ISRAEL: David Horovitz witnessed the first intifada leader to face criminal changes being put on trial yesterday
"Daddy, daddy," the three children of Marwan Barghouti called out to him in a Tel Aviv courtroom yesterday. They hadn't seen him for months.
"Your father is a murderer," retorted Avigail Levy, sitting near Ruba, Sharaf and Arab Barghouti in the court. Levy's daughter was blown up by a female Palestinian suicide bomber at a Jerusalem supermarket five months ago.
"There's a mistake here," Mr Barghouti declared from the dock. "The one who should be sitting here is the government of Israel. I don't recognise this court. I am a freedom fighter. This is a court of the occupation.
"A freedom fighter doesn't turn people into bombs," interrupted the presiding judge, Sarah Zerota.
Mr Barghouti, the Palestinian leader most prominently associated with the two-year intifada, was brought to court to hear the charges against him: murder, conspiracy to murder and more, surrounding his alleged involvement, as head of the Tanzim and the Al-Aqsa Brigades, in three dozen attacks in which 26 Israelis were killed.
The first intifada leader to be tried in a criminal court, Mr Barghouti ( 43), who was arrested by Israel in April and appeared to be in robust spirits, is seeing his popularity rise in Palestinian circles because of his incarceration.
He regularly polls second only after the Palestinian Authority President Mr Yasser Arafat, and the invitation he extended to the former South African president Nelson Mandela - courteously declined by Mr Mandela - points to the image he seeks to foster of intolerably jailed would-be nation-builder.
For the Israeli prosecutors, the trial is an effort to persuade a keenly watching world audience - the court was crowded with foreign TV networks - that the entire Arafat regime is profoundly involved in terrorism. Mr Barghouti plainly hopes to use the platform to hammer home the iniquities of the Israeli occupation. Behind-the-scenes, however, it is conceivable that Israel sees an interest in boosting the standing of a leader who was regarded as relatively moderate before the eruption of the intifada, and who might be considered a more convenient successor to Mr Arafat than the Hamas leaders who could otherwise take control.
Mr Arafat remains a dominant figure, and is set to oversee a meeting of the Palestinian Legislative Council next Monday to swear-in new appointees to his cabinet. But several leading Palestinian figures have lately distanced themselves from Mr Arafat's negotiating stances, taking positions that would have been heretical even a short time ago.
A recently resigned cabinet minister, Mr Nabil Amr, for instance, this week flatly blamed Mr Arafat for rejecting former US president Bill Clinton's proposals for a permanent peace accord, and urged a reassessment. Mr Arafat's own deputy, Mr Abu Mazen, is reported to have held meetings with Palestinian refugees in Syria recently, and indicated it is unrealistic for them to harbour the notion of a massive influx of refugees to their former homes inside today's Israel - as demanded by Mr Arafat, and one of the key issues that derailed the Camp David peace summit two years ago.
On the ground, however, violence and hostility are unceasing. In the Gaza Strip, an Israeli soldier was killed yesterday by a bomb that exploded under his tank. And a second soldier was shot dead by armed Palestinians during a routine patrol near Jewish settlements there. One of the gunmen was also killed. Israel was last night moving additional forces towards Gaza.
In northern Israel, meanwhile, what police described as one of the biggest bombing attempts of the intifada was foiled, when a car was intercepted driving into Israel from the West Bank loaded with 1,300 lb of explosives. Mr Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister, called the interception miraculous, saying that, if the device had been detonated, "it would have cost such loss of life as to change almost the entire political situation in one moment".