JERUSALEM — Democracies around the world are searching for ways to protect their citizens from the threat of terrorism. As Israel’s public security minister, I hardly go a week without a foreign official turning to me to learn from our experience. For better or worse, the thousands of attacks carried out by Palestinian terrorists against Israel have made my country a world expert in combating this threat.

As a result of its counterterrorism operations, Israel now holds 6,177 terrorism-related prisoners. Many of these prisoners were involved in the wave of violence initiated in September 2000 under Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader at the time, following his rejection of an American-Israeli peace offer. The terrorist campaign that began then has so far led to the murder of some 1,300 Israelis — mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, children of every faith and background.

Of the 6,177 security prisoners, about 1,200 have recently begun a hunger strike. The strike leader is Marwan Barghouti, who was behind several deadly attacks.

Since his arrest in 2002, Mr. Barghouti has become adept at rebranding Palestinian terrorism as legitimate “resistance” and casting himself as a “moderate.” (Palestinian groups like to use language calibrated to make their actions more palatable to Westerners: Incarcerated terrorists are called “political prisoners,” and cold-blooded attacks against civilians in restaurants and buses are whitewashed as a “struggle for freedom.”) He would prefer that his Western audiences not know that he was convicted of ordering or approving three attacks that cost the lives of five people. These victims, Jewish, Christian and Druze, were simply going about their daily lives, sitting in a Tel Aviv restaurant, driving along a road, pulling into a gas station. Mr. Barghouti denies the charges but, saying he doesn’t recognize Israeli courts, declined to defend himself.