On October 7th, 2023, the heroic Palestinian Resistance made history by commencing Al-Aqsa Flood Battle in order to liberate Palestinian prisoners from Zionist dungeons. That day, over 1,200 united Resistance fighters broke open the gates of Gaza while 5,200 Palestinian prisoners were incarcerated in Zionist prisons.

Now, at the time of writing this, there are more than 10,800 Palestinians held prisoner, at the forefront of Zionist aggression, with at least 76 having been martyred inside Zionist prisons, including 46 from Gaza.

Now, more than ever, it is urgent that we have political clarity about the role that prisoners play in our anti-imperialist movement. Prisoners are our guide to liberation, the compass of our struggle, and our vanguard in this movement— from Turtle Island to Palestine— but why?

Why prisons?

Imprisonment, particularly political imprisonment, is designed to control and repress liberatory struggles. While in detention, the enemy not only physically isolates the fighter from the movement, but also their consciousness by separating the fighter from their political home, culture, land, and people. All incarcerated Palestinians in occupied Palestine are political prisoners because the Zionist entity’s existence is premised upon settler-colonialism and genocide.

All Palestinians are deemed a threat to Israel’s colonial project of expansion and its serving as the largest and most aggressive US military base in West Asia. Prisoners are on the frontlines of Zionist colonialism as the contradictions between the prisoner and the genocidal regime are so sharp that they bear the brunt of targetted repression.

Liberated Palestinian prisoner and PFLP fighter Aisha Odeh explains in her memoir أحلام بالحرية (Dreams of Freedom) how during the year 1969 of her imprionment, the immensely horrific torture that she and other women inside experienced was the Zionist entity’s response to multiple successful militant operations led by women on the outside that same year. So, although targetted, the Zionist use of torture against all Palestinian prisoners is simultaneously a tool of collective punishment that renders all prisoners ones facing political persecution. GIven this popular understanding, it is even commonplace for Palestinian men to call one another “comrade” and “fighter” while incarcerated, regardless of any official involvement in armed resistance.

Zionist prisons function as a means of displacing Palestinians from their land and attempting to prevent their membership to the popular cradle of resistance. Liberated Palestinian prisoner and first woman Al-Qassam Brigades fighter Ahlam Tamimi writes that the prison and its conditions attempt to “dissuad[e] any militant action, paving the way for the elimination of the project of liberation struggle” as it functions as “an attempt to erase the militant self and replace it with an exhausted, compliant and surrendered self.”

Through torturous conditions and practices like solitary confinement, beatings, unleashing dogs on prisoners, sexual harassment and assault, and medical neglect, the Zionist regime hopes to exterminate any revolutionary vigor and optimism from prisoners. Even the routine process of taking a father away from his family to incarcerate him can be characterized as a tool of psychological violence and warfare by means of humiliation.

Despite Zionist attempts to crush organized dissent, Palestinian prisoners remain steadfast and continue political participation from the inside. Consciousness-raising meetings, hunger strikes, sperm smuggling, and other forms of resistance have flourished under decades of colonial oppression. Resistance factions are active and grow stronger, monthly prison magazines are distributed, cultural sessions are hosted, and articles and books are written for the outside world.

Incarcerated Resistance leaders nuture this continued culture of resistance against the occupier that carries in from the outside world. Palestinians who may have entered prison without a history of political activity are likely exposed to it while inside and may even be liberated with a new political consciousness and organizational affilitation. Prisons have ultimately become schools of thought and a means for the Palestinian liberation movement to propel forward.

Why prisoners?

Prisoners are our guide to liberation, the compass of our struggle, and our vanguard in this movement— these words are not simply slogans, but an analysis about how prisoners ground the Palestinian Resistance’s work, and by extension ours as well.

There is a reason that the Resistance centres prisoners: they face a very specific type of colonial violence through isolation and torture that occurs outside of the public eye. Some of the most successful and notorious prisoner exchanges in modern history have come out of the Palestinian Resistance’s negotiations with the Zionist entity because of the Resistance’s will to expose the nature of Zionist colonialism and its brutality against prisoners and to free prisoners from these horrors. Moreover, prisoners hold vast revolutionary potential because of their particular exposure to and experience with colonial domination. Behind closed doors, Palestinian prisoners see the genocidal ideology of their oppressors mask-off. They gain clear sight of the Zionist entities beliefs and goals, and are not able to ignore the genocidal violence that permeates every aspect of the Zionist entity’s control over their lives. This makes them highly motivated agents of change, wanting to take an active role in the liberation of their people. To be a prisoner is to have a political position in the struggle for liberation.

Part and parcel of the Zionist entity’s attacks on the Palestinian Resistance is targetting leadership for incarceration, marking certain prisoners as the actual vanguard of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It is no coincidence that the leaders of various Palestinian factions are or have been subject to some of the longest sentences in Zionist prisons.

From martyrs Walid Daqqa and Yahya Sinwar to Ahmed Sa’adat and Abdullah Barghouti who are still inside to this day, these leaders have been instrumental in maintaining the continued fight against Zionist colonialism and building the capacity of Palestinian political and military resistance. Targeting them with multiple life sentences is a calculated attempt to crush the united Resistance front and attack the will of the Palestinian people, but Palestinian leadership nevertheless continues to organize and resist.

In 2011, for example, martyr leader Sheikh Khader Adnan of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad protested his violent arrest and imprisonment by hunger striking which led to hundreds of prisoners joining in solidarity. This act of organized resistance led to his release 66 days later. Shortly after, prisoners Bilal Diab and Thaer Halaleh were inspired by the martyr leader’s actions and did the same with over 2,000 prisoners joining this mass movement. Day by day leaders of the Resistance defy the Zionist goal of fragmentation.

Martyred revolutionary leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind Al-Aqsa Flood, modelled the centering of prisoners as leaders long before October 7th. While in prison, Sinwar learned Hebrew and studied the enemy’s security system and repression apparatus. Once freed— through a prisoner exchange deal no less— he made political alliances that have strengthened the Resistance even further, freed more Palestinian prisoners, and kept the liberatory flames of hope and dignity alive.

While UN resolutions and diplomatic talks have demonstrated nothing but a continued failure and betrayal of the Palestinian liberation movement, it is the bravery of the Resistance and their leadership that has made continious political and military gains against the Zionist enemy, freed Palestinian prisoners, and deterred the periodic assaults by the Zionist entity against Al-Aqsa.

The warm and militant greetings received by liberated prisoner and fighter Georges Abdallah from political leaders, comrades, family, and the broad masses of Lebanon upon his long-awaited arrival just last month is a testament to the crucial role that prisoners play in resistance movements. After over 40 years of incarceration because he chose the morally and politically correct path of revolutionary action, Abdullah asserted that “the condition of freedom is rallying around the Resistance.”

Why and how must our own efforts be guided by the prisoners?

One might wonder why it is important for those of us living in the imperial core to see prisoners as the compass in our organizing for anti-imperialist liberation. The answer is twofold.

Firstly, because the colonial playbook is the same from Turtle Island to Palestine. Colonial entities across Turtle Island utilize imprisonment and criminalization as an attack on anti-imperialist and anti-colonial resistance movements and their leadership.

From the months-long house arrest of now liberated Wet’suwet’en Chief Dsta’hyl in “Canada” to the nearly 49 years-long incarceration of now liberated Ojibwe AIM leader Leonard Peltier to the hundreds of land defenders and water protectors who have been brutalized, arrested, and criminally charged across Turtle Island— these acts are a violent display of the colonial state’s attempt to suppress dissent against occupation, serve as a fragmentation of anti-colonial movements, and are a fear-mongering tactic to deter Indigenous peoples from resisting oppression.

When Indigenous people are criminalized we must see them as political prisoners and betray the colonial state in support of Indigenous sovereignty by any means necessary. Understanding this is crucial to our ability to organize in solidarity with Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island in their continued fight against colonialism. The struggle against occupation here is one in the same as the struggle against occupation in Palestine.

Secondly, the use of prisoners as our compass also allows us to better organize our own movement in solidarity with Palestinian liberation within the imperial core. Assessing the way imprisonment is used as a tactic of colonial repression is vital to our ability to prepare for the imprisonment and criminalization of our own movement leaders who are organizing for Palestinian liberation in the imperial core. Since the commencement of Al-Aqsa Flood Battle, we are seeing an unprecedented increase in state repression tactics, from mass arrests to strict bail conditions to “terrorist” designations. It becomes our duty to apply the knowledge we have about how the Zionist entity uses imprisonment to isolate leadership and weaken organized resistance to our material conditions here.

Decades of state repression against anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements across Turtle Island has ensured our response to orchestrated crack-downs on our organizing is weak and fragmented. We must understand prisoners of the Palestinian liberation movement, their demands, and their conditions, the leaders among them, study their tactics, follow their calls to action, and incorporate their analyses into how we can support their fight for their liberation from the imperial core, but also how we can support our own.

Even when political and trumped up charges do not result in incarceration— which in Canada they often do not— the process of criminalization still serves as state punishment and a means to crush anti-colonial resistance. Police brutality, pre-dawn house raids, doxxing, and legal fees alone can incite fear in the people thereby detering revolutionary action. This only needs to happen a few times to set an example for an entire movement.

We also must consider the Canadian state’s daily criminalization of poverty, migration, and Black and Indigenous life and how that renders political resistance weaker. A people who are left unhoused and without access to equitable healthcare, jobs, and nourishing food, and battling the daily policing of their life are a people who must focus on surviving day-to-day rather than building a strong political movement.

The Palestinian Resistance centres prisoners in their fight against the enemy of Zionist colonialism and Western imperialism and it is important that we follow suit.

Beyond Liberal Pacifism

The anchoring that the Palestinian prisoners movement and the Resistance provide help us clearly define and reject activism that is centered around liberal tropes of “peace” and “non-violence” that are decontextualized to serve imperialist narratives. A concrete understanding of Resistance leaders’ calculated acts of defiance, political and military organizing within and outside of prisons, and thoroughly planned out operations such as Al-Aqsa Flood help us contextualize what liberal media racistly paints as arbitrary violence by blood-thirsty monsters.

Al-Aqsa Flood is a natural and measured response to decades of imperialist and colonial brutality: this is the political clarity that our movement needs. Supporting revolutionary action and prisoner exchanges like Toufan Al-Ahrar pushes back against liberal benevolence where just, anti-colonial violence is condemned.

Our revolutionary understanding comes by centring prisoners and their struggle which debunks the narrative that the violence of the colonizer is equal to the violence of the colonized. It is the difference between vague statements of solidarity that do not materially advance the cause of liberation, and the conviction that to truly support the liberation of Palestine one must begin with support for armed resistance movements and their imprisoned leadership and stand by whatever led them to prison in the first place.