RAMALLAH, West Bank - This used to be Marwan Barghouti's town. He was the leader-in-waiting of a new generation of Palestinians, the fiery orator who seemed to be at every clash with Israeli soldiers on the edge of the city, the man who darted between hiding places and bragged that the Israelis were trying to kill him.

Now, the person once hailed as a man of the future for the Palestinians, the common man's alternative to leaders steeped in cronyism, sits in an Israeli jail. He is about to go on trial on charges that he helped orchestrate the Palestinian uprising and used his political sway to direct and financially support a campaign of violence.

The only place Palestinians now see Barghouti is on faded "Free Marwan" posters asking for help in paying his legal bills. And the Israeli army controls the streets of Ramallah.

Hearings at which the formal charges will be filed have been postponed repeatedly and are now tentatively scheduled to begin in a couple of weeks.

There is a chance Barghouti will never stand trial, that Israel might instead deport him to Lebanon in exchange for Israelis held prisoner by Hezbollah guerrillas.

And there is a chance, some Israeli officials say, that if Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were to suddenly depart the scene, the government would release Barghouti in hopes that he could institute democratic reforms that most Palestinians long for and that Israel says are the only route to a lasting peace.

But most Israeli officials believe Barghouti is not the man they once thought he was. Far from being a political reformer, they say, he is an unabashed militant, the financier of suicide bombers and gunmen who have killed dozens of Israeli civilians.

Soldiers arrested Barghouti at a hide-out in April, and he was regarded as a prize catch of Operation Defensive Shield, Israel's invasion of the West Bank.

If the case goes forward, Barghouti, 43, who was elected to the Palestinian legislature in 1995, would become the most prominent Palestinian to be tried by Israel in nearly a decade. His court appearance would mean far more than one man's guilt or innocence, for the very nature of this deadly conflict would be on trial.

Israel's attorney general wants to show how the shootings and suicide bombings are supported logistically and financially, tracing that support to the top of the Palestinian Authority. Officials decided last month that the trial would take place in open criminal court, instead of before a secret military tribunal.

"We want this to be public, to demonstrate the structure of terror to the world," said Uri Steinberg, a spokesman for Israel's Justice Ministry.

Barghouti's defense team says the real subjects of a trial should be the Israeli army's checkpoints, closures and curfews.

"We will use this court as a political court to accuse Israel of illegal occupation," said Barghouti's wife, Fawda, a lawyer and director of his legal team.

The charges are illegal, she said, and a guilty verdict a "foregone conclusion. Israel has no right to take an elected politician in front of its courts."

She said her husband does not plan on putting on a defense but instead will try to turn the trial into political theater.

Ali Jarbawi, a Palestinian political science professor at Birzeit University, near Ramallah, said Israel is unlikely to allow Barghouti and his lawyers to present the case they want. And if they are allowed to present it, few will listen, he said.

"What happened in Gaza did not sufficiently move the world," he said, referring to last week's attack in which an Israeli bomb killed 14 civilians along with the Hamas militant who was the target. "I don't think a political trial of Marwan will mean too much. The world is getting used to a protracted conflict in which a lot of bad things happen."

Jarbawi, one of Barghouti's former teachers at the university, said the brash politician could easily be forgotten.

"He is not the Nelson Mandela of Palestine," the professor cautioned. "He might be in 20 years, but right now he's not. I think he has a bright political future."

Imprisoned by Israel

This month, Barghouti's wife was allowed to visit her husband for the first time in the jail in Jerusalem's Russian Compound. He had spent 95 days confined to a 6-by-6-foot cell with no window and a hole in the floor for a toilet. For 21 days, she said, interrogators handcuffed him to a chair and deprived him of sleep.

The two talked for 90 minutes, about their four children, work and the trial. He had a scraggly new beard. His hair was long, and he had lost weight. His swagger had diminished.

"I tried to show him that I was strong," Fawda Barghouti said. "I didn't want to show him any sign of weakness. But when I got outside, I started crying. I couldn't hide it anymore. I felt for the first time how much Israel is intent on humiliating the Palestinian people."

This is not the first time she has seen her husband in difficult circumstances. They were married in 1984, a year after he became student body president at Birzeit University and after he had been in and out of Israeli jails for political activities that began in 1978.

In 1989, Israel expelled Barghouti for helping organize the first Palestinian uprising. He took his wife and children to Tunisia and then Jordan before returning to the West Bank in 1994 after the signing of the Oslo peace accords.

Barghouti earned political science and history degrees at Birzeit and completed a master's program in international studies in Jordan, writing his thesis on Palestinian-French relations under the guidance of a professor from the University of Chicago.

In the 1980s, Barghouti used his time in Israeli jails to become fluent in Hebrew. He was comfortable talking with Israelis - he had worked in West Jerusalem as a dishwasher in his early teens - and with Palestinian boys, whom he joined in throwing rocks at soldiers.

He never lost his influence with the street brigades, and he would use that influence to confront elder leaders. In the late 1990s, he took an unprecedented step of filing a grievance against the Palestinian Authority for wasting money.

Many Israelis regarded him as a moderate, someone with whom they could have an honest conversation, and as a brash figure who could stand up to Arafat's regime and might even gain enough public clout to one day take charge.

Ties to violence

Then came the eruption of violence in late September 2000. Barghouti rose from an elected representative to the Palestinian legislature to an instigator, taking over as the general secretary of Arafat's mainstream Fatah faction for the West Bank.

He used his mixture of intellect and arrogance to lead a new generation of young rock throwers, who were soon joined by gunmen. Barghouti became a self-appointed Palestinian spokesman at the clashes, simultaneously extolling violence and the need for a negotiated settlement.

The Israeli army says Barghouti also commanded the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant wing that escalated its attacks from sporadic shootings of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to suicide bombings and attacks in Israeli cities.

The group grew into one of the most formidable Palestinian fighting forces, and its purported link to Fatah, the political faction headed by Arafat, helped convince Israel that Arafat could stop the violence. Putting Barghouti on trial would give Israel a chance to try to prove the existence of a link between the militias and the Palestinian Authority.

Though official charges have yet to be filed, Israeli officials hold Barghouti responsible for ordering a string of attacks that caused dozens of deaths.

Documents that Israel says it seized during a series of raids on Arafat's compound in Ramallah and other buildings show that top Palestinian officials fueled the violence through rhetoric and money, prosecutors say.

In one memo, translated from Arabic into English and posted on the Israeli army's Web site, a militant leader wrote to Barghouti complaining that Palestinian security officials had confiscated an M-16 assault rifle and that he wanted it back.

"It should be noted that we purchased the gun with our own money and no use has been made of it except against the occupation," the militant wrote. "We hope you will involve yourself in this affair, for nationalistic as well as moral reasons. We need it in the present situation for self-defense as well as for activity relating to the struggles, which is so necessary right now."

Handwritten at the bottom of the memo is this: "I request the return of the weapon to the brothers or suitable monetary compensation. Thank you and all the best, Marwan Barghouti."

In another memo on the army Web site, Barghouti requests that Arafat approve paying 19 fighters $3,000 each, all of whom, he wrote, "are wanted by the occupation authorities."

The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported that other papers show Barghouti provided money to Palestinians involved in the lynching of army soldiers in a Ramallah police station Oct. 12, 2000.

Israeli authorities have said that during interrogation, Barghouti confessed to his involvement in attacks. Palestinian officials and his wife vehemently deny that and say the documents are forgeries. Fawda Barghouti said that her husband may have supported violence publicly but that he was not an instigator.

Long a reformer

Barghouti's popularity in the West Bank is high, but his influence beyond Ramallah is not clear. In outlying villages and northern West Bank cities that serve as militant strongholds to rival factions, his directives are considered but not necessarily followed.

Fawda Barghouti maintains that her husband is a political leader close to people taking action in the streets, whether it be young rock throwers or slightly older gunmen. She says he is a reformer, a man viewed by Palestinians, and once by Israelis, as a possible successor to Arafat.

He long championed democratic change in the Palestinian Authority and represented the challenge of a younger generation that longed to break free of Israeli occupation and Palestinian corruption.

Some of those changes are taking place as Barghouti sits in jail. Elections for the legislature and presidency have been tentatively scheduled for January. Barghouti has said that he will not run against Arafat, but his wife would not rule out a try for a high-profile position.

Fawda Barghouti said the Palestinian reforms being made are a fraud, designed only to satisfy demands from the United States and to placate Israel.

If Israel wants true reform, she said, officials must release her husband and open a dialogue.

"Israelis know that Marwan is a man of peace," she said. "But he wants a peace accepted by the Palestinian people, not a peace imposed by the Israelis or the Americans. The reforms are coming now, but they are the wrong reforms and are at the wrong time.

"The Palestinian concern now is liberation from the Israelis," she said. "The Palestinians want reform in their government, but it shouldn't be at the cost of our freedom or as a condition to end our resistance."

Even if Barghouti's public role has faded, his influence appears to be strong. Lawyers allowed sporadic visits took a recent draft of a cease-fire agreement to his jail cell, and he signed off on the text.

It is a sign, Fawda Barghouti said, that her husband remains an important Palestinian, someone Israel must and should deal with.

It also means that Marwan Barghouti may simply be biding his time, waiting for his next opportunity, even from jail.