“Most of the time, the people inside the banks weren’t afraid at all,” former political prisoner Jihad Abdulmumit tells me, describing the experience of doing ‘bank expropriations’ to gain funds for the Black Liberation Army during the 1970s.
“In fact we would receive rounds of applause and cheers a lot of the time from the bank customers, sometimes the bank tellers too,” Abdulmumit says. “One time I remember we dropped some of the cash and a customer on the ground eagerly helped us put it back in the bag!”
The Black Liberation Army (BLA) emerged as an underground organization, waging guerilla warfare in response to the U.S. imperialists’ bloody assault on Black liberation. Composed of former Black Panther Party and Republic of New Afrika members forced to take their work underground, the BLA was a logical response to the FBI’s monstrous COINTELPRO operation, which waged brutal, bloody, all-out war on every aspect of the Panthers’ movement.
As Panthers across the country were being assassinated, framed, incarcerated, maligned in the media, and hunted by armed agents of the colonial state, the extreme violence by the imperialists had to be met with a material response—not victimhood.
“In the Panthers, I helped form a free community health clinic in Plainfield,” said Abdulmumit. “We had free breakfast programs, distributed newspapers, and helped run the gangs and drug dealers out of the neighborhoods. This is what the government was so afraid of, why they went to war with us.”
Jihad was just 16 years old when he joined the Black Panther Party in Plainfield, New Jersey, during an explosive political climate that resembled our contemporary moment: militancy permeated the air from the Plainfield Rebellion of 1967, massive anti-Vietnam War protests swept cities, coupled with nonstop Black, Indigenous, and Chicano uprisings. Images of strong Black brothers and sisters in leather coats and berets toting weapons strongly contrasted the colonial oppression, victimhood, and daily state violence that otherwise surrounded them. Jihad like many more only wanted to be one thing: a revolutionary.
One of the tactics the BLA developed was to rob banks, more accurately called ‘bank expropriations’, in order to fund the underground movement. “We knew that the money in those banks was built off our backs anyways, and if we could use it for the liberation of our people, then we had to try.”
When the people know without a doubt that your acts of resistance are on the behalf of their liberation, he tells me, then they will support you. This is why his comrades and him would receive ovations of applause inside the banks. Jihad would eventually be caught and serve 23 years in federal prison, but he “thought of escape, revolution, and liberation” every single day.
The problem, however, was that Jihad and his comrades were not the illusive “perfect victims” as Mohammed El-Kurd explains in his new book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. As El-Kurd illustrates the many ways that Palestinians must make appeals to “humanity” and fit into a narrow category of ‘perfect, peace-loving citizens’ to be humanized, these Black liberation fighters, too, failed the categories of victimhood.
As such, they received virtually no support from the wider movement around them. There were no legal defense teams ready to work pro bono for their release, no sweeping movements in the streets to demand the liberatory bank robbers’ freedom, and few comrades of the movement, even, that wanted to associate with the image of an armed insurgent cast behind bars. Contrasted with the popular global outcries for academic temporary political prisoner Angela Davis, the framed Panther 21 in New York, and other ‘above ground’ activists, Jihad says that many BLA comrades were on their own those initial years of imprisonment.
“Palestinians must denounce certain affiliations, determined by the West, to be considered worthy of living,” El-Kurd writes in the third chapter of his book. Discussing the insidious logic of ‘innocence’ and the implications of even well-meaning “liberals” distancing themselves from armed Palestinian resistance in order to make appeals to the humanity of the colonizers, El-Kurd illuminates the shortcomings of this approach: “Bombs do not discriminate on the basis of political ideology.”
Like Palestinians who are forced to perform absolute innocence to receive any ‘condolences’ or sympathy, our political prisoners are often abandoned if their resistance doesn’t conform to colonizer-approved methods of struggle. Last month, I watched as the West Bank erupted in crowds of celebration when 90 Palestinian hostages were freed in the first prisoner exchange, a result of the ceasefire agreement the Zionists have now broken dozens of times.
Photos of loved ones emerging to tender crowds, strong embraces, and Palestinian flags waving contrasted with just how battered many appeared. Palestinian scholar and PFLP leader, Khalida Jarrar, emerged from the Zionist dungeons appearing as if she’d aged a decade in just one year, while others who had spent decades inside were finally freed. Stirring videos of the resistance fighters receiving teary hugs and admiration have also filled popular social media feeds and international news, though little is shown across U.S. media.
This process has not only been about individuals coming home from Zionist gulags, though that is probably the primary cause of excitement. This was a display of a community reaffirming their commitment to their freedom fighters in every sense of the term: those in the prisons, those on the frontlines, and the many more simply caught in between a colonial system designed for their destruction and a liberation war.
What Palestinians fundamentally understand, from children to elderly, is that the movement does not abandon its own. The fight doesn’t end at the prison gate — prison is a continuation of struggle, not a conclusion — and the futures of those outside are deeply connected with those behind colonizers’ bars. And perhaps most important is the clear example of rejecting the perfect victimhood that we in the West often require of our solidarity, support, and movements.
Black organizers and revolutionaries in the U.S. must witness this dedication and take it to heart. Last August in Atlanta, the Black Alliance for Peace hosted the first CurbFest for Political Prisoners in Atlanta, a national event to raise awareness for our incarcerated fighters. Plastered across walls stood images of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kamau Sadiki, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Leonard Peltier, and others. But where were the crowds? Where was the eruption of community support that Palestinians show for their imprisoned every day?
Ruchell Magee spent almost all of ages 16 to 83 incarcerated, only to die from brutal prison conditions a mere 81 days after his release in 2023. Black Liberation Army warrior and acupuncturist Mutulu Shakur spent 37 years in imperialist dungeons, surviving only 8 months after his 2022 release. Brother Jalil Muntaqim spent 49 years locked down, and upon his release in 2020, must witness a Black “movement” quicker to mobilize against puppet presidents than for his locked-up comrades.
Whether longtime fighters like Ahmad Sa’adat, youth defying U.S. weapons by throwing rocks, or countless others swept away in mass arrests, Palestinians show us how to refuse letting prison walls disappear their people. Their names are spoken. Their stories are told. Their freedom is demanded at every turn, on every tongue and in every chant.
Even in the absence of their successful freedom, the narratives of their extreme resistance from the inside fill the voices of Palestinians. I was filled with emotion the first time I learned about Walid Daqqah from a comrade of mine, who shared that despite him being imprisoned, he’d smuggled out his seed, to have a daughter with his wife and carry on his legacy. Such resilience is baked into the DNA of how Daqqah is memorialized, and is the substance of aspiration for those of us on the other side of the prison walls.
Under a fundamentally racist, colonial, and genocidal system, the conditions of imprisonment are inherently political. If we don’t build a movement strong enough to bring them home, we signal to the state that its war on Black liberation has worked—that prisons have broken our backs and souls. What the Palestinians have done, above all, is to make the prison struggle a popular struggle; one that saturates the mainstream and the popular consciousness of most Palestinians. We have ultimately failed to do the same.
The Palestinian movement also makes it clear: a revolutionary movement that abandons its political prisoners abandons itself.
The Palestinian movement also makes it clear: a revolutionary movement that abandons its political prisoners abandons itself. Struggle brings repression, and for those who truly dare to fight for freedom, prison is perhaps as inevitable as death. It is suicidal to not see ourselves reflected in the faces of our political prisoners and organize accordingly.
Today, Jihad Abdulmumit is the National Co-Chair of the Jericho Movement for Political Prisoners, an organization founded in the 90s by former political prisoners themselves, Jalil Muntaqim and Safiya Bukhari. It is one of the only legacy organizations in the U.S. that has carried the fight for political prisoners, and all prisoners, as its chief mission for almost 30 years now. Before it, no such organization truly existed in its form.
The support we give to the Jericho Movement today is the support we build for ourselves and our comrades tomorrow; the infrastructure for freeing our political prisoners, for popularizing their struggles, is also the infrastructure we build for ourselves as revolutionaries. Our loud denunciations of the targeting of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network are rehearsals for defending our own organizations, defending our own solidarity networks. Every community event that you hold to write letters to and raise funds for political prisoners, builds the muscle memory for when we might need those letters and funds ourselves. And the people we rally to the streets may become the acid that melts away the prison bars that we would otherwise die behind.
We have allowed our political prisoners to become ghosts, within a movement claiming to want radical exorcism of oppressive systems. Until we rectify this, learning from our Palestinian siblings the need for a popular movement, we impair our ability to walk forward. The path ahead is clear: we must reject the “perfect victim” narrative that has caused us to abandon our most dedicated fighters, which leads us to leave our most voracious freedom fighters unspoken, and instead build a movement that, like Palestine’s, fights as fiercely for those behind the walls as for those in front of them.