Free Palestine is an Abolitionist Demand:

In Solidarity with the National Prison Strike

Since August 21, workers locked inside of prisons across the country have been participating in
a historic coordinated strike​, refusing to eat, purchase items from prison commissaries, or
withholding their labor by not showing up to work assignments--the slave labor necessary to
maintain the very cages that house them. Prisoners on strike have ​10 key demands​ they are
pushing including access to the right to vote, opportunities for rehabilitation, and an end to
prison slavery. As Palestinian members of the Dream Defenders, living and organizing in the
United States, we stand in full solidarity with all incarcerated workers resisting a system that
continues to profit off of their dehumanization. ​Every day ​over 800,000 people are forced to
work​ across different industries within U.S. prisons. The prison industry profits in billions per
year, including netting profits for ​various private companies that contract​ with state, federal
prisons, and county jails to exploit prisoners and their families. Prisoners in the state of
Louisiana, for example, are paid ​four cents per hour for their labor​. Palestinian ​political prisoners
also shared ​a statement of solidarity​ with points we want to echo here:

“​Today, prison workers are some of the most exploited workers in the United States, and the
same ruling class that profits from the confiscation of Palestinian land and resources and from
the bombing of children in Yemen also profits from the forced labor of prisoners. Your struggle is
a workers’ struggle that is part of our global conflict against the vicious exploitation that our
peoples face today. This struggle inside the prisons highlights the deep connections between
racism and capitalism and how the struggle against them both can never be de-linked​.”

When we fight to express solidarity with prisoners, and fight to express solidarity with
Palestinians, we do not do so on the basis of distant sympathy. The conditions of prisoners, the
conditions of Palestinians, are reflections of our shared conditions, we fight for all of us.

When the United States spends ​$182 billion a year on policing and prisons​ this is a shared
condition of workers, whether or not we are held inside of a cell. It means all of our families,
particularly Black people, must live with traumatizing fear, fewer resources for adequate wages,
fewer public resources for education, fewer public resources for housing, fewer public resources
for nurturing the natural environment, and fewer public resources to experience healthy lives
with dignity.

In the same year that the Supreme Court announced their decision in Janus, a ​direct attack on
organized public workers’ abilities​ to collectively bargain for improved wages and working
conditions, the U.S. government has announced they will be ​pulling all funding from the
UNRWA agency ​on which millions of Palestinian refugees rely on to eat, receive medical
treatment, and attend school. The same administration that facilitated one of the ​largest
transfers of wealth from the working class to the rich in the history of the U.S​. by dramatically
slashing the corporate tax rate, also spends ​hundreds of millions of public dollars on private
prison corporations​ like Florida-based GEO Group to imprison immigrants, separate families,
and lock children in cages. ICE has spent $471 million on contracts with GEO Group. In 2017
alone, GEO Group posted ​$2.3 billion in profits​. Since 2000 Florida’s private prison population
alone has ​gone up by 211 percent​.

Again and again the U.S. government puts forth the idea that poor people on this stolen land
First Nations people refer to as Turtle Island, or poor people abroad, do not deserve to live and
must be labeled a threat. ​Simultaneous attacks on worker rights, the mass policing and
imprisonment of Black people, escalated deportations and immigrant detention
facilitated by ICE, and the ongoing U.S. backed occupation and ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians are not coincidental, they are ​coincidal​.

Israeli companies like Elta North America​ have been contracted by the U.S. to help build the
border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. While universal health care or paying living wages to
all workers, including those held captive in prisons is deemed too expensive, the U.S.
government has pledged ​$38 billion in military funding to Israel​ over the next 10 years. Elbit
Systems, one of Israel’s largest defense contractors has ​received millions of dollars​ from the
U.S. government to support advancing U.S. military technology and weaponry. While another
Israeli company ​Attenti profits in millions off of developing technology to electronically surveil
and track criminalized populations in the U.S.

We identify ourselves as internationalists because our fight against the systems of policing,
prisons, and profits that control every aspect of our lives is a global and shared struggle. We
identify ourselves as abolitionists because we do not believe putting people in cages will ever
serve our collective interests. Our lives are inextricably impacted by the wars abroad and the
wars in our neighborhoods. Flint and Gaza do not have clean drinking water because the U.S.
and Israel continue to structurally depend on, and economically benefit from, the exploitation,
imprisonment, and death of working people. ​Israel continues to train U.S. police officers​ in
“counter-terrorist” tactics in an effort to repress Black and brown worker resistance against
brutality. ​The deputy director of ICE was sent by the Anti-Defamation League to be trained in
Israel​.

When immigrant ​children die in ICE detention centers​ this is our shared condition. When
prisoners in Florida are forced to work for free, or brutally ​murdered by guards​, this is our shared
condition. When Palestinian children are killed in broad daylight by Israeli soldiers, or left to ​die
slowly in an open air prison​ with militarized police at all entrances, this is our shared condition.
These conditions are reflections of a profoundly unsafe world, a profoundly violent world, bred
from systems that tell us the billions of dollars collected from our wages that are invested into
policing, military, and prisons are necessary in order to maintain “security”. Security for who?

All peoples committed to the idea of a free Palestine must also dedicate themselves to the
struggle against prisons, and the elimination of all forms of border policing. These violent
structures do not keep our communities safe, they maintain a system that tells workers they
should settle for crumbs or face becoming like other members of the population that have been
rendered disposable. We refuse to believe in the distraction and lies of “safety” that have been
offered to us. Collective safety can only be served by equitably distributing resources towards
satisfying community needs for health, education, housing, art, and movement towards real
freedom.

Freedom is not an idea won from soldiers or police occupying, killing, and imprisoning Black and
brown people. Freedom is a practice. Freedom is a social relationship expressed in our
unyielding accountability to one another as human beings worthy of dignity and love.

By participating in a mass strike under some of the most brutal imposed conditions of
surveillance, physical violence, and the threat of solitary confinement, imprisoned workers offer
an example to all of us on what organizing is possible even in this escalated political moment.

We answer their call by dreaming and demanding without wavering, a world in which all of us
are free.

Resources for Supporting the National Prison Strike:

https://incarceratedworkers.org/campaigns/prison-strike-2018

Support the campaign to “End the Deadly Exchange” of police training in Israel:
https://deadlyexchange.org/

For more information on GEO Group and how we are taking action to shut them down:
https://geocages.com/

Support and sign the petition to #StoptheHeat -- a campaign to address the deaths and
torture of prisoners due to climate change
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/climate-change-is-causing-cruel-unusual-punishment-tell-congr
ess-to-recognize-the-demands-of-prison-strikers?link_id=3&can_id=86c02958390fb5d7125b81c
a18bf6558&source=email-bring-climate-justice-to-prison-abolition&email_referrer=email_41445
0___subject_522724&email_subject=bring-prison-abolition-to-climate-justice