Fasting and Hunger Strikes: preliminary comments in light of the Palestinian struggle for collective self-determination

This post is in honor of the Palestinian political prisoner, Maher al-Akhras, who has been on a hunger strike for 86 days.

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“Administrative detention has constituted a core of Israel’s 1,500 occupation laws that apply to Palestinians only, and which are not subject to any type of civilian or public review. Derived from British Mandate laws, administrative detention permits Israeli Forces to arrest Palestinians for up to six months without charge or trial, and without any show of incriminating evidence. Such detention orders can be renewed indefinitely, each time for another six-month term.”—Richard Falk

“Palestinian civil society is now mainly opting for explicit acts of collective nonviolent resistance to register their dissatisfactions with the failures of the United Nations—or inter-governmental diplomacy in general—to produce a sustainable peace that reflects Palestinian rights under international law. The main expression of this embrace of nonviolence is the adoption of tactics used so successfully by the anti-apartheid campaign to change the political climate in racist South Africa, yielding a nonviolent path to multiracial constitutional democracy. At the present time the growing BDS movement is working to achieve similar results.

Let us recall that successful global nonviolent movements are not restricted to fasts and marches, but include the boycott, non-cooperation, and civil disobedience tactics deployed by Palestinians today. [….] In solidarity with the hunger strikers, civic allies should address the institutional edifice upholding administrative detention. It extends from a discriminatory core and therefore its requisite treatment includes ensuring the enjoyment of internationally guaranteed rights; rights enshrined by the BDS call to action and reified by the movement’s steady and deliberate progression.”—Richard Falk, writing about a hunger strike in 2012 by Palestinian political prisoners

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it: no nation-state or group of such states has legal and political—let alone moral—authority, to ask or demand (as part of one or more of the conditions for negotiations, or ending a belligerent occupation, aggression or repressive forms policing or ‘security’) political groups or organizations struggling to realize their international legal right to collective self-determination to renounce all use of violence to achieve their ends—all the more so if the denial of self-determination is, as is often the case, part and parcel of collaboration with outside and more powerful parties systematically failing to enforce or recognize human rights violations, be they civil, political, social, cultural or economic. Adding insult to injury, we note those states in the post-colonial or imperial habit of “demanding” such relinquishment have themselves more often than not achieved their collective self-determination through violent means (war, rebellion, revolution, terrorism, what have you), while now resorting to means of violence when conventional and nonviolent political methods (diplomacy, negotiation, sanctions, etc.) fail, ruthlessly exploiting a gross asymmetry in various forms of power while employing violence to assert their political will on others (for whatever reason: ideological domination, regime change, resource exploitation, a more congenial economic environment…).

Conceding this does not amount to an implicit or roundabout moral justification or warrant for the particular means of violence such groups or organizations may choose in their struggle (although it’s not difficult to understand why those who are frequently subject to state terror often defend themselves with terrorist means readily available to them). Indeed, I think humanitarian-inspired constraints of just war theory (especially jus in bello) should apply to groups like the Palestinians in their struggle for collective self-determination (this applies as well to those seeking to secede from existing states which, with Allen Buchanan, I believe should viewed as a remedial right, thus a ‘last resort response to serious injustices’).

Speaking of the Palestinians, it’s useful to remind ourselves that, under international law, and in the words of Richard Falk, “Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right,” one that arises in the first instance from two documents: the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and the Fourth Geneva Convention and its subsequent protocols. As argued in a couple of articles Falk co-authored with Burns Weston,

“Israel’s failures as a belligerent occupant to abide by international law amount[s] to a fundamental denial of the Palestinian right of self-determination, and more generally of respect for the framework of belligerent occupation—therefore giving rise to a Palestinian right of resistance.”

In short, Palestinians have an inalienable moral and legal right to resist an illegal and violent military occupation.

For its part, Israel has reacted to all manner of Palestinian resistance, be it violent or non-violent, with routine reliance on “excessive and disproportionate use of lethal force, including the apparent targeting of civilians and children [including the demolition of housing, torture and various forms of indiscriminate ‘collective punishment’].” Both the creation of “facts on the ground” (e.g., ever-expanding settlements) “and the use of such force … constitute repeated and fundamental violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, violations that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Prisoners (political or not) engaged in “extra- or para-legal” nonviolent protest have a short menu of means from which to select from, and the hunger strike is one of the more prominent and time-honored such means.

A hunger strike is similar to “fasting,” as one is deliberately refusing to eat (and to some extent, drink) but of course they need to be distinguished, as the latter is typically motivated by medical, health, or religious/spiritual reasons, while the former is more frequently undertaken in a socio-economic and political context of rebellion or resistance of some sort; the hunger strike being of one of the more—if not the most—dramatic and dangerous tactics in the arsenal of nonviolent struggle. Nonetheless, the conceptual and activist lines drawn between a hunger strike and fasting are sometimes blurred if not effaced. In India, a hunger strike (dhurna), has long been a weapon of “passive resistance” (the adjective here is unfortunate), employed by entire communities to shame a ruler into granting their just demands, for example, or by creditors sitting “at the door of debtors who ignored legitimate claims on them.” In more intimate spheres like the family, a fast has frequently been used as “a means of arousing the conscience of a loved one,” a practice that begins to blur the boundaries between a hunger strike and a fast. Moreover, a “fast” can take on deliberate political dimensions, as was the case with Mahatma Gandhi (who set quite stringent standards for employing this ‘fiery weapon’ of last resort from the armory of satyāgraha) and later, with César Chávez, who co-founded (with Dolores Huerta) the National Farm Workers Association, better known later as the United Farm Workers (UFW). While Chávez, like Dorothy Day, fasted under a justificatory religious rubric of “spiritual personal transformation” and thus for Catholic penitential reasons, there was often an ineluctable political aspect involving nonviolent protest and “preparation” for civil disobedience campaigns. Consider this example from Day: “A week from now I shall begin the ten-day fast for peace, initiated by Chanterelle del Vasto, in which a score of women from all over the world will take part. Certainly prayer and fasting are needed today, our own work to overcome the spirit of violence in the world.”

Fasting was likewise employed by the revolutionary and reformist democratic opposition in Poland from 1976-1981. Members of KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee (later: Komitet Samoobrony Społecznej KOR/Social Self-Defense Committee, KSS-‘KOR’) engaged in several fasts believed to reflect a “Christian ethos” even among majority of its non-religious member: hence, for example, the title of Jacek Kurón’s essay (published in Znak under the pen name Elzbieta Borucka), “A Christian without God.” In this case, such an ethos meant refusing to make a distinction between “private” and “public” ethics, a refusal perversely reinforced within an authoritarian society wherein ostensibly private or intimate behavior often has, for better and worse, political reverberations. Recall that it was KOR that played a direct “service” role in the emergence of Solidarity (Solidarność, the first non-Communist party-controlled trade union in the Warsaw Pact countries) in 1980. Fasts in which KOR and other opposition members participated occurred in the first instance at Catholic churches (which provided some measure of political ‘protection’), although sympathizers unable for one reason or another to frequent the churches also fasted in support of these collective nonviolent protests. Fasts were undertaken on behalf of the release of imprisoned workers and in solidarity with Czech activists fasting in defense of political prisoners. The “spillover” or “by-product” effects of such fasts are intriguing, as in the exemplary case of one such fast cited for its capacity to

“create an atmosphere of seriousness and deep concentration, which was achieved not at the price of isolation, but in relation to others, to the human ties and feelings among friends. In addition, the fast united both believers and non-believers around common values and the goals ensuing from them, and therefore it became a great event of what might be called ethical ecumenical significance.” Please see Jan Jósef Lipski (Olga Amsterdamska and Gene M. Moore, trans.), KOR: Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981 (University of California Press, 1985).

One might correctly infer from my full name that I’m Irish (in part!). Thus, although it may be true (for better and worse) that “[h]unger strikes have deep roots in Irish society and in the Irish psyche,” my Irish brothers and sisters may be puzzled by the failure to discuss the well-known 1981 Irish hunger strike by Irish republican prisoners in Norther Ireland (the culmination of a five-year protest during ‘The Troubles’). But the fact that it is fairly well-known (and for reasons left unsaid) will have to suffice as reason enough for the omission. However, should these and/or other hunger strikes interest you, I have some reading suggestions that follow the bibliography immediately below.

Recommended Reading

• Awad, Mubarak. Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1985.
• Awad, Mubarak E. and R. Scott Kennedy. Nonviolent Struggle in the Middle East. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publ., 1985.
• Barghouti, Omar. BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
• Ben-Eliezer, Uri (Shaul Vardi, trans.) War over Peace: One Hundred Years of Israel’s Militaristic Nationalism. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019.
• Cypel, Sylvain. Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. New York: Other Press, 2006.
• Dunsky, Marda. Pens and Swords: How the Mainstream American Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Gordon, Neve. Israel’s Occupation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008.
• Hajjar, Lisa. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. London: University of California Press, 2005.
• Hiltermann, Joost R. Behind the Intifada: Labor and Women’s Movements in the Occupied Territories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
• Kattan, Victor, ed. The Palestine Question in International Law. London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008.
• Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine, ed. Refusing to be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press/Garnet, 2010.
• King, Mary Elizabeth. A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. New York: Nation Books, 2007.
• Kretzmer, David. The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008.
• Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
• Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. London: Oneworld Publications, 2006.
• Pappe, Ilan. The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories. London: Oneworld Publications, 2017.
• Pappe, Ilan. Ten Myths about Israel. London: Verso, 2017.
• Quigley, John. The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Ring, Kenneth, with Ghassan Abdullah. Letters from Palestine: Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the Power of Nonviolence. Tucson, AZ: Wheatmark, 2010.
• Roy, Sara. Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector. Princeton, NL Princeton University Press, 2011.
• Said, Abdul Aziz, et al., eds. Peace and Conflict Resolution in Islam: Precept and Practice. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001.
• Stephan, Maria J., ed. Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Tilley, Virginia, ed. Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. London: Pluto Press, 2012.

On Hunger Strikes (by Irish political prisoners* and others): a very select compilation

• Armbruster-Sandoval, Ralph. Starving for Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity (University of Arizona Press, 2017).
• Bardacke, Frank. Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso, 2011).
• Bargu, Banu. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014).
• Beresford, David. Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987).
• British Medical Association. Medicine Betrayed: The Participation of Doctors in Human Rights Abuses (Zed, 1992) See Chapter 7: Hunger strikes and other human rights issues involving prisoners: 119-131.
• Cansiz, Sakine (Janet Biehl, trans. and ed.) Sara: Prison Memoir of a Kurdish Revolutionary (Pluto Press, 2019).
• Flynn, Barry. Pawns in the Game: Irish Hunger Strikes, 1912-1981 (The Collins Press, 2011).
• Goodman, Ryan and Mindy Jane Roseman, eds. Interrogations, Forced Feedings, and the Role of Health Professionals: New Perspectives on International Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, and Ethics (Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, 2009).
• Grant, Kevin. Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890–1948 (University of California Press, 2019).
• List of hunger strikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hunger_strikes
• McConville, Seán. Irish Political Prisoners, 1848-1922: Theaters of War (Routledge, 2003).
• McConville, Seán. Irish Political Prisoners, 1920-1962: Pilgrimage of Desolation (Routledge, 2013).
• McConville, Seán. Irish Political Prisoners, 1960-2000: Braiding Rage and Sorrow. (Routledge, 2021).
• Miller, Ian. A History of Force Feeding: Hunger Strikes, Prisons and Medical Ethics, 1909–1974 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
• Morrison, Danny, ed. Hunger Strike: Reflections (Brandon Books, 2007).
• O’Rawe, Richard. Afterlives: The Hunger Strike and the Secret Offer that Changed Irish History (The Lilliput Press, 2011).
• O’Rawe, Richard. Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike (New Island, 2016).
• Pawel, Miriam. The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (Bloomsbury Press, 2009).
• Pawel, Miriam. The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (Bloomsbury Press, 2014).
• Ross, F. Stewart. Smashing H-Block: The Popular Campaign against Criminalization and the Irish Hunger Strikes, 1976-1982 (Liverpool University Press, 2000).

* “The use of a hunger strike as a means of protest in Ireland is a tradition dating to pre-Christian times. There [have] been hunger strikes by Irish republican prisoners since 1917….”

See too the following bibliographies at my Academia page: (i) The Modern Arab World, (ii) Radical Catholicism, (iii) Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence, (iv) The Life, Work, and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, (v) Human Rights, (vi) International Criminal Law, (vii) Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, (viii) Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East, (ix) Punishment and Prison, (x) Terrorism, (xi) Torture, (xii) Violent Conflict and the Laws of War, and (xiii) Zionist Ideologies.