Solidarity across borders 

Hello, my name is Jayna Ahsaf (she/her) and I’m from the unceded territory of the Abenaki people, the land known as Colchester. I lead the FreeHer VT campaign for the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. We are a people-powered prison abolitionist group who have mobilized in response to Vermont’s plan to build new prisons that will cost our state over $500 million. The National Council was founded and is still led today by women who were incarcerated in federal prisons together. Our unapologetic goal is to end the incarceration of women, girls, trans, and nonbinary people.

I would like to begin by sharing some principles that I have grounded myself in and invite you all to do the same before we continue exploring the intricate web that binds war, militarism, borders, and the PIC (prison industrial complex).

1. The Struggles Against State Violence Must Be Global: Our fight against state violence transcends borders. We stand together, recognizing that our liberation is interconnected. Prioritizing Palestine doesn’t mean neglecting other struggles; but reinforces the fabric of freedom that binds us all.
2. Ground in a Vision of Collective Liberation: We envision a world where atrocities cease, where cages no longer confine humans, and where no one is deemed “illegal” based on stolen land. Safety and freedom will be our universal right.
3. Strength Amid Despair: As we mourn for our Palestinian siblings, our determination must outweigh our despair. Let us invoke the teachings of Mariame Kaba that hope is discipline as Stefanie Fox reminds us.
4. Acknowledgment of Movement Ancestors: Our beliefs are shaped by movement organizers, Palestinian survivors, and countless remarkable individuals. We owe our deepest gratitude to those who bravely resist genocide, apartheid, and settler colonialism in Palestine. You have awoken the world and started a fire in the revolutionary souls of humans across the globe. Thank you for taking that moment to ground with me. Our work so often keeps us on the move that it’s essential to make space to reflect on why we are doing this so we never lose sight of our purpose.

The term “prison industrial complex” is thrown around often, and ensuring we have a shared understanding of what we’re talking about when it is invoked is important. The prison industrial complex is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and incarceration as solutions to economic, social, and political problems (Critical Resistance). As we can see, the prison industrial complex extends far beyond the traditional prison walls, involving borders, the military, tools of surveillance, oppressive ideologies, and more. The expansiveness of this system has created a lucrative industry out of the surveillance, deportation, policing, incarceration, and destruction of our communities.

To dismantle it, we must address interconnected systems of violence. Empires thrive on keeping our movements isolated. Let us defy this divide. As Nadine Naber says, punishment, containment, invasion, and disappearance are inseparable strategies made material through policing, incarceration, and militarization. As the empire’s tactics are widespread and all-encompassing, ours must also be.

War, Militarism, and the PIC

To draw connections between our movements, let’s explore the links between war, militarism, and the PIC. Critical Resistance helped us draw the connection that war looks different where it happens, but when we look closer, we understand that war has a similar face everywhere. There are the same economic and social systems at play: Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy persist across borders. The same political and civil actors (mainly the West and Global North). The Global North shares institutions that perpetuate control and we have seen firsthand that Israel and the United States are allies in maintaining dominance and determined to remain in control at any cost necessary. War also utilizes the same ideologies and cultural warfare tactics. Governments and the ideologies they promote normalize hierarchies through racism, Zionism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and so on. Let’s take a moment and dig into some of the repeating actors in our repression across the globe to one, highlight how central Israel’s role is in worldwide repression, and two, illustrate how profitable these systems of control and violence have become.

Israel has a significant role in global repression and is an oppressive force for all our movements. To name a few examples, Israel had provided arms, surveillance, equipment, and political cover for apartheid South Africa; provided arms and personnel to support military dictatorship of Marcos in the Philippines; provided hundreds of millions of dollars of arms in an attempt to keep the western-backed Shah of Iran in power; helped arm Portugal against the national liberation movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique; funded and trained military forces to repress anti-colonial movements across the African continent; provided surveillance and crowd control vehicles to Pinochet’s brutal regime in Chile; provided 98 percent of arms to Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship that killed 50,000 people in its last year in power; and as of 2019, over 120,000 police officers in the U.S. have been trained by Israeli forces. To see the full report of Israel’s repression, visit the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network’s website.

The second global actor we must focus on is Group 4 Security (or G4S). They are the world’s largest private security group and span continents—from the UK to the United States and Palestine. G4S holds immense power as the third-largest private employer globally after Amazon and Walmart, and it’s the largest private employer in Africa.¹  G4S capitalizes on racism, anti-immigrant practices, and punitive technologies worldwide– including technologies of punishment in Israel. Their influence extends to Palestinians, where G4S is directly involved in political incarceration and aspects of the apartheid wall. South Africa where they aided in the apartheid. The United States where they contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. Providing services related to border enforcement in Mexico, and they also operate private prisons in Europe, Africa, and Australia. Drawing connections here: Palestinians, too, have been transformed into immigrants against their will—undocumented on their own ancestral land.

As the global prison industrial complex continues to grow, its profitability rises in tandem. It now encompasses not only public and private prisons but also juvenile facilities, military prisons, interrogation centers, and immigration detention centers–the most profitable sector within the private prison business. Another significant connection here is that private prison companies drafted the most repressive, anti-immigrant legislation in the United States as an undisguised attempt to maximize their profits.² We see how this disgusting business model has bleed into other areas of our lives: profits obtained from incarceration are linked to profits from the healthcare industry and from education and other commodified human services that actually should be freely available to everyone.³ Elite powers are making a fortune off the destruction of our people.

Incarceration as Tool of Repression of Palestinian Liberation Movement

Not only is war used to repress, but so is prison and the threat of arrest. We have seen the escalation of state repression through surveillance, policing, and law creation. There are now laws aimed at surveilling Palestinian homes, communities, and faith institutions. California is even considering making Palestine solidarity on college campuses illegal. In 37 states, engaging in BDS against Israel is illegal. Our solidarity with Palestine faces continued criminalization. The Palestinian Prisoners Movement emerged out of prison being used as an oppressive tool. They played a vital role in shaping the national struggle against the Israeli occupation. Its roots extend beyond 1967, back to the British Mandate for Palestine. During this period, Palestinian revolutionaries were imprisoned and executed by the British authorities. The Movement’s early years were marked by oppressive practices, aimed at breaking prisoners’ spirits and disconnecting them from the Palestinian struggle. Despite these challenges, the Movement rejected the division of Palestine and called for democracy and reconciliation among all Palestinian factions. Today, the Palestinian Prisoners Movement continues to mobilize the Palestinian street and shape public opinion politically, culturally, and socially. It remains an essential force in the ongoing fight for justice and liberation.

It is also not talked about enough how prison and the threat of incarceration are wedged against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and greater Israel. People have been incarcerated for accusations of agitation or for being part of a terrorist organization, for speaking out on social media and through traditional media about what’s happening to incarcerated Palestinians. Journalists have been arrested and killed with many of their whereabouts unknown, and since 1967, more than one million Palestinians have experienced incarceration by Israel. Most Palestinian families have had at least one member in prison by the Israeli authorities. A particularly sinister aspect of Israel’s weaponization of Incarceration is its targeting of children. Over 99 percent of children are held in pre-trial detention centers during Israeli Military court proceedings and Israel is the only country that automatically and systematically prosecutes children in military courts (Save the Children). Each year, approximately 500-700 Palestinian children, some as young as 12 years old, are detained and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system – with the most common charge being stone-throwing. Israel currently utilizes a few different forms of incarceration against Palestinians. To first clarify, there are the Israel Prison Service and Israeli Military Courts, which, in theory, have different procedures and processes. Israel uses administrative detention which was inherited from British colonial emergency rules; this empowers the state to arrest and detain someone without trial.

Many countries claim to use administrative detention as a means to combat terrorism or rebellion, to control illegal immigration, or to protect the ruling regime. The other three forms of incarceration being used by Israeli forces are incarceration in closed prisons, house arrest, and forced labor. As we can see, incarceration is beyond physical confinement for Palestinians; Smaller and bigger prisons exist, with the largest prison being Palestine itself. In Israel’s prisons, the conditions are beyond horrifying. Soldiers deploy sexual extortion and physical torture – the body, soul, and entire being of a person are targeted. There is no access to lawyers or visitors. Detainees are not allowed release even when terminally ill – and as you can imagine, healthcare inside prisons is virtually nonexistent. Israeli officials have even kept the location of loved ones from families. Israeli forces also incarcerate through house arrest. House arrest transforms homes into prisons. Families experience strained relationships due to confinement and the mental toll is immense. The toxic atmosphere perpetuates suffering and even encourages immigration outside of Palestine. And lastly, forced labor (or slavery) is the final form of incarceration weaponized against Palestinians; this is a settler colonial regime tactic to impose submission and force defeat.

Aligning with the Palestinian Liberation Movement moves us all closer to freedom. Now that we’ve drawn connections amongst all these violent institutions let’s explore lessons from Palestine that are moving us closer to freedom. First, we must acknowledge that we wouldn’t have even gotten to this moment without vast numbers of people being willing to seriously consider abolitionist approaches regarding prisons, police, and border control. Angela Davis reminds us that we have learned so many lessons from Gaza that have strengthened our collective understanding of how to pursue a path leading to the collective liberation of our people. For prison abolitionists, the carcerality of Palestinian life in Gaza serves as a stark warning that we can not seriously consider proposed alternatives to incarceration, such as ankle bracelets and house arrest. By witnessing what has taken place in Gaza, we understand the concept of open-aired prisons, and any alternative that shifts carcerality from prisons into our communities is insufficient. We also learned more about the extent of the oppressive reach of global capitalism. The corporate security companies responsible for surveillance and punishment in Palestine are deeply embedded in similar processes worldwide, including in the U.S. We also moved closer to freedom when we realized that Israel’s centrality in the militarization of police forces globally forces us to shift our focus to the systems, structures, and institutions perpetuating repression.

To conclude, our call to end the Palestinian genocide is not isolated—it strengthens our calls to abolish prisons, abolish borders, and defeat fascism. Our interconnected struggles weave a tapestry of resistance. The liberation of Palestine serves as a roadmap to global justice—a beacon guiding us toward a world where freedom knows no borders. Our strength lies in our resilience, our adaptability, and our unwavering commitment to freedom. To our Palestinian comrades, thank you for your unwavering contributions to the global fight for liberation. Your resilience fuels our collective fire. Let us continue to dismantle the machinery of repression—from Gaza to our own streets. Our solidarity transcends borders.

References:

Arab and Muslim Ethnicities Diasporas Studies (AMED) and Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice Open Classroom Series. (2024, April 17). Israeli Prisons, Palestinian Freedom & Abolition (link)

Davis, A. Y. (2015). Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books. (¹)(²)(³) (link)

Davis, A. Y., Kiswani, L., Fox, S., & Naber, N. (2023, November 1). Abolition and the Liberation of Palestine (link)

Number of Palestinian children in Israeli detention. (n.d.). Defense for Children Palestine (link)

The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: History and experiences. (2023, June 13). The MENA Chronicle | Fanack; Fanack وقائع الشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا (link)

(N.d.). Middleeastmonitor.com (link)

(N.d.-b). Savethechildren.net (link)

Featured Image credit: Yoav Potash and Montecruz Foto; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”