🔥FEB Updates🔥: Holding it down, thinking it through, leveling up

Oakland Abolition and Solidarity

February 2025

Free Palestine!

Holding It Down Outside Santa Rita Jail
You're Invited! Open Meeting This Tuesday, 2/18
"The Strike" Documentary Is Out!
Prisoners and Hostages: Notes on the Ceasefire in Palestine
Getting Involved

REMINDER!
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Holding it down outside Santa Rita Jail

One of our jaii support crews out there in front of Santa Rita Jail last week in the rain!
Now that is hardcore. All love and respect to the volunteers holding it down

Oakland Abolition and Solidarity provides unconditional jail support to releases at Santa Rita Jail. Support crews currently go out on various weeknights from 7:30pm-12:00am, offering whatever we can - prepackaged food, beverages, cigarettes, free phone calls, a welcoming space, a listening ear.

Solidarity first!
Solidarity always.

If you want to help sustain this project, you can help out with a monthly donation.

Anything you can pitch in helps make it all happen. We spend anywhere from $500-800 per month on jail support supplies and it all comes from what we can hustle up. We don't have big funders and we don't get any grants. We are regular people just tryna do what we can.

(FYI: the monthly option depends on you being logged into Paypal.)

DONATE

Next open meeting this Tuesday, 2/18

This Tuesday, February 18, we'll be hosting our monthly open meeting and all are invited!

We are looking forward to connecting with you all. We'll have plenty of time for conversation and updates on ongoing projects, with plenty of ways to plug in ranging from doing jail support, helping with correspondence, publishing newsletters (like this one in front of you now!), creating political education and more.
A couple items on deck for discussion this Tuesday:

Discerning the real from spectacle with all the recent executive orders effecting the border, trans prisoners, undocumented neighbors, etc.
Fundraising to support our thriving jail support program outside Santa Rita Jail.
Assemblies, national gatherings, and network conference calls - checking in on all that is in motion.

Masks required. We'll have some if you need one.
RSVP to admin@oaklandabosol.org and we'll send the details to you.

(Note; meeting up in person is best, but a remote option is also available)

"The Strike" documentary is out!

"The Strike is a feature documentary that tells the story of a generation of California men who endured decades of solitary confinement and, against all odds, launched the largest hunger strike in U.S. history." (https://www.thestrikefilm.com/)

Over a decade in the making, two filmmakers have put together a humbling, grounded telling of the massive hunger strikes of 2011 -2013 that rocked California's prison system seeking to up-end business as usual and stop indefinite solitary confinement. We won't write a full review here but there are some major points that deserve attention and indeed, praise.

The filmmakers did their homework and spent years and years working with the strikers, family and organizers. This is rare.
The film itself gives center stage to the strikers and allows them to tell the story in their own words. The men of Pelican Bay open their hearts and pull no punches.
So much footage from inside the prisons was obtained and included. Stunning never before seen footage of bargaining sessions between strike leaders and CDCr prisoncrats was also obtained and woven into the film. Even those of us who have done time or have done prison abolition work for decades were taken to school by the film.

But of course, the film definitely has its limits, not in terms of cinematic technique, but in terms of the ideological content it pushes as well asin terms of some thorny issues it conspicuously sidesteps such as the involvement of the so-called "gang" structures in building the strike.

But let us know what you think!

Email us at a dmin@oaklandabosol.org or dm us on the socials with your take on the film and we can include it in a followup piece in our next newsletter

See "The Strike" for free HERE

Prisoners and Hostages: Notes on the Ceasefire in Palestine

“Palestinians celebrate the release of some 90 prisoners set free by Israel in the early hours of Jan. 20, 2025 upon their arrival aboard a Red Cross bus in the occupied West Bank town of Beitunia, on the outskirts of Ramallah.” (CBSNews)
ZAIN JAAFAR / AFP via Getty Images

“As we make this call to you, we do not ask you to free us from prisons: that is the task of the resistance and it will take care of it.”

- Letter from the National Prisoners’ Movement in Palestine, November 29, 2023

The resistance keeps its promises. A ceasefire went into effect in Gaza on the morning of January 19th which promises the cessation of military operations, withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the release of thousands of Palestinian captives from Israeli detention centers. This is a monumental achievement for the forces that have been bravely and steadfastly fighting the US backed, funded, and enabled zionist genocide, and a relief to the approximately two million people who’ve been living under Israeli bombs for 15 months.

There is much to be said about this agreement, and still many looming uncertainties. At the time of writing, Jenin is under siege as zionist forces escalate violence in the West Bank, and alarming proclamations about Gaza are coming out of the Trump admin. We want to celebrate the achievement of the Palestinian fighters, and will limit our analytical purpose here to some reflections on the Toufan al-Ahrar, the “Flood of the Free”, prisoner exchanges. These releases are a prominent part of the ceasefire agreement, a clear point of victory for the Palestinian resistance, and there is much to be learned from this for our own context. Settler colonial narratives about captives, for example, are similar in all parts of the so-called “West” and we have to continue exposing and deconstructing them. There is also much to be learned from the way that the Palestinian resistance steadfastly centers its captive peoples, and fights for their freedom.

Notable Facts about the Prisoner Exchange Agreement in the Ceasefire

In the weeks since the agreement was reached, trucks full of humanitarian aid are finally starting to enter the Gaza Strip and enormous caravans of displaced people have begun to return to their homes in the North of Gaza. In keeping with the substantial prisoner exchange aspects of the agreement, buses of freed captives, operated and escorted by the International Committee of the Red Cross, are beginning to arrive in Gaza and the West Bank, greeted by fierce celebration.

Things to know about the prisoner exchanges that are already underway (from Palestine Chronicle):

“During the first phase, Israel will release approximately 2,000 prisoners, including 250 serving life sentences, and around 1,000 prisoners detained after October 7, 2023. Hamas will release 33 Israeli detainees (alive or dead), including civilian women, soldiers, children under 19, elderly individuals over 50, and wounded or ill civilians, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. For every Israeli detainee released, Israel will release 30 Palestinian children and women from prison.

In exchange for the release of 30 elderly and ill Palestinian prisoners, Hamas will release all living Israeli detainees who are elderly, ill, or wounded civilians. Israel will release 50 Palestinian prisoners for each Israeli soldier released by Hamas.

In the sixth week of the agreement, Israel will release 47 prisoners from the “Shalit Deal,” who were re-arrested after their release in 2011.
If the number of living Israeli detainees released does not reach 33, the remaining number will be made up of bodies. In return, Israel will release all women and children detained after October 7, 2023, by the sixth week.

Palestinian prisoners released under the agreement will not be re-arrested for the same charges for which they were previously detained. They will not be re-arrested to complete the remainder of their sentences. Palestinian prisoners will not be required to sign any documents as a condition for their release.”

This series of releases will significantly reduce the population of Palestinians caged by the Israeli regime, which before the ceasefire numbered well over 10,000. There are many uncertainties around how these exchanges will continue to unfold, and what the increasing military aggression in the West Bank portends. On February 9th, as I’m completing final edits I’m seeing reports of a brutal IOF raid in Nur Shams. Still this ceasefire agreement must be seen as a victory for the Palestinian resistance. It is clear in the ratios of exchange that Palestinian fighters leveraged a substantial demand and secured the freedom of 30 - 50 Palestinians for every Israeli released.

Deconstructing the Narrative:

Since October 7th the zionist and mainstream media has paid undue focus on the “hostages” that were taken by Hamas while systematically minimizing and obscuring the ongoing brutality visited upon Gaza, and ignoring the thousands who have been held in Israeli “detention” centers before and since. Their message is clear, as always, that the violence against and caging of Palestinians is ever normalized. The use of “hostage” vs “prisoner” is strategic, it’s one of many well-known and easily seen pieces of rhetorical trickery that perpetuate entrenched Western and zionist narratives around Palestine. This difference in descriptive treatment (not to mention in actual treatment) is strategic precisely because it employs the cultural signifiers, so prominent and ever important in the West, of guilt and innocence. To media consumers in the imperial core, the concept of prisoner marks guilt at a deep, subconscious level, whereas the narrative import of hostage is that of innocence and victimhood.

The implications of pieces of narrative warfare like this are deep. Israeli citizens are given what western liberalism calls the presumption of innocence, while Palestinians are always already guilty. It is the same logic that allows the US and Israel to justify the genocide to itself and its constituencies. Palestinians are always already seen as criminals and combatants, and in a way they are, in that the stakes of their resistance are existential. But the western narrative colors this with the same signifiers of guilt and disposability that it uses against criminalized people and rebels here.

This narrative warfare is further evidenced in the way that Israeli prisoners have been placed at the center of so much, and are treated as individuals with complex stories and profiles. Palestinians, however, whether held in detention centers or living outside them under the reign of bombs and apartheid laws, are written about and understood in numbers and statistics. On the morning the ceasefire went into effect, NPR published an article profiling each of the 33 Israeli hostages set to be released with large photos evoking innocence, detailing their ages, genders, citizenship status, and miscellaneous personal details. Palestinians appear in the article only as “1900 Palestinians,” despite an anonymous Hamas official being cited as the principal source for the article. Innocence vs guilt, individuality vs mass; the narrative distinction is very evident. And there are endless examples of this intentional narrative construction. In the spring of 2024, the Intercept obtained a leaked internal New York Times memo detailing language parameters for talking about the genocide or “conflict,” notable among many instances of rhetorical manipulation is the instruction for writers to avoid the word Palestine “except in rare cases.”

Beyond the narratives and categories deployed by the oppressors, where we clearly see the dehumanization and erasure of Palestinians, we must challenge the whole foundation of the settler colonial state of Israel. The framework of the settler legal systems has no legitimate basis yet grants Israel juridical power over stolen land and colonized indigenous people. The United States, itself a settler colonial state, uses its power to continue propping up this system. One challenge we face is that we still find ourselves using the term “prisoners” for colonized peoples fighting for liberation. If we are not continually deconstructing these terms, we perpetuate the narrative without interruption.

It is no wonder that there is a long tradition of solidarity between US and Palestinian prisoners. Palestinian prisoners have reliably expressed explicit and enthusiastic solidarity with prisoner resistance in the US. This was present during the hunger strikes in California in 2011 and 2013, as well as the national prisoner strikes in 2016 and 2018. There is an implicit and abiding understanding of shared struggle, shared reality, and shared colonial conditions between these sets of captives that continues.

Consequences and Conclusion

Beyond the ideological aspects and narrative warfare, the breakdown of the prisoner exchange says a great deal about the effectiveness of resistance. The Palestinian fighters never conceded or capitulated. They maintain a sober understanding of the existential stakes of the war they are fighting, and the motivations of their enemies. By holding out in this way they have achieved a scenario in which each released hostage earns the freedom of 30-50 Palestinians. In other words, they have succeeded in reversing the way that the West calculates the worth of the lives of its citizens as compared to all those that it dehumanizes and renders as Other.. Israel and the US value the lives of Israelis over that of Palestinians in ways that are obvious in action and narrative. But Palestinian fighters have forced them to pay for those hostages disproportionately as well, thus turning the empire’s devaluation of their lives against it.

So much of this feels like stating the obvious. It’s crazy-making how power can manipulate so thoroughly and so obviously. It’s like how the city’s public line, here in Oakland, was that the encampment sweeps are about “protecting public space,” and they do so by circling public parks with eight feet of chain link fence. The message is clear: Certain people count as citizens and individuals, all others are disposable, marked to be displaced, imprisoned, or simply annihilated. Fuck that. Down with the zionist entity and the empire that upholds it.

Want to get involved?

Donate
We are in motion and need some help!

We are not a non-profit. We don't benefit from grants or big donors.
We are able to continue our work autonomously by hustling,and fundraising in our networks and community. These contributions are always necessary to keep us moving. They fund purchases of food, masks, and sanitary supplies for jail support, postage and printing for newsletters and correspondence, etc. Shoutout to all yall that have been supporting us with $5 or $10 a month for years! <3

And wow! The prices for everything recently have gone up. That combined with the growth of out jail support program have escalated our need to fundraise to keep it all going. If you can't be going out all night to do jail support or put in time on other stuff, it's easy to pitch in with a few bucks.

Please consider kicking down if you can Especially with an automatic monthly subscription. It goes a long way with us! (details here)

Join the Phone Tree

Please consider joining our anti-repression phone tree to respond to the phone zaps and calls for support that we organize or boost. Our pressure makes a difference!

Imagine being locked up, isolated and organizing perhaps as a group, to defend yourselves and your wellbeing. Now imagine being able to bring down 100 guaranteed phone calls and emails onto a prisoncrat to push your demands, to apply pressure and to publicize your situation to all kinds of people outside. THAT is what committing to a few phone calls a month can make possible.

Our phone trees are coordinated through Signal or SMS. You can join as an individual or even better, you can organize as a crew or calling cluster. Email us with your phone number to be added. We can also offer support, suggestions, and best practices for organizing your own cluster for those who are interested.
admin@oaklandabosol.org

Translation

Help us reach more people inside California prisons!

Our newsletter is a place where prisoners can share their political writings and art with other prisoners, something that’s so essential to an abolitionist movement. Publications like this are few and far between and having a Spanish translation has long been a goal. However, being able to produce the specialized labor needed for that is hard for a grassroots org like ours where everyone is doing this work in the time they have between paying jobs.

If you want to support this effort but don’t have the personal connections, donating money would help us fill any potential gaps with paid translators so we can have a Spanish version available whether or not the volunteer labor is there.

Please reach out! admin@oaklandabosol.org

Jail Support

Like we mentioned above, Oakland Abolition and Solidarity provides unconditional jail support to releases at Santa Rita Jail. Support crews currently go out on various weeknights from 7:30 pm-12:00 am, offering whatever we can - prepackaged food, beverages, cigarettes, free phone calls, a welcoming space, a listening ear.

Solidarity first!
Solidarity always.

Contact admin@oaklandabosol.org to get more information about getting trained to join a jail support crew.

Our mailing address is:
PO BOX 12594
OAKLAND, CA 94604

Our email address is:
admin@oaklandabosol.org

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Oakland Abolition & Solidarity · P.O. Box 12594 · Oakland, Ca 94604 · USA