A Mideast Mandela?(Israel under pressure to free Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti)(Editorial)

Fadwa Barghouti was accustomed to 1 a.m. phone calls. The wife of Israel's most prominent Palestinian prisoner, Fadwa had spent months lobbying people on the phone and in person on her husband's behalf. This time Yasir Arafat was on the line, according to Palestinians familiar with the details. In a short but dramatic conversation last month, the Palestinian leader told Fadwa her husband would be freed within 48 hours. "I didn't know what to think," she said in the living room of her home in the West Bank town of Ramallah last week. For two days, she waited restlessly for word from prison and tried to calm her anxious children, who hadn't seen their father since his arrest 14 months earlier. The anticipation was so overwhelming that, at one point, Fadwa unplugged the phone. When the deadline came and went, she concluded that Arafat had been mistaken--Marwan Barghouti would remain in jail.

For now, anyway. Barghouti is on trial for directing the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and having a hand in the killing of at least 26 Israelis. In court last week, he continued to challenge Israel's authority to try him, declaring that "no Palestinian can get justice from Israeli judges." But while Barghouti, 44, is the biggest fish Israel has netted in nearly three years of fighting, the government is coming under increasing pressure to free him. Palestinians insist he's the one figure who could give Prime Minister Abu Mazen the street legitimacy he sorely lacks. Europeans point to the way Barghouti last month orchestrated a provisional Palestinian ceasefire. Even in Washington, where pressuring Israel is considered politically risky, some officials are saying aloud that springing him could be in the Jewish state's interests. "People like me understand people's checkered past. But we balance that with a search for anyone who can actually command authority to end violence," says U.S. Congressman Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican from Illinois.

Barghouti is certainly a man of authority, but Israel claims he's used his clout mainly to foment violence. A member of Arafat's Fatah faction since high school, Barghouti was imprisoned by Israel in the late 1970s for plotting attacks and was later deported. He returned to the West Bank in 1994, after Israel and the PLO reached an accord, and got elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council. But when peacemaking broke down, he was among the first Palestinians to call for a new uprising.

The more Barghouti became identified with the uprising, the higher his popularity climbed. Since his arrest last year on charges of heading Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades--an --armed wing of Fatah that has killed hundreds of Israelis in shootings and suicide attacks--Barghouti consistently shows up in opinion polls with more public support than anyone but Arafat. For Mazen, who's been critical of the violence and whose own approval rating hovers around 3 percent, the statistic must be disconcerting.

Barghouti's advocates say the jailed leader showed his worth last month by coaxing militant groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad into accepting a three-month ceasefire--a windfall for Abbas, whose own efforts to arrange a truce had fallen short. Khader Shkirat, one of his lawyers, carried a four-page letter dictated by Barghouti to Damascus, where leaders of Hamas met to consider the proposal. "I sat ...