‘My husband is now a changed man’

THE wife of the most famous Palestinian prisoner and a man many believe could one day negotiate peace with Israel has said she empathises with the mother of freed Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was reunited with her son last week after he spent five years in Hamas captivity.

“I was very happy the mother of Shalit saw her son.When I saw the mother of Shalit hug her son I was happy,” Fadwa Barghouthi, the wife of second intifada uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi, said of last week’s release of the 25-year old Israeli sargeant in exchange for 477 Palestinian prisoners.

The deal did not include freedom for her husband, arrested in 2002 and now serving five life terms plus forty years after being convicted of attacks that left four Israelis and a Greek monk dead.

In an interview with The Scotsman in her office overlooking Palestinian founding father Yasser Arafat’s tomb, Fadwa Barghouthi said that she related to Gilad Shalit’s mother, Aviva, because her own eldest son, Qassam, was in an Israeli prison for four years and then released.

She said: “As a human, as a mother, I am not happy when any mother is deprived of her son. I am for the mothers on earth to be with their sons because it is a very big punishment for the mother if the son is away.”

Hamas had promised that Marwan Barghouthi, from the moderate Fatah movement, would be released. But last week the militant Islamic group admitted Israel refused to release him.

“I felt disappointed because Hamas and Egypt promised me personally that Marwan would be part of the deal and that it would not accept any deal without releasing Marwan,” Mrs Barghouthi said. If the Jewish state was serious about peace, she believes, it would free her husband since he would “help Abu Mazen [Palestinian president Abbas] in making genuine peace.” She is urging Mr Abbas to make her husband’s release a precondition for the resumption of peace talks.

Asked whether, if freed, Mr Barghouthi would resemble the moderate supporter of the peace process he was from the Oslo Agreement with Israel in 1993 until 2000, or the firebrand uprising leader he became that year, Mrs Barghouthi said that nearly a decade in prison had “made him deeper”.

“He spends seven to twelve hours a day reading. He has read literature, poetry, politics, books about Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton, about how other peoples achieved their freedom, about economy, democracy and women’s studies. He has read a great deal about Israeli society and a great deal in Hebrew and some Israelis who visited him were surprised he is reading new books published in Israel.”

While the West Bank is still occupied, she said, her husband backs “popular resistance” – the current unarmed demonstrations against Israel’s separation barrier, which often entail stone throwing at Israeli forces.

But she added: “If we have a state with clear borders that is really independent, Marwan will support a normal relationship with all neighbours, including Israel.”

Asked if she hopes her husband will become Mr Abbas’s successor, she said that above all else “what I want is really that he comes back home. He left four young children and now they are old, all of them have graduated from university. Some of them will get married while their father is away and they cannot visit him or get his advice.’’

Israeli opposition lawmaker Amir Peretz yesterday called for Mr Barghouthi’s release, saying Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “already freed murderers from Hamas” and that such a move would strengthen Fatah and enable peacemaking.

But an official, who requested anonymity, said: “I understand his wife wants him released, but what about the wives, husbands, parents and children of his numerous victims?”