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When Zakaria Zubeidi was suddenly freed from an Israeli prison in February, it was a rare and fleeting moment of joy for Palestinians.
Hundreds turned out in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to celebrate Mr. Zubeidi’s arrival from jail, cheering him as a returning hero. They chanted his name as he took his first steps of freedom, some of them hoisting him on their shoulders. A child clutched a tin of hair gel that Mr. Zubeidi had given him six years ago, before he was jailed. “I want to show Uncle Zakaria that I kept it,” said Watan Abu Al Rob, 11, “and I’ll only use it now that he is free.”
Mr. Zubeidi, 49, is the best-known of the Palestinian prisoners swapped for Israeli hostages during a brief truce in Gaza earlier this year. In the early 2000s, he inspired Palestinians — and terrified Israelis — by leading a militant group affiliated with Fatah, Hamas’s secular rival.
He drew international attention when, several years later, he stopped fighting and helped set up a theater. Jailed a decade later, he cemented his legend when he briefly escaped prison through a tunnel, before being recaptured days later.
Now, months after his release, Mr. Zubeidi has become emblematic of something else: a sense of hopelessness that imbues Palestinian life. In a recent conversation with The New York Times — his first major interview as a free man — Mr. Zubeidi said he felt that his life as a militant, a theater leader and a prisoner had ultimately proved futile. None of it had helped forge a Palestinian state, he said, and it may never do so.
“We have to reconsider our tools,” Mr. Zubeidi said in an interview in Ramallah. “We founded a theater, and we tried cultural resistance — what did that do?” he asked. “We tried the rifle, we tried shooting. There’s no solution.”
