As Abolitionists we must act in solidarity with Palestine

Article
Written By Maureen Mansfield

Anonymous Arab

As the devastating cycle of colonial violence has continued to unfold in occupied Palestine over the past two weeks, many of us have been thinking of ways to transform our horror into solidarity action. As abolitionists situated in Britain, we recognise that the struggle against the violence of prisons and police is deeply intertwined with the struggle against war, military, and colonial violence. Abolitionists must actively show their solidarity with the Palestinian people, call for an immediate end to the Israeli military attacks, and urge the end of the occupation of Palestine as a key demand of the global abolitionist movement. 


Challenging British colonial complicity

The British government and UK media has been framing the current violence of the Israeli state as a legitimate defense against terrorism. We know this is a gross distortion of colonial reality and that the current military siege on Gaza is the direct consequence and continuation of 75 years of colonial occupation of Palestinian land. This is an occupation that the British government has been directly complicit with and has supported through longstanding military and carceral support.

UK abolitionists have called attention to the historical origins of the British carceral state and emphasized how current mass incarceration in the UK has its roots in the violence of the British empire. In the case of Palestine, just as in other ongoing settler-colonial states, colonial-carceralism is not a fact of the past - it remains a critical component of the Israeli settler-colonial project today. 

The internationalist call for abolition articulates that the prison-industrial complex and military-industrial complex are intimately connected. This is made vividly clear in the context of the state of Israel, where Palestinians are regularly imprisoned by the Israeli military as a tactic of control and coercion. Policing and military strategies and counterinsurgency tactics used by the IOF in the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people are shared with US police forces. Israeli drones produced in British factories are used to surveil, monitor and target both Israeli and Palestinian populations. These methods and tools of repression are produced by Britain’s financial, ideological and military investment in apartheid, and shared and exported globally.


Connecting abolitionist & anticolonial struggles

The embedded carceral-colonialism of the Israeli state intertwines us as abolitionists to the Palestinian people’s struggle. For years, Israel’s state policy of administrative detention - the indefinite incarceration on the basis of an individual’s likelihood to commit a future offense - has been used to stifle dissent of prominent Palestinian liberation activists, lawyers, journalists, and students. Just as supposed ‘anti-radicalisation’ state policies in Britain claim to stop criminals before they commit a crime (such as ‘Prevent’ policies), administrative detention creates a zone of pre-criminality that strips Palestinians of their liberties. Yet, Palestinians are not simply advocating for an end to indefinite detention processes; they question the political justifications of the entire Israeli carceral state. Carceral procedures are systematically embedded into the lives of ordinary Palestinians, too. One in every five Palestinians has experienced arrest and charge since 1967. These charges result from the wholly different set of legal rights that the state applies to Israelis versus Arab-Palestinians, including the legal right to acquire land, to enter into Israel to seek work, to obtain a marriage license, to reunite with family, to participate in civil society and many other laws that criminalize Palestinian existence. 

The application of punitive laws to colonized populations remind us of how the ‘rule of law’ attempts to confer legitimacy to an occupying power, when there is none. Abolitionists know all too well that when states rely on a web of laws to justify expanded criminalization, the state is inventing ‘criminals’ rather than stopping any harm. Such disproportionate levels of Palestinian incarceration function in tandem with routine land seizures, forcible evictions, home demolition, the barred return of refugees, and thousands of Israeli state killings, to maintain a well-bolstered project of settler-colonial supremacy. 

Critically, an abolitionist approach urges a serious reconceptualization of violence and its material realities - its institutional causes; its precipitating oppressions; its militarist, political, and colonial roots. Abolition seeks to dismantle all forms of collective punishment, because we reject punishment as a means of producing societal change or the root causes of harm. Even when harms occur, collective punishment never begets justice. In the case of Palestine, mainstream analyses of violence fail to recognize the larger context that precipitates and sustains violence. The use of collective punishment by the state of Israel, which fabricates Palestinian criminality en masse, is a reminder that the struggle for abolition is global. Over two million Palestinians in Gaza have been subject to collective punishment since the destructive blockade on Gaza was made permanent in 2007 - effectively turning the area into a giant open-air prison. Israeli authorities operate like prison guards that can use the threat of violence and material suffering to maintain a severe power asymmetry within a confined and blockaded environment.  

The brutality of that collective punishment is now being escalated even further via the military siege on Gaza - with even further inhumane and deadly consequences. The state of Israel’s use of collective punishment to control Palestinians shows us that our fight for a life-giving world and alternatives to punishment must encompass the fight for Palestinian liberation. 

Ways forward for our solidarity 

As we grapple with the horrors unfolding in Gaza, we must transform our witnessing into collective action and meaningful solidarity. The collective power of  international solidarities with the Palestinian anticolonial struggle that has the greatest potential to stop the current colonial violence, end the occupation and support the liberation of colonized peoples. But to do this, we must move towards practices of solidarity that firmly align abolitionist politics with decolonial struggle.

Firstly, our solidarity must begin with understanding the historical and present-day complicity of the British state in establishing and enabling the Israeli settler state, well before its latest uncritical support for Israeli state brutality. This is facilitated through its arms sales and support of the military occupation and its ongoing efforts to stifle Palestinian diaspora resistance via an ever-expanding arsenal of domestic ‘counter-terror’ powers.

Secondly, we must understand that anticolonialism is not just about ending the interconnections of prison violence and military occupation, nor simply the ‘undoing’ or ‘taking away’ of systems underpinning indigenous subordination. It is also about building a society that is based on radical freedom, collective care, and transformative justice. In this, we see the decolonisation of Palestine as a radical abolitionist future that cannot exist without an end to the status quo, but do not insist upon the re-coding of decolonisation work into a Western abolitionist comprehensibility as a precondition for our solidarity. Rather, we can strengthen our solidarity with the Palestinian struggle by learning from the ways that Palestinians are already enacting their resistances and use that as the basis to bring the separate threads of our activisms onto a communal journey. 

Such a solidarity involves following on the efforts of Palestinian activists to situate their resistance within 75 years of incessant ethnic cleansing and firmly denouncing any hypocrisy in failing to contextualize the root of Palestinian resistance within its military occupation. It means avoiding the dilution of the demands of the resistance, such as with the liberal calls for a ceasefire only. It heeds the calls of Palestinian prisoner solidarity networks that advocate for a release of prisoners and building solidarity in-between those behind and outside of prison bars. It means learning from the existence of life-affirming mutual-aid funds organized by Palestinians that bypass colonial state deprivations and insist upon the right to Palestinian life. It also means adhering to the borderless call for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction of the Israeli apartheid regime and its manifold institutions, and recognising that such tactics are frequently deemed acceptable when used by all but the Palestinians. 

In the same breath that we learn from Palestinian’s many resistances, we must not idealize the current situation on the ground. Palestinian decolonisation is not complete and Palestinians are, as we write, undergoing nothing short of a mass ethnic cleansing. 

To that end, we share the following resources for abolitionists seeking to further their solidarity. We invite the addition of any more solidarity resources and actions below. Free Palestine!  

Resources:

  • Samidoun - Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network

Maureen Mansfield
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