Coalitions & civil movements
The Palestinian Prisoners' Movement
الحركة الفلسطينية الأسيرة
- Founded
- 1970s (roots from 1930) — Inside the prisons
- Ideology
- national unity across factionssumudcollective self-organisationthe hunger strike
No Palestinian institution has been built under harder conditions than the one the prisoners built inside the prisons themselves. The movement’s own historiography does not begin in 1967: as the researcher Ra’fat Hamdouna argues, its roots go back to the British Mandate — to Acre prison, where Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir were hanged on 17 June 1930, to Farhan al-Saadi executed in 1937, and to Yusuf Abu Durra in 1939. The gallows of the Mandate stand at the head of the line the movement claims as its own.
The organised movement took shape in the Israeli prison system after 1967, as tens of thousands of Palestinians passed through interrogation centres and detention camps. In the movement’s own account, the turning point came when prisoners rose against humiliating conditions in the late 1970s and early 1980s: out of that struggle a structure was born that laid down rules, spread awareness, educated its members, and unified collective action across factional lines — a discipline of self-organisation practised in a place designed to produce the opposite.
Its weapon is the open-ended hunger strike — what prisoners call the battle of empty stomachs. Strikes inside the walls have repeatedly been answered by national mobilisation outside them; in the words the movement’s chroniclers use, when a strike occurs inside the prison, a national movement occurs in parallel, and the prison administration has repeatedly been forced to negotiate with the prisoners’ chosen representatives. Through those confrontations the movement won the concrete texture of prison life: representation, books, study, coordination between sections.
The prisoners describe what they built as an academy in captivity. Over decades the movement turned the prisons into places of academic and cultural education — reading circles, taught courses, examinations, whole political educations completed behind walls — and its graduates have shaped Palestinian politics, culture and public opinion far beyond the prison gate. The movement remains active in every confrontation over the conditions and the meaning of Palestinian imprisonment today.