TEL AVIV, 4 October — The defense team of Yasser Arafat’s lieutenant Marwan Barghouti, back in court on terrorism charges yesterday, threatened to accuse Israel of "genocide," as Washington rushed to calm Arab rage at its moves to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
"Marwan is going to present against the state of Israel charges of war crimes, genocide, massacre, torture and illegal demolitions," Khader Shkeirat, a lawyer for Barghouti, said before the midday hearing.
Barghouti, however, denied in a turbulent hearing Israel’s right to try him. "This isn’t a court, this is a carnival," said Barghouti, accused of heading the militant Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and being responsible for killing 26 Israelis. Amid angry scenes inside and outside the courtroom, the judge adjourned the hearing until Nov. 21, without ruling on a prosecution request for a prolongation of Barghouti’s custody until the end of the trial.
The head of Barghouti’s defense team, Jawad Bouloss, said the court had no jurisdiction over his client, "kidnapped" by the army when it invaded the West Bank town of Ramallah in April. He said that, under Israeli-Palestinian accords, Israel could not arrest anyone in Palestinian self-rule areas without first approaching a joint legal committee.
However, since the beginning two years ago of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, Israel has increasingly taken control of the autonomous zones and in June it moved in for a long stay in most of the West Bank.
Bouloss also rejected Israeli charges that the defense team had "politicized" a criminal trial, saying the charges of "terrorism" were already political. Barghouti, head of Arafat’s Fatah faction in the West Bank, also claims that as a member of the Palestinian legislature he enjoyed immunity from arrest and prosecution.
One of the Palestinian defense team complained he had been beaten by security officials and thrown out of the session, a charge denied by Israeli officials. Bouloss said after the hearing his team will be back, despite his colleague’s angry denunciations. "We’ll appear in another session to present our argument to the court but not at the next track of this trial dealing with charges against Marwan," he said.
After the session, tempers continued to flare. Some 600 people gathered in Ramallah to voice their support for Barghouti, including his wife, Fadwa.
"Marwan is still standing up and resisting the occupation. The Palestinians are doing the same. We are entering the third year of the intifada with the same determination as we had at the beginning," his wife told the crowd.
Elsewhere in the Palestinian territories, violence ground on, with a 45-year-old Palestinian man shot dead by Israeli forces in the reoccupied West Bank town of Jenin.
In Washington, meanwhile, the US administration tried to calm Arab tempers after a congressional funding bill signed into law by US President George W. Bush this week demanded that the US Embassy in Tel Aviv be transferred to Jerusalem. The move would implicitly recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, whose 1967 annexation of the Arab eastern sector of the disputed city has never been acknowledged by the international community.
Most states have their embassies in Tel Aviv to avoid adding weight to Israel’s declaration of Jerusalem as its undivided capital, which clashes directly with the Palestinians’ aspirations to have the capital of their future state in the eastern part.
The move caused a storm of protest across the region, while Israel itself has kept quiet on the issue. Worried that the furor could further hamper efforts to build an anti-Iraqi coalition in the region, the State Department insisted US policy on Jerusalem was unchanged and Washington still believed its status should be settled between Israel and the Palestinians.
"Our policy on Jerusalem has not changed," department spokesman Philip Reeker said. "I can’t make it any plainer than that." But Palestinian President Yasser Arafat called on Christians to join Muslims in rejecting Congress’ demand. "No one can touch Jerusalem," he said in Ramallah. (The Independent)
