Popular struggle and the first intifada
By Blue. Illustration: Rory Robertson-Shaw
"I will kiss the ground of my cell, as it is part of my homeland.”
-Omar El Qassem
When I think of popular struggle, the first thing that comes to mind is Abed’s stories from his time as a political prisoner during the First Intifada. Abed is from Tulkarem, a city in the north of Palestine known for its fierce resistance to the Zionist occupation. Like most Palestinian children, he began protesting young, at 9 years old, while witnessing the occupation of the West Bank in 1967. During his youth, this struggle against the colonising force started to take more serious forms, culminating in his decision to join the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) while studying at university in Turkey. In the summer of 1984, when Abed was 23, he was travelling home for the summer break to see his family when the Israeli occupation forces arrested him. Accused of being a member of a political organisation and participating in the 1982 war in Lebanon against Israel, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
The conditions of Palestinians in Israeli prisons are notoriously horrifying. Small, overcrowded cells (4x4m with 21 prisoners in each, including a toilet), often with no windows, widespread fatal diseases including meningitis, small unhygienic portions of food, and a never-ending torrent of physical and mental torture were Abed’s reality for the 5 years he was imprisoned. While Israeli prisons have changed since the 80s, they have not necessarily improved - with B’Tselem’s 2024 report referring to them today as “torture camps”.
Despite this reality, prisons have always played a crucial role in the Palestinian resistance. Abed’s story is no different. He recalls participating in his first hunger strike in 1984 when all the prisoners refused food for nine days and won the right to own a radio to listen to the news. “Our demands were related to the conditions in the rooms, the almost null time for family visits, we demanded more and cleaner food. But these were next to our wider political demands of national liberation and to be treated as political prisoners instead of criminals.” The prisoners’ internal organisation, with its various strikes and protests, pushed back against the prison authorities and created a space for self-governance under unimaginably harsh conditions. These episodes of militant action were coordinated and managed by committees of elected representatives from the various political factions in the prison at the time. Tightly organised and highly democratic, these committees were central not only to the struggle they were waging inside the carceral system but also to the broader fight for the decolonisation of Palestine.
Not only was the political organisation within the prison extensive but the coordination across different jails was also a vital aspect of the resistance effort. In an attempt to disrupt internal organising, the Israeli prison authorities would constantly move Palestinians from prison to prison. Rather than this being a hindrance, however, the prisoners would take this chance to carry messages from the parties’ representatives to the other comrades in different jails. Information was carried through ‘capsules’, messages tightly written on thin paper pages, then wrapped in plastic and swallowed by whoever was being transferred.
Perhaps the most striking part of Abed’s story, however, is the self-organised education system that was in place in the prisons at the time. Prisoners taught each other languages, studied Palestinian history and organised political education sessions. He remembers how often they wouldn’t sleep because of how much work there was to do; each prisoner would have to study a book and then relay it to the others, followed by hours of discussion and analysis. He also tells me about the transcribing of ‘forbidden’ books that were constantly at risk of being confiscated by the prison guards. “I was unlucky because I was good at writing and would have to copy books for hours, writing them out on cigarette papers”. This education system turned prisons into schools for revolutionaries, whose efforts would become central to the unfolding of the First Intifada. The Co-Founders of Symbiosis aptly put it: “As these freshly educated and trained political activists were released back into society, the resistance movement was galvanised. Illiterate teenage boys arrested for throwing stones re-entered the fray months later as committed, competent organisers who had studied movement building, strategic civil resistance, and dialectical materialism.”
History shows us how true this was - the First Intifada was, above all, a participatory uprising. Ordinary people coordinated the resistance through a federated network of popular committees, often to the frustration of the self-elected Palestinian leadership. Many of the skills needed to maintain this web of democratic, revolutionary power were built up and learned in prison.
After five years in prison, Abed was released. In the middle of his struggle in the First Intifada, he fell in love and got engaged.
Six months after the end of his first sentence, however, he was arrested again and jailed without a trial or access to a lawyer. This form of incarceration, known as administrative detention, is used by the Israeli state to jail and torture Palestinians on a daily basis and increases in moments of unrest – 14,000 during the First Intifada and more than 2500 since October 2023. After over a year of torment, he was released and immediately married his fiancée.
Ever since, Abed has spent his life dedicated to the popular resistance. He has been participating diligently in the work of the Palestinian popular committees for decades, maintaining a commitment to showing solidarity to the prisoners currently in jail and organising to bring international solidarity on the ground in Palestine. Abed is now 66 years old and is outwardly indistinguishable from most smiley, quiet old men. While he is special to those of us who know him, in a lot of ways, he is by no means unique; a similar fire burns in all those who understand that power lies in the hands of the people. In his words:
“Popular resistance means everyone is involved – we need the masses, the resistance needs to come from the people. Liberation cannot rely on a few people. This is the strongest way to resist, and this is what happened during the First Intifada; everyone was part of the uprising.”
Blue is an anarchist currently based in Italy with a background in survivor support and Palestine solidarity. She has been in the west bank twice with the international solidarity movement (ISM)