Mustafa Barghouti

Mustafa Barghouti was born in Jerusalem in 1954 and spent his childhood in Ramallah. He trained as a physician in Moscow and practised medicine in Palestine for eighteen years, and in 1979 helped to found and lead the Palestinian Medical Relief Society — a volunteer-driven health movement that grew into one of the largest providers of primary care in the occupied territories, working by 2010 in 495 cities, villages and refugee camps with 380 health professionals, some 38,000 volunteers, and 1.3 million patients a year. In 1989 he helped found the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute, the policy think-tank that houses the Palestine Monitor.

He was active in the First Intifada and served as a delegate at the Madrid conference of 1991, and became an outspoken critic of the bargaining positions and concessions of the Oslo process. In June 2002 he helped found the Palestinian National Initiative — al-Mubadara — together with Edward Said, Haidar Abdel Shafi and Ibrahim Dakkak, a movement whose manifesto of November 2000 had called for a non-violent, non-militarized intifada. The Initiative stands apart in the Palestinian field: it has no armed wing, practises peaceful resistance to the occupation while recognizing the right to resist, calls for democratic reform within the Palestinian Authority, a state on the pre-1967 lines, withdrawal of the occupation forces, and the right of return. He has been repeatedly jailed and arrested by Israeli forces for his political activity.

In the presidential election of January 2005 Barghouti ran on a platform of anti-corruption and democratic renewal and finished second, with just under 20 percent of the vote, behind Mahmoud Abbas and well ahead of the combined support for all other candidates. He was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 as general secretary of the Initiative, served as minister of information in the 2007 unity government, and sits on the PLO’s Central Council. Since the war on Gaza that began in October 2023 he has been one of the most persistent Palestinian voices in the international media, arguing the case that has defined his career: that Palestinians’ liberation will be won by civil resistance, democratic institutions and international pressure rather than by armed factions.

Sources

• The Palestinian National Initiative and Dr. Mustafa Barghouti — CJPME Factsheet 80, May 2010
• Mustafa Barghouti — European Council on Foreign Relations, Mapping Palestinian Politics
• Mustafa Barghouti — The Muslim 500