Mustafa Barghouti (Arabic: مصطفى البرغوثي, pronounced [musˤtˤaˌfaː‿l.barˈɣuːθiː]; born 1 January 1954) is a Palestinian physician, activist, and politician who serves as General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI), also known as al-Mubadara, and head of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society. He has been a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 2006 and is also a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council. In 2007, Barghouti was Minister of Information in the Palestinian unity government. He is an advocate of the use of non-violence and civil disobedience to confront Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.
Early life and education Mustafa Barghouti was born 1 January 1954 in Jerusalem. His family is from what is today Bani Zeid, a municipality of over 6,000, founded in 1966 when the villages of Deir Ghassaneh and Beit Rima merged during Jordanian rule. He grew up in Ramallah and his father was the municipal engineer for the nearby village of Al-Bireh. Barghouti has said that his family "has always been very political, very active," noting that under the Mandate, his grandfather and great-uncle "were jailed by the British." He has said that he "grew up surrounded by internationalist, progressive literature," and has described his family's politics as always being "shaped by opposition to social injustice, rather than by nationalism." His father, he has noted, "used to speak to us of his Jewish comrades in Tiberias or Acre." He has said that he was "reshaped" by the Six-Day War. "I felt a huge amount of responsibility. My childhood ended then. We were now under occupation. It was the beginning of a life mission: how do we become free? The feeling of injustice was very strong. Though still a child, I felt the whole world sitting on my shoulders…. Some gave in to defeatism—Nasser had it wrong, it was better to adopt a pro-American stance—but our position was: no, we have to resist, but in a stronger, better way. I've never felt I was fighting for the liberation of the Palestinian people on purely nationalistic grounds, one people against another. It was a fight against oppression, against occupation." Barghouti has said that he was "very active" as a student activist in the West Bank. In 1971, he went to Moscow to study medicine and spent seven years there completing his medical training.
Career
Returning home in 1978, Barghouti specialized in internal medicine and cardiology at Maqased Hospital in Jerusalem. At that time he was active in the Palestinian Communist Party. After the signing of the Camp David Accords, Barghouti said that he and his comrades "realized...that we couldn't rely on Egypt, Syria or any other country, that we could expect nothing from outside. We would have to be self-reliant, self-organized. Resistance would have to mean defying the Occupation, defying the Israeli rules." While he was at Maqased, he and "five or six" medical colleagues founded Medical Relief (MR), a volunteer organization that has developed into "a whole network of primary health-care centres, mobile clinics and outreach programmes." By 1986, "there were MR committees all over the Occupied Territories, including Gaza." During this time, Barghouti pursued further studies in Jerusalem, then received an MSc. in Business Administration and Management from Stanford University. Barghouti served as Secretary-General of the Palestinian People's Party (formerly the Communist Party) and represented it in the Palestinian National Council, the legislative body of the PLO, until his resignation from the PPP in 2002. He stood for election in the 1996 PLC elections, running as a candidate in the Ramallah district, but lost out narrowly after a recount.
Barghouti is the President of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, an NGO that provides health and community services to people in the Occupied Territories. He is also the Director of the Health Development Information and Policy Institute, an independent Ramallah-based think-tank that engages in policy research and planning for the Palestinian health-care system in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Additionally, he was one of the founders, in October 2001, of Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People, a program that seeks to protect Palestinians, including those engaged in nonviolent protest, by arranging for international civilian witnesses to be present at potentially violent encounters between Palestinians and settlers or members of the IDF. Barghouti was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 by Mairead Maguire, who had won the prize in 1976.
Madrid Conference of 1991 In 1991, Barghouti was a delegate to the Madrid Conference, which was held with the aim of ending the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the First Intifada. At Madrid, he has said, "we sought to consolidate Palestinian unity—it was crucial that Israel should not succeed in erecting a wall between internal and external representatives." Barghouti has complained that "Oslo was decided behind the back of the Palestinian delegation to Madrid, and by extension, behind the back of the Palestinian people." He has described the Oslo negotiations as "a technical and political disaster," complaining that while "the Madrid team had been well briefed and had 600 experts at its disposal, the PLO's Oslo negotiations were conducted by amateurs." Israel, he has said, took "gross advantage of the naïvety of the Palestinian negotiators," but the result was "so disastrous, so unjust, that even the signatories couldn't make it stick....This is why democracy is so important in these cases: because it renders the negotiators accountable to the people, answerable for every document they sign." Barghouti said that after 1993, he and his colleagues "were conducting a struggle on two fronts," against the Israeli Occupation and against the Palestinian Authority. "Not only were our leaders completely inept at negotiating with Israel, but they were rapidly transforming themselves into a gigantic security apparatus…consuming 34 per cent of the budget." The PA, he has complained, "has functioned along the same lines as the totalitarian Arab governments that gave it refuge," trying "to control every aspect of life."
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