T's pausing statement

After nearly two and a half months without food, we announce a pause in our collective hunger strike, victorious in the knowledge that people have been moved to take action, taking upon themselves the very idea we stand accused of.

We stand by what has already been vocalised before us, this time by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who writes, “Imprisonment without trial is not only a punitive act of physical and mental torture of a few individuals; it is also a calculated act of psychological terror against a whole nation.”

The aim behind our arrests under counter-terrorism powers, the misuse of counter-terrorism legislations as reported by the UN, and incarcerating us for nearly two years before trial is the calculated tactic, the warning designed to deter others from protesting. It is the psychological siege of the British people packaged under the name ‘Operation Recomply’.

This hunger strike has been the assertion of many things: our willpower to stand by our principles, our determination to be free, but most importantly, reaffirming our deep rooted solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. We have made it impossible to deny the political nature of our imprisonment and of the proscription of Palestine Action, and exposed the prison conditions of our comrades. In equal measure, it has been the people’s moment of asserting their stance at a time of worsening political repression, defying the psychological terror intended by the purposefully vague and broad counter-terrorism laws being used against pro-Palestine protesters. As Mohammed El Kurd writes, “Their vagueness [anti-terror laws] is key” and “have translated into a far-reaching crackdown on political advocacy, nationalist expression, and anti-colonial speech.”

Since the hunger strike, there has been a surge in people taking action to shut down the Israeli arms companies operating in the UK. This was the most important demand, and therefore the biggest victory: the people shutting down Elbit, Israel’s biggest weapons company. Since its inception in this country, Elbit has intended “to turn the UK into the third most important arm of Elbit’s operation, after Israel and the USA” (FOI request - 20180710 RIAT Affinity Brief*). The decision to end our hunger strike came as it was revealed that Elbit Systems UK was denied a vital £2 billion army training contract with the Ministry of Defence.

We directed this demand to the government merely as a point of future-proofing for when the state will inevitably try to find moral cover for their part in the genocide and their part in our arrests. We held no expectations from a government that has held secret talks with Elbit representatives about protestors - with twenty percent of its sitting MPs funded by pro-Israel groups or individuals, of which 15 have been directly funded by the Israeli state- nor from a Secretary of State, David Lammy, who has accepted thousands of pounds in donations from pro-Israel lobbyists and groups since becoming an MP in 2000.

In refusing to meet with the hunger strikers’ legal representatives, officials contravened their own food policy which requires them to identify and understand the reasons behind food or fluid refusal, and assist the prisoner in pursuing their grievance through legitimate channels. Instead, the Ministry of Justice sordidly claimed meeting with them risked creating “perverse incentives” saying, “We will not create perverse incentives that would encourage more people to put themselves at risk through hunger strikes.” Thatcher also said “There is no such thing as political murder”, justifying the death of the 10 hunger strikers her government killed.

It was clear then that the same fate as the 1981 hunger strikers was to be our own conclusion. During this hunger strike, I lost 20% of my body weight, and others lost up to 24%. During hospitalisation my co-defendant was told his heart had shrunk, leading him to face extreme risk of cardiac arrest. We all experienced neurological impairment, such as confusion, loss of hearing and vision, and dementia-like symptoms. Our skeletal, dying bodies were deemed a threat. We were cuffed and double cuffed, and surveilled even in the shower and the toilet as we were defecating our own muscle mass. As we inched closer and closer to death, we knew then, that the government’s move is ending the threat and death would be the perverse incentive they would win.

For the political parasites who live off colonisation and plundering the dignity of others, our hunger is a language they could never understand. Whilst they made a profit from their squalid cowardice, we turned our incarcerated bodies into a weapon they could not occupy, could not intimidate, and could not break.

The more our bodies wasted away, the more our willpower increased. This hunger strike peeled back the layers of cruelty this government is capable of against its own citizens in order to protect its foreign genocidal project, but it was also a realisation of their greatest fear: after they locked us away in the deepest depths of the cages they created with all the power they possessed, they failed to disappear our resistance. Nor will they ever be able to.

We announced the pause knowing that we did our duty, and what we got out of it was integrity and self-respect, and the knowledge that our resistance cannot be contained. The idea we stand accused of has spilled out from beneath the prison walls to the streets. This is our calculated tactic, and far from being crushed, it is alive and well.