Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is a Palestinian physician and politician, serving as the General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, which he founded in 2002. Barghouti is also known for founding the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in 1979, which provides medical services to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. He has featured prominently in both English-language and Arabic-language media over the past year since October 7, emerging as a prominent advocate for Palestinian national unity and the holding of immediate democratic elections as an urgent requirement for confronting the threat of genocide and ethnic cleansing faced by Palestinians. He has strongly advocated over the past year for the rights of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, in Gaza and beyond. Mondoweiss spoke to Dr. Barghouti on October 2, 2024, to reflect on the ongoing genocide that started a year ago and what it has meant for the Palestinian struggle.
Mondoweiss: It has been an entire year since the Israeli genocide in Gaza began, and it has now expanded into a regional war involving Hezbollah and, potentially, Iran. When Hamas launched its surprise attack a year ago, what went through your mind? Did you expect that the Israeli response would be a genocide like the one you have witnessed?
Mustafa Barghouti: Nobody expected that the second largest and strongest Israeli command brigade, [the Israeli army’s Gaza Brigade] would collapse as it did. That led to many things that, in my opinion, were never planned, such as taking civilians prisoners. There was a certain level of chaos. I didn’t, of course, know that there would be such an attack, but I did expect some sort of explosion [from Gaza], because of the fact that Israel was ignoring any demand to end this state of siege. We witnessed a situation where the Israeli occupation had continued for 57 years. Ethnic cleansing continued for 76 years. The siege on Gaza was becoming unbearable. You’re talking about 17 years of siege on Gaza that led to a situation where people had almost no electricity, only a few hours a day, where 24 percent of the water was either polluted or saltwater, where 80 percent of young graduates were unemployed, and where there was not only a complete economic disaster but a total loss of hope. I think when we reached that moment on October 7, it became clear to all Palestinians that Israel had no plan whatsoever for a peaceful resolution of this situation.
The new Israeli government is a fascist government with people in it like [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir, who are themselves settlers and were previously accused by the Israeli judicial system of being members of terrorist groups. They declared clearly that the Israeli plan is to fill the West Bank with settlers and settlements so that Palestinians would lose any hope for a state of their own, and they would have to choose between leaving, which is ethnic cleansing, living a life of subjugation, which is apartheid, or dying, which is genocide. In reality, this is an officially declared Israeli policy. So, of course, people were expecting some sort of reaction to get us out of a terrible situation in which Israel was literally eliminating the Palestinian cause. Netanyahu was very clear about his plans. He declared that the goal of normalization with Arab countries was to liquidate the Palestinian cause.
And if you want another reason, just two weeks before October 7, Netanyahu appeared before the United Nations General Assembly and showed a map of Israel that included all of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, all of the Golan Heights, and a map of the new Middle East, which he is trying to construct, as he said, for 50 years to come.