Legal Affairs: Stealing the Show - Israel may have created the new Mandela

[Quetzal]

Stealing the Show

LATE ONE EVENING IN MARCH 2002, the Sea Food Market restaurant in Tel Aviv was still packed with diners, including several members of Israel's national soccer team. Ibrahim Hasouna began shooting into the crowd at around 2:30 a.m. As people screamed and tried to scatter, some wounded by the gunfire, Hasouna charged into the melee he'd created and stabbed to death three people—a policeman who tried to stop him, and two other men.

Hasouna's rampage ended when he was gunned down by Israeli security forces. This spring, however, an Israeli court convicted a man named Marwan Barghouti for the crime. In June, he was sentenced to five life terms for the Sea Food Market stabbings, two car ambushes, and a thwarted bombing of a Jerusalem shopping mall. Barghouti had not been present at any of the attacks, but the court found that he had approved them, as the leader of the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a collection of terrorist cells loyal to Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement.

At 45, Barghouti is a former peace activist, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and, according to Israel, responsible for "hundreds of Israeli deaths." Palestinians suspected of masterminding terror typically don't have long life expectancies. In just the last year, Israel has killed half a dozen political leaders of Hamas. But rather than have Barghouti's blood on its hands, the government decided to prove that an esteemed member of the Palestinian leadership had Israeli blood on his. Israel could then brand the Palestinian leadership as guilty by association. "We need to tell the story of the Israeli population and what it has been through in the last two years," Gideon Meir of the Foreign Ministry said when Barghouti's trial began in September 2002.

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Stealing the Show