Carrie Zaremba: The Prison as a Front

2025 ICSZ Writing Fellows were invited to submit reflections on their work following the ICSZ 2025 Residential Writing Retreat. Special thanks to Ronit Lentin for copyediting these essays.

For my fellowship project I focused on the significance of prisons as a front in the struggle against U.S.-led imperialism and Zionism. The project was inspired by the hunger strike of T. Hoxha, one of the Filton 24 in the U.K., and the response by anarchist political prisoners Casey Goonan and Malik Farrad Muhammad in the U.S. Reading their correspondence, I was struck by the hunger strikers’ embodiment of sumud as a shared political language that dissolves the boundaries of captivity. As a tactic, the hunger strike resonates with the Palestinian prisoners’ movement, where refusing food has long been a form of collective resistance and a declaration of political agency. Confronting the most extreme stakes, including the possibility of death, the hunger strikes compel those of us on the outside to prioritize prisoner support work . 

While hiking the Big Bear mountain trails, I kept returning to the question of what it would mean for the U.S. Palestine solidarity movement to consider domestic political prisoners as part of our anti-Zionism struggle, as a shared front? I was haunted by this question because the gap was so glaring. While there is no shortage of consciousness regarding Palestinian political prisoners—their names, faces, and campaigns circulate with the urgency they deserve—there is little recognition of imprisoned revolutionaries who fight the same enemy at home. Though we often repeat the slogan that “political prisoners are our compass,” it rarely becomes a coherent political strategy. While Mahmoud Khalil, the young Palestinian refugee detained by ICE, became a popular symbol of innocence wronged by the state, prisoners accused of militant resistance, like Jakhi McCray[1], have not been embraced with the same urgency. This unevenness reveals a movement trapped between abolitionist rhetoric and selective solidarity, still beholden to liberal frameworks of innocence and legality that dictate who is worthy of defense. To extend unconditional support to prisoners the state deems “guilty” requires understanding that guilt itself is a political weapon, a category designed to destroy movements.

That realization sent me searching for a lineage of thought to ground my intuition, leading me to draw on George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye (1972)[2] and Safiya Bukhari’s essay “On the Question of Political Prisoners” (1995).¹ Both illuminate prison as a dual site of repression and revolutionary potential where the dialectic between the inside and the outside becomes the terrain on which political consciousness is forged. In the context of the critical study of Zionism, their analyses expose how the carceral state functions as a core mechanism through which empire maintains itself, linking imperialist logics of containment, counterinsurgency, and racialized security to the Zionist colonial prisons in Palestine. For Jackson, imprisonment does not remove one from the struggle but rather intensifies one’s participation in it. The task, Jackson argues, is to transform the conditions of captivity into conditions of political formation, turning prisoners into revolutionary cadre and ensuring that the comrades outside build the infrastructure of support and continuity. To take this seriously today means understanding prison as an active front of struggle—one demanding the same rigor of organization as any other terrain. In this sense, the anti-Zionist struggle within the imperial core must use the prison as a site where solidarity is tested, repression is refined, and new forms of revolutionary coordination emerge. If incarceration marks not an endpoint but a shift in the fronts of the struggle, the movement must develop the capacity to include the prison in its fight, sustaining the prisoners in captivity and preserving its continuity under repression. 

The Critical Study of Zionism should involve further research of the prison as a site of both repression and resistance. The writings of U.S. domestic political prisoners and the statements of prisoner support committees provide fruitful material for studying contemporary resistance to Zionism in the imperial core. I would encourage scholars to engage with the work of current and former New Afrikan political prisoners and prisoners of war, such as Shaka Shakur[3] and Dhoruba bin Wahad[4], who have long articulated the relationship between imperialism and Zionism as interlocking systems of domination sustained through carcerality and counterinsurgency. These writings not only demonstrate how Zionism operates within the imperial core but also expand the field’s methodological scope by showing that resistance to Zionism exists within the carceral geography of the United States. By situating the prison as a key site within the global study of the operations of Zionism, we can expand our understanding of how empire reproduces itself through carcerality, and how sumud continues even from within the prison walls. Such reframing insists that anti-Zionism must also be abolitionist.

1. Jakhi McCray, a pro Palestine activist, has been charged with setting fire to NYPD vehicles, https://halifax.citynews.ca/2025/07/21/man-accused-of-setting-fire-to-11-nypd-vehicles-is-arrested-and-charged-with-arson/

2. George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye, (New York: Random House, 1972).

3. Shaka Shakur has been held captive by the Indiana Department of Correction since 2002. For more details, see Shakur, Shaka #1996207, https://thejerichomovement.com/profile/shakur-shaka-1996207.

4. Dhoruba Bin Wahad is a former Black Panther who was a target of racist and political repression by the United States government because of his effective leadership role within the Black Panther Party. For more details, see Dhoruba Bin Wahad, https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Dhoruba_Bin-Wahad/513.Dhouruba.who.is.dhoruba.bin.wahad.pdf.