Samidoun (Paris-Banlieue) & International Red Aid (Toulouse): Joint Interview

Editor’s Note: For this fourth issue of Material, dedicated to the question of (political) prisoners, we sought to pose a series of key questions to several organizations engaged in the struggle against imprisonment. We believe this exercise allows readers to compare the approach taken by each respondent as well as the broader political context in which they operate. For this first iteration of this interview process, we received responses from two organizations: Samidoun (Paris-Banlieue) and International Red Aid (Toulouse).

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Material: Could you describe how, in your context, the state, through laws, policing, detention practices, or other mechanisms, produces political prisoners on a mass scale—and how this process fits into its broader strategy of containing, disorganizing, or destroying revolutionary movements in this time of history? How does imprisonment seek not only to punish individuals but also to break collective morale, instill fear, or isolate revolutionary forces from the masses? In this regard, we would like to hear how your organization/movement has analyzed and responded to this in the past and present.

Samidoun (Paris-Banlieue)¹: Regarding this question, we will discuss the specific context of Palestine, which lies at the heart of Samidoun’s international struggle.
In Palestine, imprisonment is part of a wider context of settler colonialism, similar to what Algeria, Ireland, and other countries have experienced. As a result, in Palestine, prison is a tool of repression designed to subdue society as a whole. However, it targets those activists and fighters involved in national liberation movements with particular intensity, as they are the most advanced segment of the oppressed masses engaged in struggle. Dialectically, it is through the repression of these fighters that the Zionist state affects the people as a whole: workers, peasants, fishermen, students, and intellectuals. This reality is pervasive throughout Palestinian society: there are prisoners in every family and every generation.
Israel attempts to fragment the realities of the different areas of Palestinian territory in order to divide its population: there are around a hundred arrests per day in the West Bank; prior to October 7, Gaza was under blockade; Palestinian refugees face specific forms of discrimination in Jordan and Lebanon; and so on.
Repression through imprisonment is a pervasive phenomenon in the Palestinian context. A quarter of Palestinian men have been incarcerated since 1967, and since 1948, there have been over a million prisoners. In occupied Palestine, those arrested are tried by military courts and subjected to daily raids carried out by the Zionist army. Those imprisoned civilians are then sent to interrogation and investigation centers and subsequently brought before military courts where the conviction rate is around 99%.
This type of administrative detention is a tool of repression that allows Zionist authorities to imprison Palestinians based on “secret” records and files to which neither the defense nor the prisoner has access. Without a trial or judgment, provisional sentences of several months are often extended, and it is common for prisoners to remain under this “administrative detention” regime for years. Currently, as of March 2026, there are nearly 3,500 detainees held under this system, not counting those in Gaza.
The repressive prison and legal system we have just described dates back to Mandatory Palestine.² Its tools were originally developed by the British colonial administration even before the establishment of the Zionist entity in Palestine, clearly illustrating the colonial continuum that exists between British imperialism and the Zionist entity. Prisons are, in fact, often located on the sites or foundations of detention facilities from the British Mandate era, as is the case with the Damon Women’s Prison.³ This legacy is also reflected in the legislative framework, as seen in the law on “illegal combatants,” modeled after similar legislation in the United States.⁴
The history of mass incarceration in Palestine dates back to the 1930s, during the time of the first anti-colonial strikes and actions, which in turn triggered the earliest forms of state repression against this emerging resistance.
In the 1960s, with the advent of political parties such as Fatah, the PFLP, and the DFLP, the prison population increasingly consisted of activists engaged in political-military actions, numbering several thousand inmates at the movement’s peak. In this context, the enemy’s objective was—and still is—to weaken the resistance by cutting off its fighters from the popular base on which the guerrillas draw their strength. It is vitally important for the occupying power to silence the most determined resistance fighters, to cut them off from their communities, and to make them disappear. The prison experience thus aims to deter any return to the struggle by former prisoners, scarred by multiple traumas and the weight of reprisals threatening their families, rendering it increasingly costly for them to continue participating in the struggle for liberation.
From this situation grew the need for an organization of political prisoners inside the penal institutions themselves. It was necessary to create the material conditions to transform the destructive prison environment into a place of confrontation with the enemy and a school of revolution. This is how the reality of prisons has evolved throughout history, in step with the ebb and flow of prisoner exchange agreements or periods of rapid increase in the number of prisoners, forcing the movement to continually adapt.
What is important to emphasize—if not to reiterate—is that the enemy’s desire to break the morale of the resistance fighters has, on the contrary, given rise to a movement that turns prison into a school of the Palestinian revolution. Prisoners are the vanguard of the liberation struggle. When referring to them, terms like “Palestinian hostages” tend to be overly humanitarian or even moralistic: the men and women in question are, above all, individuals who have been repressed by a colonial entity, with previous generations having fought to ensure the political dimension of their incarceration is recognized. (Similarly, there were no Zionist “hostages,” only prisoners of war.) Whatever the reason for which a Palestinian is imprisoned, all the decisions made by the colonized are linked to the overall fate of their people.

International Red Aid (Toulouse): As part of their strategy of preemptive counterrevolution, imperialist states have developed a vast legislative arsenal. In this context, and in the face of the structural crisis it is currently undergoing, French imperialism has, in recent years, introduced a growing number of new measures aimed at strengthening its instruments of coercion. These measures do not target only revolutionary movements—which do not currently exist on a mass scale—but seek above all to contain any inclination emanating from various sectors of the proletariat, particularly non-white segments of the population, toward challenging the established order.
Under these conditions, it cannot be said that the French state produces political prisoners “on a large scale.” (However, it is noteworthy that France held one of Europe’s longest-serving political prisoners, Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, for over forty years.) This statement nevertheless warrants some nuance. During every phase of heightened antagonism with the state, many people are imprisoned, as was the case during the Yellow Vest movement in 2018⁵ or the riots following the police killing of Nahel Merzouk in 2023.⁶ Furthermore, several anti-fascists have been repressed and incarcerated following clashes with neo-Nazi groups. The most emblematic case remains the pretrial detention of nine antifascists in the case linked to the death of the neo-Nazi Quentin Deranque in Lyon.⁷
The fact remains: In all these situations, the issue of incarceration—and even more so the struggle against it—is largely ignored by broad segments of the revolutionary movement, and even more so by progressive circles. This can be explained in particular by years of pacifism and by the dominance of social democracy in various spaces of struggle, which have largely contributed to depoliticizing the issue of repression, even though it is an integral part of the revolutionary struggle. This observation must, however, be updated: we are seeing the development of self-defense frameworks, particularly in Autonomist circles, which have been hit hard in recent times.

1. In English: “Samidoun (Paris-Suburbs).” Unlike the North American context, in many European countries—and in France in particular—the rapid and planned urbanization of the outskirts of large and medium-sized cities in the 1960s and 1970s led to a concentration of the working class in these “villes nouvelles” (“new towns”). By the 1980s and 1990s, as white workers gained opportunities to become homeowners themselves in even more distant suburbs (made accessible by the construction of highways across the country), the “villes nouvelles” became areas where the most precarious members of the largely non-white working class were concentrated.—Material.
2. Mandatory Palestine was a British colonial entity established post-WWI (after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which had governed the region for 400 years by that point) to economically exploit the territory and facilitate the Zionist project through the violent suppression of indigenous Arab national liberation movements.—Material.
3. Damon Prison is a high-security facility located in the Haifa district, originally built as a tobacco warehouse during the British Mandate and repurposed as a colonial site of confinement. It was infamously used by the British to incarcerate Arab nationalists after the suppression of the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt.—Material.
4. The Israeli “Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law” (2002) is a direct structural mirror of the US “Unlawful Enemy Combatant” designation created by the Bush administration following 9/11. By inventing a category that is neither “civilian” nor “prisoner of war,” both states carved out a legal gray zone to justify indefinite detention without trial and the suspension of Geneva Convention protections.—Material.
5. The Yellow Vests (“Gilets Jaunes”) emerged in October 2018 as a spontaneous uprising of mostly rural working-class elements and professionals against a newly introduced “carbon-tax,” embodying the more general neoliberal austerity measures implemented in France over the last several decades. Bypassing traditional trade union mediation, the movement became more ideologically left-wing and radical in its methods before it was met by a high level of state repression.—Material
6. The police execution of 16 year old Nahel Merzouk sparked riots all over the French banlieues (ghettoized working-class suburbs) against the structural racism of the French repressive apparatus.—Material
7. In February 2026, neo-Nazi Quentin Deranque died of injuries suffered during a brawl with anti-fascists in Lyon. The clash was provoked by a neo-Nazi mob (of which Deranque was part), accompanying the far-right identitarian “feminist” collective Nemesis, at a protest against MEP (Member of the European Parliament) Rima Hassan’s (a prominent Palestinian activist) talk held at Lyon’s Institute for Political Sciences. What followed was a media smear campaign of unprecedented scale, leading to Deranque being honored with a minute of silence in the National Assembly, as well as threats of all kinds directed at La France Insoumise (to which Hassan belongs), a self-proclaimed “radical-reformist” party vilified by the right and the center for its pro-Palestinian and (moderate) anti-fascist positions.—Material