Imminent Mass Hunger Strike Across UK Prisons
"We have exhausted all other options."
Dozens of political prisoners in the so-called United Kingdom who have endured months of targeted abuse behind bars due to their support for Palestinian liberation are announcing their intention to launch a hunger strike.
Prisoners for Palestine representative Audrey Corno (who I interviewed last month) says it would mark the largest coordinated prisoners’ hunger strike in the UK since the Irish Republican Army/Irish National Liberation Army hunger strike in the occupied North of Ireland in 1981, when ten prisoners of war were martyred.
On 20 October, Audrey and Francesca Nadin, both of whom have spent time behind bars for direct actions against zionist weapons companies, delivered a letter to the UK Home Secretary “on behalf of the 33 people unjustly locked up as a result of taking action to stop the genocide in Palestine.”
They have five demands: an end to all censorship of their mail and communications; immediate and unconditional release on bail; the right to a fair trial; the removal of Pal Action from the proscribed “terrorist” list; and the closure of all Elbit Systems facilities in the UK.
The prisoners, who include members of the Filton 24 and the Brize Norton 5, have been detained without charge in multiple UK jails under the “Terrorism Act,” in some cases for over a year. Thus far, appeals for the prisoners to be released on bail have been unsuccessful.
Large-scale collective hunger strikes have the power to make bold and far-reaching demands that go beyond improvements to the prisoners’ immediate conditions. The Prisoners for Palestine are clearly aware of this, as evidenced by the strategic way they have folded more immediate demands around their legal cases and prison conditions into broader attacks on Elbit Systems. For instance, they argue that their right to a fair trial should include transparency regarding any and all meetings that have taken place between UK, Israeli, and Elbit officials, as well as “any others involved in coordinating the ongoing witch-hunt of actionists and campaigners.” In this way, the hunger strike is a continuation of the direct actions they allegedly took against the same enemy target outside the prison walls — they are just struggling on a new terrain.
The hunger strike marks a significant escalation in resistance in response to the extensive discrimination and mistreatment the Pal Action prisoners have suffered behind bars — deprivation of appropriate religious services and the Qur’an, prevention of family contact and visits, isolation in rural facilities, violent assaults, and confiscations of their mail and property — as well as the failure of their repeated attempts to appeal to UK prison administration and government authorities.
It also builds on the heels of a successful 28-day hunger strike undertaken by Teuta “T” Hoxha, one of the Filton 24, earlier this year, when she built significant international pressure against HMP Peterborough to reinstate her mail, recreational activities, and library job. While her job in the prison was not ultimately restored, Hoxha won all of her other demands and succeeded in exposing the existence of a Joint Extremism Unit (JEU) specially assigned to target, isolate, and punish the prisoners for Palestine.
In addition to these successes, T. Hoxha’s strike had wide-reaching effects on the international Palestine solidarity movement, drawing unprecedented attention to the draconian repression faced by activists around the world who have chosen to take direct action against their countries’ participation in the Palestinian genocide. In the so-called United States, political prisoners Casey Goonan and Malik Muhammad joined in solidarity hunger strikes with Hoxha, having experienced similar political targeting and abuses. (And it is worth noting, politicized prisoner Shine White is on hunger strike in North Carolina right now for similar reasons.)
The international pressure and solidarity galvanized by T. Hoxha’s hunger strike, as well as her success in winning her demands, raised consciousness in her fellow co-defendants and political prisoners, including those locked up for not overtly political reasons. Her action showed them that when you fight, you win. Activists have hinted that this impending hunger strike would have wider support from the general prison population.
“The prisoners are firm in the knowledge that they have massive support both here and internationally, and that the people will come together to take action in their name. This is a direct result of not only the government’s appalling actions towards the prisoners, but also their active participation in the genocide in Gaza,” said Dr. Asim Qureshi, Research Director at CAGE International, negotiating partners for the hunger strikers alongside Prisoners for Palestine.
“This hunger strike, if it goes ahead, will be the first of its kind in at least two decades. It brings into sharp focus the violence of the carceral system in the UK, a violence we often associate with places afar. From Guantánamo to Gaza, the infrastructure of authoritarian terror laws built to imprison, silence, and suppress action for Palestine and voices challenging wars and genocide must be dismantled,” Qureshi added. “Prisoners are the beating heart of our movement for justice. We must honour their sacrifices and stand up to challenge the injustices they face.”
Audrey noted in our previous interview that allowing time in advance for outside supporters to prepare for the strike and maximize its impact and reach would be key. The announcement of a collective hunger strike weeks in advance raises the question of whether more international prisoners will participate this time around, and just how big it will grow. People in the political prisoners’ movement should alert as many inside comrades as possible, so that they know this act of collective resistance is taking place, and can choose to show their solidarity through words or actions if they wish.
Prisoners for Palestine and CAGE International have given the UK government until 24 October to respond to their demands. The strike is set to begin on 2 November, a date with historical resonance marking the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, when the UK granted official support for zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. Activists in the political prisoners’ movement everywhere should take note of the way that the prisoners and their supporters have refused to back down even in the face of immense repression, insisting on politicizing every aspect of the strike.
On Prisoners as Political Subjects
Hunger strikes have played a central role in the Palestinian prisoners movement, the Irish national liberation movement, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, South Africa, India, and elsewhere.
Over the course of the zionist occupation, Palestinian prisoners have gone on mass hunger strikes, often thousands at a time, unified across different political factions. In the 1970s and 80s, several Palestinian prisoners died from being force fed, a practice reinstated by the zionist occupation in 2012. These strikes have shaped the broader movement — the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network developed out of the September/October 2011 PFLP prisoners’ hunger strike to release Ahmad Sa’adat, general secretary of the party, from solitary confinement. “From Ansar [Palestine] to Attica [New York] to Lannemezan [the French prison where Georges Abdallah was held], the prison is not only a physical space of confinement but a site of struggle of the oppressed confronting the oppressor,” Sa’adat wrote.
Similarly, in 2013, US inmates in long-term solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison organized a massive strike, resulting in 29,000 California prisoners protesting, refusing work and classes, and 100 inmates across two prisons refusing food until they won reforms. In the US military’s Guantánamo Bay detention camp (on illegally occupied Cuban territory), hundreds of prisoners have gone on hunger strike and been violently force-fed since 2002, with the news repressed by military censorship. Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni detained indefinitely without charge, went on hunger strike and was force-fed for two years. Now free, he works with CAGE International and is supporting the impending UK political prisoners’ strike, and will speak on a call with them on 25 October.
A hunger strike is not a tactic taken up lightly. It is a choice of resistance made in conditions of captivity, when your body is your only weapon left, since the state has taken every other means of resistance away.
We are not talking about the performative stunts of one to three-day fasts undertaken by non-prisoners, ridiculously labeled as “hunger strikes” for Gaza. These are ineffective because they are conducted outside the context of captivity and thus have no leverage — they are also offensive, in that they make a mockery of hunger strikes by co-opting and watering down what is in reality a tactic available only as a last resort to captives under conditions of extreme duress, who sometimes die slow and excruciating deaths over the course of their strikes. (For those of us on the outside, with more means at our disposal for resistance, our duty is not to passively weaken our bodies but to strengthen ourselves to go on the offensive.)
Writing of the martyred Palestinian revolutionary Walid Daqqa and his long history of captivity in Zionist dungeons, Kaleem Hawa observed how the hunger strike, when wielded in captivity, enacts a reversal of power relations:
“The [hunger strike] flips the normal script on its head, of docility as the sentence, hunger as the jury. [It is] a snapping of the colonists’ tools, a reminder that dignity persists within the colonized subject, a reconfiguration of the colonial order both within the prison and beyond it...the hunger striker does not run away from life, but towards freedom; their act rejoins the body-in-stasis and self-in-isolation toward a politically committed whole...insisting upon the right to narrate its own captivity.”
Unfortunately, some outside activists chose to condemn T. Hoxha’s act of resistance, framing the impulse to go on hunger strike as suicidal and thus inherently immoral. They questioned why she would choose to risk her life for such seemingly miniscule demands as the restoration of a job in the prison library. Couldn’t she just let it go? Yet as Hoxha herself emphasized in a recorded message to Casey Goonan: “We both know this isn’t about a library job, but the principle behind it.” Hoxha’s insistence that it is not the content of the demand itself that is important but the principle behind it is echoed by thousands of other hunger strikers throughout history, who have preferred to risk and in many cases sacrifice their own lives rather than accept the dehumanizing conditions of prison life.
After Casey began their own hunger strike in solidarity with T. Hoxha some two weeks after she had begun hers, some outside activists in the US similarly condemned their action as a form of self-harm, even going so far as to equate it to overdosing on drugs. This “self-harm” was defined in both physical and legal — though notably not political — terms. Because Casey is diabetic, it was argued, and their sentencing had not yet occurred, a solidarity hunger strike would not only incur serious health consequences, but could also jeopardize their legal case. These outside activists further claimed that there was nothing US supporters could do to help T. Hoxha, since she was imprisoned in a different country, thus insisting that Casey’s act of solidarity was not only reckless but futile. Comrades who supported Casey’s hunger strike and actively upheld the militancy of their actions were publicly slandered and even blamed for the harsh 19-year sentence handed down by the state weeks after the strike ended.
Such instances of attacking and denouncing acts of bravery, solidarity, and principled resistance in the name of “concern” and “safety” are not isolated. Ironically, while these voices claim that it is those who uphold principled resistance that pose a threat and a danger to the prisoners, it is precisely the insistence on condemning and discouraging resistance to state repression that represents the most dangerous trend of all. As Shaka Shakur, a New Afrikan political prisoner, observed in a recent interview:
“It’s a tendency for us [on the US left] to try and struggle within the boundaries set by the oppressor. You cannot say that you anti-state, or you anti-government, you anti-capitalism, you anti-imperialism, and all of your organizing and concept of resisting is within the legality, the confines, the boundaries of your opposition, thus allowing your opposition to dictate what your strategies and tactics are. That recognizes a certain legitimacy for the very system you say you fighting to destroy or tear down or change. So you doomed already.”
In the same interview, Shakur extends his criticism of the pacifism he sees as hampering the progress of the US left in general to the culture of prisoner support and prison organizing in particular:
“You know, I think it’s a tactical mistake, a strategic mistake, that when you’re talking about supporting prisoners, political prisoners in particular — well, a movement that says it supports political prisoners or prisoners of war that only growls but refuses to bite, is a sham movement. It’s a sham movement. If the state knows that it can come in here and kill me, orchestrate my murder, without any type of real repercussions, or any kind of ripple effect, then that speaks miles to the seriousness of the movement that supports us. And that’s a tragedy. And unfortunately, too many of us has fallen to that.”
Shakur also notes how the concept of prisoner solidarity has been watered down to merely supporting prisoners materially or technically — such as through sending money or letters — but not politically, a criticism we have also uplifted elsewhere. The result is that when prisoners are targeted with repression or even murder for their political views and acts, there is no equivalent consequence exacted on the prison system by outside supporters. Shakur continues:
“So when you talk about mutual aid and support, where does that elevate to some other things, like some other levels of resistance and struggle and direct action? You know, why is it that all our elders got to wait till they’re 70, 80 something years old and on their death bed to be freed, to be released? You know what I’m saying? And so when we talk about the whole concept of abolition, what does that really mean? How can we make that manifest? What are the stages of development in terms of sharpening those contradictions and escalating struggle and resistance to actually bring about abolition? Are we trying to support our people, our comrades in prison to be comfortable, or are we trying to make these motherfuckers ungovernable? You know, is we tryna send money or are we tryna free some people?”
In the face of brutal state repression, we cannot afford to allow concepts of “safetyism” or “legal advice” to take the helm of our political strategy and collective struggle. If all of us prioritize our individual safety over collective liberation, our struggle will never advance. Political prisoners are imprisoned for political acts of resistance to the state, so their fight for freedom must be waged on political terms and terrain as well.
The history of prisoner hunger strikes show that it is in fact the opposite of a suicidal impulse. Instead, it is the reassertion of a prisoner’s life and humanity under the most dehumanizing conditions imaginable, the insistence on one’s revolutionary subjecthood when the state has reduced them to a passive object. For those of us on the outside, it is our duty to uphold this narrative and the risks our comrades choose to take, despite our personal concerns for their safety and well-being.
Silence is fatal. Even as T. Hoxha and Casey’s strike picked up attention, many major Palestine solidarity organizations failed, or outright refused, to uplift their simple requests for people to call and email the jail demanding that T. Hoxha receive the urgent medical care she required. Assuming the imperialist, genocidal UK government does not suddenly gain a conscience and meet the five straightforward demands of the imminent and this time much larger hunger strike, it is our duty to lend our unconditional support to those on the inside undertaking these acts of bravery.
Let us surround the dungeons where our prisoners are held captive.
Let us ensure their resistance and sacrifices reverberate loudly and widely enough that the prison walls crumble down.
To end with the words of one of 10 Irish republicans martyred in the 1981 hunger strike, Patsy O’Hara of the Irish National Liberation Army: “After we are gone, what will you say you were doing? Will you say that you were with us in our struggle or were you conforming to the very system that drove us to our deaths?”
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These people are heroes ❤️
Brilliant, confrontational, thought provoking! More, please!