Intifada anniversary marked

Middle East: Palestinians yesterday marked the third anniversary of the intifada, but two of their more prominent representatives…

Middle East: Palestinians yesterday marked the third anniversary of the intifada, but two of their more prominent representatives were at odds over whether the uprising had actually advanced their cause.

Making his closing remarks yesterday in a court in Tel Aviv where he is on trial for murder, Mr Marwan Barghouti, one of the leaders of the uprising, said he was "proud of the intifada" and that "to die is better than living under [Israeli] occupation".

Addressing the judges in fluent Hebrew, which he learned during a previous stint in an Israeli jail, Mr Barghouti said the intifada was "a clear reaction to occupation and settlements and the frustration of the Palestinian people over non-implementation of Oslo."

Mr Barghouti (43) is a member of the Fatah party of Mr Yasser Arafat. He is charged with orchestrating attacks in which 26 Israelis were killed, but has repeatedly said he does not recognise the legitimacy of an Israeli court.

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If Israel did not agree to a Palestinian state alongside it, he warned, it would ultimately become "a state for two peoples". In just over a decade, Arabs will outnumber Jews in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, leaving a Jewish minority ruling over an Arab majority.

However, Mr Mohammed Dahlan, who served as Minister for Security Affairs in the government of Mr Mahmoud Abbas and who has not been included in the new government, appears to have drawn very different lessons from the last three years of violence.

In an interview with the Associated Press in Gaza, he said that the first intifada, from 1987-1993, in which Palestinians faced off against Israeli troops with rocks and slingshots, "brought us back to our homeland".

"We were in a better position than we are now, politically and internationally," he said.

Hinting that suicide bombings and shooting attacks had undermined the Palestinian cause, especially in the wake of the September 11th terror attacks in the US, Mr Dahlan said: "We did not understand 9/11 in a correct and fundamental way that would have allowed us to help the national interest of our people."

More than 2,400 Palestinians and some 860 Israelis have been killed in the violence.