On Tuesday the 19th of November, the Research Centre in International Justice (RCIJ) co-hosted an online workshop with Birzeit University’s Institute of Law on ‘Political Prisoners and Ireland-Palestine Connections’. The workshop is the first of a series of events marking the new partnership between the RCIJ and Institute of Law.
The workshop, which was delivered in Arabic and English, comprised a panel and roundtable, and included presentations from researchers within the RCIJ and Institute of Law. In the panel, Sahar Francis (Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association) discussed the key roles of colonialism and militarism in Israel’s mass incarceration of Palestinians. Basil Farraj (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Birzeit University) discussed how Israel’s carceral regime is ‘mobile’ and exported globally through weapons exports, as well as police and military training. Sara Troian (School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University) expanded on these themes, explaining how carcerality is a tool of settler colonialism not only in terms of its power to frame Indigeneity as ‘inherently criminal’, but also in eliminating the evidence of the Israeli settler colonial project itself. Soundos Hammad and Ghaid Hijjaz (Birzeit University, Right to Education Campaign) spoke about their experiences as staff and students of Birzeit University, and in their volunteer roles at the Right to Education Campaign, amid the mass arrests of students by Israeli occupation forces since the 7th of October 2023. Bana Abu Zuluf (School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University) rounded out the panel with a scathing critique of academia and its complicity in the Gaza genocide, a presentation based on her recently published OpinioJuris article entitled ‘International Law Beneath the Rubble: Academic Complicity and the Gaza Genocide’.
The roundtable, comprising Reem Al-Botmeh (Birzeit University) and John Reynolds (School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University), emphasised the various and historical connections of the Irish and Palestinian experience of colonial carcerality and the need to pressure the Irish government to take more meaningful action on Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
This joint workshop was chaired by Jamil Salem (Institute of Law, Birzeit University) and Rhiannon Bandiera (Research Centre in International Justice, School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University), and co-organised with Reem Al-Botmeh, John Reynolds, and Amina Adanan (Research Centre in International Justice, School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University).