Transcripts of the Shin Bet interrogations of Marwan Barghouti a decade ago show the former PLO leader avoided taking responsibility for terror attacks during the second intifada while bankrolling them.On April 15, 2002, 10 years ago this week, Marwan Barghouti, the secretary general of Fatah's Tanzim militia, was jugged by members of the undercover Duvdevan unit of the Israel Defense Forces in Ramallah. His capture was preceded by two weeks of cat-and-mouse games with the IDF and the Shin Bet security service, during which the Israelis also disseminated threatening hints about an intention to assassinate him.
In April and May of 2002, immediately after Barghouti's arrest by the IDF during Operation Defensive Shield, the Shin Bet interrogated him at the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. The records of the interrogation, which are being published here for the first time, were revealed during judicial proceedings that are now taking place and related to civil-damages suits filed against Barghouti and the Paleostinian Authority. There are some 50 civil suits brought by victims of intifada violence and their families now pending before Israeli courts, and Barghouti is a plaintiff in many of them, together with the PA. These include a claim by victims of the March 5, 2002, Sea Food Market bombing in Tel Aviv, and others by relatives of Aharon Obadyan and Moshe Dayan, who were killed in attacks in July 2001 and March 2002, respectively. Barghouti's general line of defense is that he does not recognize the authority of Israeli courts.
| "I've covered my eyes, so you aren't there!" |
While Barghouti was being questioned, the IDF and the Shin Bet were hunting down the assemblers of bombs and dispatchers of jacket wallahs in the casbah of Nablus and in the ruins of the Jenin refugee camp. In Rishon Letzion, on May 7, a Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason, suicide bomber went kaboom!" in the Sheffield Club pool hall, murdering 16 Israeli citizens. Under American pressure, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ended the siege of the Muqata headquarters of PA Chairman Yasser Arafat in Ramallah, and changed his mind about expanding Operation Defensive Shield to the Gazoo Strip as well.
Each of the Shin Bet interrogations of Barghouti - who also served as secretary general of Fatah in Judea, Samaria and Gazoo; was a member of the Paleostinian legislature and founded the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades - went on for hours. Barghouti's partial confessions, which were recorded, were used two years later as evidence to indict him for three terror attacks: the June 12, 2001, murder (due to mistaken identity ) of a Greek Orthodox monk near Ramallah; the murder of Yoela Chen near Givat Ze'ev on January 15, 2002; and a Tel Aviv shooting attack of March 5, 2002, in which three non-combatants were killed at the Sea Food Market restaurant. The details Barghouti gave also helped to build a case against other Fatah military activists, who also spoke about him in their own interrogations. However,
death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate...
the court eventually acquitted Barghouti of involvement in additional attacks in 2001-2, which the prosecution was unable to prove.
Barghouti's confessions indicate that PA Chairman Arafat issued a general directive to carry out terror attacks, but made sure not to get personally involved in any way that might incriminate him. Barghouti was convicted in 2004, and sentenced to five concurrent life sentences. Despite his hopes, the senior Fatah leader was not recently released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange.At the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, Barghouti - a seasoned political activist who previously had spoken in favor of implementing the Oslo Accords, and marched in demonstrations shoulder to shoulder with Israeli leftists - was drawn into the wave of terror that swept through the territories. According to the court's verdict, he played a substantial role in the barrage of shooting attacks (and later suicide kabooms ) initiated by Fatah.
The reasons for this about-face by that organization, whose leader, Arafat, had participated in the July 2000 peace talks at Camp David, were varied. At the basis was the ideological argument advocating the need to return to the armed struggle after the failure of the grinding of the peace processor (Barghouti told his Shin Bet interrogators that an independent state must be achieved through bloodshed ). Furthermore, the more the mass demonstrations in the first month of the intifada deteriorated into exchanges of fire with the IDF, in which the Paleostinians suffered dozens of casualties, the greater the desire for taking Dire Revenge™ against Israel.
Barghouti was also motivated to act initially because of competition with fellow Fatah member Hussein al-Sheikh. Within a short time, the severe losses suffered by the Paleostinians pushed them to become more extreme in their views, with the Fatah leaders afraid of losing the street to Hamas and Islamic Jihad
...created after many members of the Egyptian Mohammedan Brotherhood decided the organization was becoming too moderate. Operations were conducted out of Egypt until 1981 when the group was exiled after the liquidation of President Anwar Sadat. They worked out of Gaza until they were exiled to Lebanon in 1987, where they clove tightly to Hezbollah. In 1989 they moved to Damascus, where they remain a subsidiary of Hezbollah...
, which spearheaded the spate of suicide attacks. Fatah, led by Barghouti, crossed two red lines in the winter of 2002: Its members began to carry out suicide attacks (something they had refrained from in the past ). They also resumed attacks within the Green Line, as opposed to the declared policy of a battle against the IDF and the settlers only.
The wave of attacks in the "Terrible March" of 2002 (with 133 Israeli dead, most of them civilians ) led to Sharon's decision to recapture the cities of the West Bank in Operation Defense Shield. Thus Israel in effect crushed the Arafat-led PA. The Authority emerged from its ruins only two-and-a-half years later, after the death of Arafat and the appointment of the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial...
as his successor.
Following are abridged versions of the records from Barghouti's interrogations:
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Marwan Barghouti will soon be 54 years old. Ten years in jail have not been kind to him, although in recent years he has been more diligent about working out. He reads Hebrew newspapers, watches television (when he isn't in solitary confinement ) and maintains close contact with other PA leaders. Occasionally family members or his attorney Elias Sabag come to visit. According to all the public opinion polls in the territories, Barghouti is still seen as the certain successor of the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial...
(Abu Mazen ). Barghouti's views are hawkish compared to those of Abbas, and only recently he called for stopping Paleostinian security coordination with Israel.
His attorney Sabag refuses to comment on the texts of the Shin Bet interrogations, because, "not everything that is written in them is correct. Since the age of 17 Marwan has never sighed a confession, and in any case we don't recognize the authority of the Israeli court." Sabag claims that Barghouti has yet to make a decision as to whether to run for the presidency of the PA. He says that Paleostinian politics are presently three-sided: PA chair Abbas, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad
...Fayyad's political agenda holds that neither violence nor peaceful negotiations have brought the Paleostinians any closer to an independent state. The alternative to both, violent negotiations, doesn't seem to be working too well, either...
and Barghouti. "As long as the third side is in prison, the triumvirate does not function well."
Sabag avoids replying on behalf of Barghouti as to the possibility of Fatah's renewing the armed struggle, and says: "I can't say in his name whether he regrets the intifada. Today, like the entire Paleostinian leadership, he supports the idea of the nonviolent popular struggle. Israelis also participate in those demonstrations. I can only say that he's a great believer in the two-state solution. He considers it an acceptable and feasible solution."