA’s hand. The president of France’s football association stated, “The world of sport, and in particular football, cannot remain neutral.”
This brings us back to Israel. It’s not too late for soccer barons to take action. And it turns out that UEFA is actually a key player. The Israeli Football Association was originally part of the Asian Football Confederation, given its geographical location in the Middle East. But after Indonesia, Sudan, and Turkey all refused to play 1958 World Cup qualifying matches against Israel, and other countries applied political pressure, the IFA was eventually expelled in 1974. This placed Israel in the soccer wilderness until, in the early 1990s, UEFA invited the Israeli national team to participate in its competitions. In 1994, Israel became a full member of UEFA.
After Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, UEFA halted all matches in Israel for the foreseeable future. This meant that Israel was forced to play recent World Cup qualifying “home” matches in Hungary.
Rights groups—from Human Rights Watch to Fair Square to the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner—insist that Israel has openly violated FIFA Statutes. Therefore, individual Football Associations from around the world need to stand up and press FIFA to follow its own rules.
Norwegian Football Federation President Lise Klaveness moved in the right direction recently when she stated, “None of us can remain indifferent to the disproportionate attacks that Israel has subjected the civilian population in Gaza to.” When Susan Shalabi, the vice president of the Palestinian Football Association, urged FIFA to take action against Israel at its recent meetings in Paraguay, the Norwegian Football Federation issued a statement that it “stands in solidarity with the Palestinian Football Association and supports their right to have this long-standing issue properly addressed by FIFA.” We need more of this sort of political courage.
Sport should not be allowed to supersede human rights. For too long, FIFA has executed behind-the-scenes maneuverings that have allowed it to avoid reckoning with Israel’s human-rights violations. As FIFA whistleblower Bonita Mersiades put it, “True reform demands more than new systems—it requires new values.” At the very least, football honchos and fans alike must align their stated values with principled actions.
With authoritarianism on the march globally, now is the time to fix the limit on human-rights abuses, using sports as a way to immobilize the jackboots. As Nelson Mandela put it, “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”
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Trump’s South Africa Executive Order Reflects the Global History of White Supremacy
The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition.
Feb 23, 2025
On February 7, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order “to address serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.” The order charged “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against because of their race as refugees.” His actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Analysts in South Africa quickly pointed out the many factual errors in Trump’s diatribe. Even Afrikaners, who he alleges are persecuted, are unlikely to accept being refugees since South Africa is their home country. The post-apartheid constitution of 1997, echoing the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter of 1955, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it.” But Trump’s misunderstanding is an example of the transnational scope of white racist nostalgia.
An essential component of opposing the MAGA offensive against human rights in the United States has been new understandings of U.S. history, as reflected in the 1619 Project and a host of other publications. Most often, however, this discussion has focused on the United States in isolation. Scholars such as Ana Lucia Araújo, in Humans in Shackles, and Howard French, in Born of Blackness, have pioneered wider global histories. But however influential this trend is among historians, it has not been matched by attention in the media or public debate.
The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest.
In the global history of white supremacy, the close relationship between the United States and South Africa stands out for centuries of interaction between the two settler colonies, with both ideological and material links from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Significant links between Black resistance movements in the two countries also date back at least to the early 20th century. But until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest bonds were between white America and white South Africa.
In a short history of the Boer War written by eight-year-old future CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1901, and published by his grandfather, Dulles noted that the Boers landed at the Cape in 1652, “finding no people but a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the British to come in because the Boers had the first right to the land.” For Dulles, as for other U.S. policymakers until almost the end of the 20th century, it was axiomatic that only whites had rights.
The parallels between these two settler colonies were significant. Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to university students in Cape Town in June 1966, put it like this:
I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.
The parallels were matched by a long history of interaction. The concept for the African reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa was modeled on American Indian reservations. As noted by historian John W. Cell, Americans and South Africans debated how to shape “segregation” in urbanizing societies in the mid-20th century. The Carnegie Corporation of New York financed both the classic study of the situation of “poor whites° in South Africa and Gunnar Myrdal´s The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.
In the early 20th century, mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later U.S. president) was the founder and director of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, which shipped some 50.000 Chinese laborers to South Africa to work in South African mines. The scheme was abandoned in 1911. Mention of it was recently deleted from Wikipedia, most likely in 2018.
Both countries were united during the Cold War through anti-communism. South African officials studied McCarthyist legislation in the United States and applied it at home through the Suppression of Communism Act. In both countries, “anti-communism” became a way to defy demands for civil rights. Although white racism in South Africa became the focus of international condemnation after the official adoption of apartheid in 1948, the United States and other Western countries systematically opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades until the rise of the international anti-apartheid movement resulted in the congressional override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.
That success came after decades of campaigning in the United States and around the world, with heightened international attention coming in response to resistance in South Africa itself. The Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961, in which Nelson Mandela and 135 other leaders of the African National Congress were charged, evoked widespread anti-apartheid actions in the United Kingdom and other countries. The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and the Soweto Youth Uprising in 1976 precipitated even larger waves of protest, fueled by new media options. Resistance reached a new peak after the formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983.
Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and the first non-racial election that brought him into office, there was worldwide celebration at the end of political apartheid. In later years, it became clear that only a minority of Black South Africans had joined the elite at the top of a still sharply unequal society. Disillusionment and discontent over high rates of unemployment and poverty arose among the majority of Black South Africans.
But that is a very different sentiment than the nostalgia for the old apartheid order among white South Africans who left the country as well as many who stayed in South Africa.
The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition. The global anti-apartheid movement unleashed unprecedented demands by citizens to rein in corporate activity that supported apartheid. In the same way that climate activists studied divestment, so too have conservative lobbying groups studied how to block divestment groups. The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest. Trump’s Executive Order can only be understood in that context.
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