Italian anarchist joins UK prison hunger strike

Solidarity action links Sanremo with UK detainees held on remand over Palestine Action cases

~ Blade Runner ~

Italian anarchist prisoner Luca Dolce has joined from his cell in Sanremo the coordinated hunger strike that began in British prisons on 2 November — the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Britain’s colonial pledge that set the machinery of dispossession and genocide in motion. The British hunger strikers, held on remand for alleged offences linked to Palestine Action and all without conviction, say they will refuse food until Elbit Systems shuts its UK sites. Elbit, long targeted by Palestine Action’s factory occupations, remains Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.

Alongside the strike, the prisoners have launched Prisoners for Palestine, an initiative to collectivise detainees charged over actions in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. At least six prisoners across Bronzefield, New Hall, Pentonville and Peterborough are currently refusing food as part of a rolling action involving dozens who have pledged to join.

Since the proscription of Palestine Action earlier this year, the British state has been using remand as a form of domestic counter-insurgency. One of the six strikers spent September on hunger strike after authorities withheld her mail and removed her from her job in the prison library. Today the strikers report censorship of letters, phone calls and books, and say treatment has worsened since the ban — a predictable result when a political movement is reclassified as “terrorism” and handed to the state’s extremism apparatus.

From Italy, Luca Dolce made a statement that cuts through the mainstream line that hunger strikes are simply protests about conditions: “The struggle against prison and the military techno-industrial system is essential for a struggle of broader scope, of revolutionary and internationalist resistance. … I stand by their side with serenity and resolve.” Dolce also salutes Palestinian prisoner Anan Yaeesh in Melfi prison in southern Italy, another target of isolation and transfer tactics meant to erase political prisoners. According to Dolce, whether Yaeesh remains on strike is unclear.

The British state insists these prisoners are merely defendants awaiting trial. But their captivity functions neatly to suppress a movement that has repeatedly exposed and disrupted the UK’s arms pipeline to Israel. The hunger strike makes visible what the legal process tries to obscure: this is political imprisonment in the service of a war economy.

The strikers aren’t appealing for prison reform. They are refusing to cooperate with the machinery designed to put militants out of action. And the fact that prisoners abroad are joining them only underscores the point they are making from their cells: the death machine is international — and so the resistance must be too.

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