Aoife Kilbane-McGowan places the ongoing Palestine Action hunger strike alongside the context of the 1981 Long Kesh hunger strike led by Bobby Sands.
On the 1st of March 1976 the British state made a decision that would change politics in Ireland forever, and transform Sinn Fein from the political wing of the Provisional IRA to the largest and most popular party on the island. Then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mervyn Rees announced the end of special category status for republican prisoners, beginning a strategy of recategorising the Troubles from an anti-colonial struggle to a problem of violent organised crime.
Special category status had de facto afforded republicans additional rights over those with common criminal convictions: wearing their own clothes, exemption from prison work, and additional social visits and letters. Margaret Thatcher was to remain steadfastly committed to criminalisation, “There is no such thing as political bombing or political violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political. It is crime and there can be no question of granting political status.” Five years after the revocation of special category status, repeated failures in pressuring the British state to reinstate special category status pushed then 26 year old leader of the IRA in Long Kesh, Bobby Sands, to start a new type of hunger strike.
Sands’ strategy was designed to maximise support on the outside and leverage public outrage to force concessions on the five demands, restoring de facto political status. To do this, the strike would need to last much longer than any one participant would be able to remain alive while refusing food. That this would work, only, if there was not one moment of martyrdom but a sustained campaign of loss at the hands of the British state. To achieve this, internees joined Sands in refusing food in two week increments.
Over the course of the next five months, ten hunger strikers would die in Long Kesh. In the course of the struggle for Irish independence post-partition the deaths of these young men would be a catalyst in bringing Sinn Fein into the mainstream, creating a channel to articulate a republicanism that had until this point been sidelined from official public political discourse. What Bobby Sands was right: the hunger strikes showed the world the violent indifference of the British state to the lives of those who dedicate themselves to justice.
Beginning in 2024, the British state began imprisoning without trial members of Palestine Action who are accused of breaking into Elbit System’s Filton site. As they are under remand, these people are not serving a defined sentence. Thus far only six have been brought to trial, which is ongoing at Woolrich Crown Court in London. On November 2nd, the first of these protests began their own hunger strike, moulded in the legacy of 1981. Their five demands are the right to immediate bail, the end of censorship to their communications, the right to a fair trial, the de-classification of Palestine Action as a proscribed organisation (UK legal label for terrorist groups), and the shut down of Elbit Systems UK, an Israeli military technology developer.
Now, two detainees remain on a full hunger strike: Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmad. They have both been refusing food for longer than 8 of the 10 men who died in 1981. Like Thatcher then, Keir Starmer’s Labour government wants to depoliticise the Palestine Action protests. Criminalisation is a necessary strategy for the British state because it allows them to ignore Palestine Action’s political aim: to end British complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. What will be decisive in the strike’s impact will be the action of the public in the coming days and years.
When Bobby Sands died in the H-Blocks, more than 100,000 people attended his funeral in Belfast. While the impact of these strikes on the public remains to be seen, it too may be a moral turning for the public’s conscience on Britain’s state support for Israel. Already, a YouGov poll found that twice as many Brits sympathise with the Palestinian cause compared to Israel. Muraisi and Ahmad’s strike may change politics in Britain forever, where support for genocide becomes an untenable position, and the question of allowing companies like Elbit to operate comes into serious question.