‘What they do to them is what was done to us’

They say that a triangle is the strongest shape in nature. It’s unbreakable,’ says Ciarán Dawson. Now a lecturer at University College Cork, Dawson was imprisoned in Long Kesh between 1977 and 1983 and participated in the ‘no wash’ and ‘blanket’ protests that led to the Irish hunger strikes. ‘We had this triangle of solidarity which stretched from ourselves in the H-Blocks and the women in Armagh, the whole way down across the equator to the South African prisoners, and the whole way back up to the Palestinian prisoners.’

While he implores others to stay tuned in to the destruction currently taking place in Gaza, there are times Dawson, with his memories, finds it’s almost too much.

He says:

What I find very, very hard not to look away from today are the images of the naked Palestinian men, and descriptions of the prisoners living on the floor amongst the maggots, amongst the filth. That’s what we lived in when we were in the H-Blocks.

For Dawson, the same system is at work in both cases: the ongoing use of administrative detention of Palestinians held under the Israeli military system without charge or trial, and subject to indefinite renewals, using laws in place in the region since the British mandate. Such laws were enacted in Northern Ireland under the policy of internment.

Palestinian prison struggles did not follow on from Irish cases, however; for decades, the two took place alongside one another. The first recorded organised Palestinian prisoner hunger strike was in Ramleh and Kfar Yona prisons in 1969, a protest against being forced to address prison guards with ‘Yes, Sir’. In the years that followed, strikes took hold in many Israeli prisons with demands that would foreshadow the ‘five demands’ of the Irish strikers, especially the rights to visitation, to medical care, and to wear civilian clothes to signal their status as political prisoners. The year 1980 saw in Nafha, a notoriously brutal desert prison, a mass hunger strike of seventy-four prisoners. Rasem Halawa, Ali al-Jafari, and Isaac Maragha all died as a result of force-feeding: testimonies from the time describe filthy feeding tubes forced directly down prisoners’ throats in an attempt to break their resolve. Nevertheless, in August 1980, after thirty-three days, beds were set up for prisoners for the first time.

In July 1981, the survivors among these Nafha strikers wrote and smuggled out a letter of solidarity to the families of the Irish hunger strikes who had lost their lives less than two months earlier in Long Kesh. It detailed the parallels in their treatment, accounts of torture and medical neglect, and affirmed their will to continue. ‘From behind our cell bars,’ the survivors wrote, ‘we support you, your people and your revolutionaries who have chosen to confront death.’ The letter was published in Ireland in An Camchéacta, the magazine of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, that September.

‘The only democracy in Palestine is inside the prison’

The hunger strike was always the highest risk strategy, so the process of escalation leading up to the decision to strike was always intense with a lot of activity,’ Khaled Al-Azraq explains, speaking with a group about his memories of the prisons. Al-Azraq, a softly spoken man from a prominent Aida family, spent a total of twenty-eight years incarcerated as a political prisoner in many Israeli jails, including Nafha. ‘There was some coordination from outside but the final decision was always made inside the prison.’

In another letter sent from Nafha in 2009, Al-Azraq explains that the prison, in his experience, served as Palestine’s ‘political, national, revolutionary university’: ‘It was in prison that I realised that knowledge is what paves the road to victory and freedom.’ Countless prisoners have become authors and degree holders. Many have also campaigned and participated in national elections, as well as established over the decades an internal democratic system within and between the prison walls. It is less that incarcerated men and women have found a few ways to participate in society despite their chains, and more that their cells are the place where political progress is made in Palestine, the workshop for any free society in the future. In 2006, the historic Unity Document, widely regarded as the future cornerstone for any national government, was written, negotiated, and signed by incarcerated men. In light of the Palestinian Authority (PA) cancelling every public election since, Khaled notes wryly: ‘The only democracy in Palestine is inside the prison.’

In this, too, the Irish and Palestinian experience is a shared one. Paddy Agnew, Kieran Doherty, and Bobby Sands, who died on hunger strike, were all elected members of the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Irish parliament, and in 1981, the British government introduced emergency legislation that would ensure that in the future no prisoner could stand for election. There are currently eleven elected Palestinian representatives who sit on the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) despite their incarceration, within the structures of the PA. Marwan Barghouti, tipped as a likely successor to Mahmoud Abbas, has been serving multiple life sentences in Israel since 2002 and has served on the PLC for twenty-two years, during which he has led a number of large hunger strikes and spearheaded the creation of the Unity Document. In a statement to Sinn Fein in 2013, Barghouti wrote from prison: ‘From within the darkness of the prison, I salute the heroic and brave Irish people. The path of hunger strikes and steadfastness for freedom is the same path, and we are together in this struggle.’

Such a shared struggle demands a likeness in tactics. Where Al-Azraq describes the centrality of education to the prison struggle, Dawson underlines the role that Irish language lessons played in his fellow prisoners’ political consciousness: ‘It was part of the decolonisation of the mind, although we didn’t have those words in those days.’ Al-Azraq recalls clandestine messages about internal election results smuggled out of prisons in pieces of resin and gelatine capsules hidden on or in the body; in the H-Blocks, Dawson remembers, it was clingfilm and cigarette papers.

They were that small that you could just tuck them up into your lips, between your cheek and your teeth. When they came to search your mouth you had no choice, you had to swallow it. But it was so well wrapped up, and we were on the ‘no wash’ protest, so we caught it coming out the other end.

Dawson says at this time they knew ‘on a visceral level’ that Palestinian prisoners were standing beside them. ‘We didn’t get news of the nitty gritty of their struggle, of course, but we were all very, very aware of each other.’ Increased awareness came in postscripts of solidarity delivered at the end of other news on secret radios, a tiny window to a world watching on.

He recalls:

It was February 1981, the eve of a strike which would claim the lives of ten of our brothers but would also break the British. By Christmas, we had our clothes back, and we had political status. The South African prisoners and the Palestinian prisoners, I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to send us a joint message. I remember it to this day, as if I’m listening to it. It said, ‘We know what you have been going through these last years. We know what you are about to embark on. Know that you do this for us all.’

Strength of Will

Since the Oslo Accords, Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strikes have morphed from a collective weapon in the struggle for basic rights into protests against individual cases of administrative detention without trial or charge. Khader Adnan, who died in May 2023 after eighty-seven days without food, undertook no less than six hunger strikes in his lifetime, further spreading the return of this tactic. Hisham Abu Hawash went 141 days without food, and Samer Issawi ate nothing between August 2012 and April 2013, breaking the record for the longest ever strike. All had been imprisoned indefinitely without trial.

In each of these cases, the relationship between Irish and Palestinian experiences was underscored; for many, it served as a source of strength. When Hanaa Al-Shalabi was released in 2012 after forty-three days of hunger strike, the families of Irish hunger strikers travelled to Gaza, to which she had been deported, to present her with an easter lily at her hospital bed. In the book A Shared Struggle: Stories of Palestinian and Irish Hunger Strikers, Palestinian footballer Mahmoud Al-Sarsak, who was held without trial for more than three years, recounts the reasoning behind his decision to refuse food: ‘Despite my prior knowledge . . . that I might lose my life the same as some Irish hunger strikers did, I decided to go on because every martyr who falls on this path is a light for those who seek freedom.’

Perhaps because of this shared history, Dawson does not find this period of unprecedented international solidarity with the Palestinians new. Organising weekly ‘bridgils’ (bridge vigils) with his Palestine solidarity group, he is instead transported back to a time in his life when references to ‘the protests’ didn’t have to be made any more specific. He explains:

I could ask myself at this stage in my life if I really want to be back, engaged in protest with the same level of intensity, besides not being locked up myself. But I cannot imagine another way. They stood with us. I couldn’t not give it all back to these people. We’ve done this before, and we’re not going to stop. The blanket protest lasted six years!

People still ask Dawson how he and his fellow prisoners survived their experiences. ‘There’s a cocktail of reasons,’ he says. ‘But I suppose one of the things that comes to my mind is the line in [the poem by] Bobby [Sands], ‘Rhythm of Time’, when he talks about “that thought that says I’m right!”’ Khaled, asked the same question about his means of survival, looks bemused for a moment and then replies simply: ‘My will.’

Samir, like all released political prisoners, experiences challenges: it’s easy to be ground down by continued extreme restrictions on his movement and constant harassment from the local Shin Bet commander. ‘I left the small jail, and stepped into the bigger one,’ he says. ‘I look around here in the refugee camp and see so much of what I saw in prison. The cameras, the soldiers everywhere.’ Still, the strength of the triangle of solidarity offers a scaffolding for freedom even in the darkest hours. Recently, through the work of Lajee Celtic, Aida’s football team set up by Celtic FC supporters, Samir was able to travel outside of Palestine for the first time, to South Africa. There, also for the first time, he saw the sea.