Marwan Barghouti intends his trial to be an indictment of the Israeli occupation, and sends a message to the Palestinians, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem Click to view caption Unshaven, with hair tousled, yesterday Marwan Barghouti was brought before the Tel Aviv District Court with nothing in his hands save Israeli handcuffs and his cause. "Peace will be achieved with the end of the occupation," he yelled to the press gallery. Fatah's West Bank leader stood indicted on charges of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to murder and "activities in a terrorist organisation". The Israeli prosecution is seeking a sentence of life imprisonment. The Palestinian defence is seeking to show that an Israeli court has no jurisdiction over an elected politician abducted from the occupied territories. But the core of the trial is political. For Israel the goal is to marshal evidence to convince all that Fatah, the PA and indeed Palestinian nationalism are entities "infested" with terror and that the Israeli occupation is a necessary bulwark in "the war against terrorism". For Barghouti the case is to put that occupation on trial and defend his people's right to resist it. He probably won the first round. From behind a cordon of Israeli police he raised his manacled hands and spoke in Arabic, Hebrew and English, mindful of the constituencies he needs to mobilise if he is to be free. But whatever the language the message was the same: "No peace, no security, with occupation. The Intifada will win." How the Intifada will win has been the issue of another political trial in Gaza, fought not between the occupier and the occupied but between their various national and Islamic representatives. After months of negotiations, on 10 August the Palestinian factions agreed a draft political policy that, finally, would give content and form to the Intifada. On the internal front the policy calls for the establishment of a united leadership, comprising all factions, to prepare "comprehensive" elections for the PLO, PA and other Palestinian bodies. But the kernel is an unequivocal statement that the goal of the national struggle is the establishment of a Palestinian state on the entirety of the 1967 occupied territories. Less clearly, it states the means of struggle must be consonant with the goal, implying that resistance henceforth should be confined to military targets in the West Bank and Gaza. On 12 August Hussein Sheikh -- Barghouti's replacement in the West Bank -- made the implication explicit. "It is not part of Fatah's strategy to harm innocent people and carry out attacks inside Israel. Our strategy is to set up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza," he said. Barghouti is said to have approved Sheikh's announcement, and the factions' policy statement in Gaza. And so, initially, did Hamas. According to sources involved in the drafting, Hamas political leader Ismail Abu Shanab not only endorsed the 10 August statement, he was involved in its formulation. By 13 August, however, the unity had waned. "Hamas will not accept any document that does not give it the right of resistance on all Palestinian lands," including inside Israel, he said. What had changed? Sources say Hamas' military cadres and outside leadership "ideologically" opposed any statement that bound the Palestinian cause and struggle to the occupied territories. More immediately they were against derogating decisions over such matters to a collective national leadership rather than their own factional one. And so were the Al-Aqsa Brigades, Fatah's military arm in the occupied territories. On 12 August -- in the teeth of Sheikh's announcement -- the militia vowed to continue suicide attacks inside the Green Line "unless Israel withdraws from the Palestinian territories, releases Palestinian prisoners and stops assassinating the Palestinian leadership". It is a line at one with Hamas' recent offers of a conditional truce on attacks on Israeli civilians. But the core of the dispute goes deeper than one of military tactics or ideological claims on the territorial extent and meaning of Palestine to encompass the goals of the uprising. Among Fatah's younger political leadership -- including, say sources, Barghouti -- the realisation has dawned that the strategy of an "armed Intifada," and especially the suicide operations inside Israel, has proved disastrous to the Palestinian cause. It has given Ariel Sharon the pretext to pursue Israel's territorial and military conquests in the West Bank, and drained the reservoirs of international sympathy on which the national struggle once drew sustenance, especially in Europe. The aim of Fatah's moratorium on attacks on civilians in Israel is to win back that sympathy and restore legitimacy to the Palestinian resistance. Although unconditional, it appeals to the world to exert pressure on Sharon to withdraw his tanks from the PA areas so that elections can happen and new Palestinian leaders chosen, preferably along the lines of the "united leadership" advocated by the factions in Gaza. Hamas' stance to this project is wholly ambiguous. There are some among its political leaders in Gaza who support it. But there are others who view the armed Intifada as their road to leadership of the Palestinian struggle, and regardless of the cost this exacts on Palestinian society, institutions and people. There are some in Fatah, too, who believe that "the only goal of the Intifada is to continue the Intifada." Barghouti is not among them. In Tel Aviv he stated clearly that two states for two peoples is the only formula that will bring security to the Israelis and independence to the Palestinians. He was addressing the world, but he was nodding to his national movement in Gaza and the West Bank, and for one simple reason. He knows what history has taught: that a people whose leadership is conflicted on goals and divided on means will never be free.
