Hunger strike shows history of Irish-Palestinian solidarity | Israel-Palestine conflict

In an 11-day attack on the Gaza Strip in May 11, Israel claimed the lives of 254 Palestinians, including 66 children, and carried out acts of solidarity around the world. But it may not have been as significant as what happened in Ireland. On 26 May, the Irish Parliament passed a resolution condemning Israel Palestine’s “de facto annexation.”.

It was significant, but it was not surprising, because a history of Irish-Palestinian solidarity it is long and reciprocal.

Once again, it was sold and awarded by an Irish author. Sally Rooney, rejected his offer to translate his novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, into Hebrew, in support of the Boycott of Disinvestment and Punishment (BDS) movement.

The BDS movement, which calls for global civil society to take part in a comprehensive boycott campaign against Israel, allowing Palestinian refugees to return home, ending the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, dismantling settlements and partition walls and treating Palestinians. Israeli passports are especially popular with Irish Jews in Ireland. But again, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the term “boycott” was coined.

Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897) was an English land agent who worked for Lord Erner, who owned 40,000 acres (16,000 acres) of land in Ireland. At the time, the British government had 750 – often absent – half of the country owned by landowners. Many of them paid their agents to manage their assets, as did the Boycott of Erne County in Mayo County. His job was to collect rents from the farmers who worked the land.

In 1880, the Land League, which had been formed the previous year to work for land reform, left poor farmers in jeopardy if they were at risk of overpaid wages and homelessness, called for a 25 percent reduction in Boycott rents. The harvest was bad and there was a chance of famine. But Ern – and Boycott – got release notices for those tenants who refused and could not pay.

Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist leader and president of the Land League, called on the residents of Boycott to reject or reject it in response. The surrounding shops refused to serve him and when the workers refused to cultivate the land, he was forced to bring the workers from Ulster, much higher than the value of the harvest harvested.

But Father John O’Malley, a local Land League leader, thought the word ostracism was too complicated for tenants, and so the term “boycott” was coined.

But that word – and the concept – is not the only thread that connects Irish and Palestinian history.

‘Bloody Balfour’ – From Ireland to Palestine

Soon 1916 Easter Rising – from 24 April to 29 April, when Irish nationalists rebelled against British rule, until the British army violently suppressed the rebellion and executed the leaders – the Palestinians experienced their calamity at the hands of the British.

On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leading figure in Britain’s Jewish community, stating: the national home of the Jewish people ”.

The Balfour Statement it would have dire consequences for the Palestinians, but the Irish already knew Balfour’s work.

From 1887 to 1891, Balfour was Secretary General of Ireland, where he immediately began trying to repress the work of the Land League. The Perpetual Crimes Act of 1887 went after peasant activists and aimed, among other things, to prevent a boycott.

Hundreds of people, including more than 20 lawmakers, were jailed as a result of the law, which allowed the case to be tried by a magistrate without a jury. But members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were shot dead on September 9, 1887, in Mitchelstown, Cork County, when a group of two people were shot dead in protest against the conviction of two people, nicknamed “Bloody Balfour”.

1980s – From Lebanon to Long Keshera

The link between the Irish-British struggle and the Palestinian-Israeli struggle continued in recent years. In the 1970s and early 1980s, members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) reportedly had an affair. Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Irish members of the IRA would visit the Lebanese refugee camps in Lebanon, where the PLO had its headquarters until 1982, to express solidarity with the Palestinian people. Danny Morrison, a former Sinn Fein advertising director, said the Irish Republican political party is historically linked to the IRA: “The IRA has never confirmed a working relationship with the Palestinian Resistance. Republicans were reportedly training at a Palestinian camp. The Irish authorities seized weapons in the port of Dublin, which came from Cyprus and allegedly from the PLO to the IRA in 1977, but the IRA never confirmed this. “

But perhaps the topic that most connects the Irish and Palestinian experiences is that of political prisoners.

In 1936, British rule came under British rule Administrative Detention, which allowed prisoners to be interned indefinitely without trial or charge. Israel has been using this law to this day, and hundreds of Palestinians under which they are now imprisoned.

In Northern Ireland, in 1971, three years after the trouble began, an equivalent law was enacted to punish the IRA. The indiscriminate incarceration led to mass arrests, mostly of nationalists and Catholics, many of whom had no ties to the IRA. The detainees were sent to Long Kesh Prison Camp (later known as H-Blocks or Maze Prison). By the end of the law in 1975, nearly 2,000 people were interned.

The detainees in Long Kesh argued that they were political prisoners rather than ordinary criminals and should be treated as such. In 1972, prisoners serving prison sentences were granted Special Category status or political status, which meant that they did not have to wear prison uniforms or work in prisons and received extra visits and food packages.

But in 1976, the Special Category Status ended. (A century earlier, Arthur Balfour had advocated treating political prisoners in Ireland as ordinary criminals.) Israel also refuses to recognize the political status of Palestinian political prisoners, even though many of them – Ahmad Sadat and Marwan Barghouti – are leaders of political groups.

Hungry strikers

On March 1, 1981, five years after the end of Special Category Status, an Irish Republican prisoner, Bobby Sands, went on a hunger strike to demand a return to political status. Other Republican prisoners joined him on hunger strike from time to time. Ten of them, including Sands, were killed.

After Sands’ death, on May 5, the 66th day of his strike, Palestinian prisoners at Israel’s Nafha Prison issued a letter in support of the Irish hunger strikers. He said: “We salute the heroic struggle of Bobby Sands and his teammates, who have sacrificed the most valuable possessions of any human being. They gave their lives for freedom. ”

He stayed several hunger strikes Palestinian prisoners before this and many others since. Five Palestinians have been killed in a hunger strike and dozens are on the verge of death. Thousands of Palestinian prisoners The Palestinians have been involved in what they call the “battle of the empty stomach,” individually or massively, over the years.

Hunger strikes are effective in humanizing prisoners as people willing to sacrifice their lives for freedom, gaining international attention, helping to build international solidarity, especially among people in the diaspora.

I recently contributed a book – A Shared Struggle: Stories of Irish and Palestinian Hunger Strikers – where the stories of some of these hungry Palestinian strikers and their Irish Irish are told.

One such story is Rawda Habibrena, who was arrested by the Israeli army in 2007 and sentenced to eight years in prison. When Israel refused to be taken to the women’s section of the prison, Habib, who was pregnant at the time and later gave birth while in prison, went without food and water for three days.

“I didn’t know that a hungry striker usually stops eating food and takes salt only with water so that their stomachs don’t rot,” he explains in the book. “I also discovered that a striker was suffering from hunger, but not thirst. Failure to drink water can lead to paralysis, kidney failure or even death within a few days. I fell on the evening of the third day and fell to the ground. ‘

She was taken to the women’s section of the prison and later released in a 2011 exchange of prisoners between Hamas and Israel.

It’s similar to Habib’s story Hana Shalabi. In 2012, Shalabi, a West Bank city of Jenin, went on a hunger strike for 43 days, ending when Israel agreed to deport him to the Gaza Strip, where he now lives. Shalabi told me that while he was on hunger strike he was taken to a hospital in Haifa, where his parents lived before they took refuge in the city. Nakba. But when the Israeli authorities realized that he was happy in his hometown, he was taken to another hospital as punishment.

Laurence McKeown, an Irish Republican who was imprisoned for 16 years from 1976 to 1992, took part in the 1981 hunger strike, joining Sands and three others after his death. His strike ended on his 70th day when his family authorized a medical intervention to save his life. In the book he described how the prison guards brought him food three times a day in an attempt to persuade him to go on hunger strike. Today, Israel is taking a similar approach against Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike; April 2017, when 1,500 Palestinian prisoners they went on a hunger strike near the cells where the Israeli settlers organized a BBQ party.

The resemblance between the brutal practices of Irish political prisoners in the past and the cruel treatment of Palestinian prisoners today serves as a reminder of this long history of solidarity between the two countries plagued by colonial-colonialism. On the cover of A Shared History is a photograph of Palestinian women carrying placards bearing Nafha, H-Block, Armagh, One Struggle; it is an image that speaks of Irish-Palestinian solidarity.

On November 29, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, two Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strike: Hisham Abu Hawwash, Who has been on hunger strike for 108 days, and Nidal Ballout, who has been on hunger strike for 35 days. Both are in administrative detention without charge or trial.

But as Bobby Sands wrote all these years ago in The Lark and the Freedom Fighter, an attempt to remind us of Muhammad Hassan, a Palestinian prisoner, contained a bird in a prison cell in Nafha, feeding it daily and giving it freedom. until a prisoner accidentally crushed and killed the bird: “I have a spirit of freedom that cannot be extinguished even with the most horrible treatment. Of course, they can kill me, but as long as I’m still alive, I’m still who I am, a political prisoner of war, and no one can change that. “

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.