My Word: The Marwan Barghouti effect - opinion

SEPTEMBER 4, 2026 13:51There’s a strange collective amnesia taking hold of the cultured masses. Certain circles in Hollywood and beyond have found a new cause: Marwan Barghouti. Some stars have adopted Barghouti’s cause with a passion.Barghouti, 66, is the new Nelson Mandela. He has been conveniently sanitized to become a saint.Those promoting Barghouti often fail to mention that he is serving five life sentences for masterminding terrorist attacks that took the lives of four Israelis, including a woman killed at a gas station, three murdered in an attack on Tel Aviv’s Seafood Market restaurant in 2002, and a Greek monk who was mistaken for a Jew in 2001.Barghouti is the leader of Tanzim, one of Fatah’s “military” wings, and founder of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. He was acquitted of 21 counts of murder in 33 other attacks for “lack of sufficient evidence.”It seems the victims’ families have more reason to claim Barghouti’s trial was unfair than he does.YASSER ABBAS attends the results announcement of Fatah’s Eighth General Conference, in Ramallah, May 18. (credit: Mohammed Torokman/Reuters)Multiple actors join Freedom for Marwan campaignAs several writers have noted in this paper recently, more than 20 actors who have appeared in Marvel films have joined the Freedom for Marwan campaign calling for his release. These include Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton, among others.According to an Instagram post last week, Barghouti’s family launched the campaign at the end of 2025 in coordination with organizations in the UK. Some 200 cultural figures had already signed a petition before the latest round of celebs voiced their support. It’s a culture war with a twist.As Stephen Flatow noted in an opinion piece last week, the campaign isn’t new: “What’s new is the branding. Someone decided the fastest route to a younger, historically illiterate audience runs through the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe] fan account, not the literary supplement. It is a genuinely modern piece of message discipline, and it deserves to be examined as such rather than waved off as showbiz noise.”Flatow’s daughter, Alisa, was murdered in a 1995 bus attack by Palestine Islamic Jihad. He notes that her name and the names of Barghouti’s victims – Salim Barakat, Yoela Chen, Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi, and Tsibouktsakis Germanus – are being erased, like their lives, while the Barghouti campaign cashes in on famous names.“Nelson Mandela was never convicted of ordering the murder of a restaurant patron. The comparison was always doing more work than the facts could bear,” Flatow pointed out. “It is doing that work again this week, with better production values and a Marvel logo.”I was reminded of the so-called Mandela Effect. Nelson Mandela is remembered as a human rights activist who, after years in jail under the apartheid regime, became president of South Africa. His name lives on after his death in 2013 for another strange reason – his non-death.The term “Mandela Effect” was coined by writer and paranormal researcher Fiona Broome in 2009. She mentioned at a conference remembering Mandela’s death in jail in the 1980s and found other attendees had the same collective memory of the non-event.I suspect Mandela might be rolling in his grave, now that he is truly dead and buried, at being constantly compared to Marwan Barghouti, a living martyr in some minds. While Mandela supported Palestinian aspirations, he called on the Arab world to accept Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist in security, and even visited the Jewish state in 1999.Most of us have fallen for Mandela Effect false memories at some time or another. Oft-cited examples include the common misperception that the Monopoly man icon wears a monocle; Curious George’s non-existent tail; and the entrenched belief that Vikings wore horns on their helmets. These appeared centuries later in a staged performance of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, but go tell that to Norway’s fans at this summer’s FIFA World Cup.Fittingly, several well-known examples of the Mandela Effect come from the cinema world – it’s Loony Tunes, not Toons, for instance. Although Disney’s Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs said, “Magic mirror on the wall…” this is not reflected in the way most of us remember it, with a double “mirror.” It’s now common knowledge that the famous line in Casablanca, “Play it again, Sam!” is actually “You played it for her, you can play it for me. If she can stand it, I can. Play it!” But that is too long for our memories, or at least for our needs for brevity for quotability.Veteran readers might remember, correctly, that I have written about the Mandela Effect before. It’s perhaps the only opportunity I have to drop the word “confabulation” into a column. Confabulation occurs when the brain fills in gaps to make more sense of memories. Priming or suggestion can also alter how we perceive an event, and information learned after an event can change the way we remember it.A look at the Quote Investigator site shows that Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world” first came to life in a 1974 book by Arleen Lorrance, more than 25 years after Gandhi’s death. In 1913, Gandhi wrote a less pithy version: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change toward him.”Barghouti, of course, is also compared to Gandhi.Broome’s more conspiratorial thought suggests the Mandela Effect is related to alternate realities or parallel universes.Mandela knew what an apartheid state actually was – the white minority completely subjugated and segregated the black majority, who had no vote and no say at all in the corridors of power. This week of all weeks, when Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former top police commander and politician, took the No. 2 spot on Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am Islamist Arab list, talk of apartheid seems particularly incongruous. Whatever you think of Segalovitz and Abbas and the politics behind their move, apartheid it ain’t.There is a thin line between distortion, disinformation, and propaganda, especially in the age of social media, but it might take the Monopoly man’s missing monocle to find it. It is likely that certain satirical shows also play a role in forming public perceptions, with an oft-repeated theme in a skit creating a new general memory.Barghouti has become a saint while terms like Israeli “genocide” and “starvation” have been bandied around so often they’ve become accepted as truths.Apropos “starvation,” in the Israeli media, footage leaked by the Israel Prisons Service (ISP) showing Barghouti surreptitiously eating a snack bar in his cell during a Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike has made a comeback. It killed the hunger strike. Incidentally, despite the Mandela Effect myth, he probably ate a Tortit candy bar rather than tortillas.In 2005, former IPS chief Yaacov Ganot told The Jerusalem Post’s then-defense reporter Yaakov Katz, that Barghouti was running a political campaign from his cell with the help of his legal advisers. The claim also came up last week in an extensive profile on Barghouti by KAN 11’s Ayala Hasson, where it was noted that he still has multiple visits by his lawyers despite his trial being long over.By the way, Barghouti received a doctorate in political science from an Egyptian university, having written his thesis while in prison in Israel, the sort of prisoner perks that have since been rescinded.As the Post’s Danielle Greyman-Kennard noted this week, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research consistently shows Barghouti as the leading choice among Palestinians for the next president of the Palestinian Authority. In a poll published last month, it found that Barghouti would receive 54% of the vote, well ahead of Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would receive 14%.Barghouti has support among Fatah, not being directly associated with the corruption of Abbas’s regime, and among Fatah’s rival, Hamas, which may think that he could be a puppet president if the terrorist organization helps get him elected.It’s still a bit theoretical. Elections are scheduled in November for the PA’s Palestinian Legislative Council, but 90-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 21st year of a “four-year” term, does not seem in a hurry to hand over power. That’s democracy, Palestinian-style.Collective memories can obviously betray us in a very real sense. Sufferers of the Marwan Effect need a reality check.Follow us on Google