The following piece was written by Amu Gib, a 30-year-old British activist who has been imprisoned for the last nine months under counterterrorism laws. Amu and four others allegedly broke into a British military airbase in central England with the group Palestine Action in June 2025. They are alleged to have damaged two refueling planes suspected of supporting Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza. Almost immediately after the alleged break-in to the military airbase, the British government moved to proscribe Palestine Action.
While in prison, an independent socialist party approached Amu to run as a candidate in this year’s local council elections. On Feb. 23, Amu announced their candidacy for Councillor in the north London borough of Islington, where they grew up. Unless convicted, prisoners can run as candidates in British elections—and even hold office if elected. Amu’s name will be on the ballot in the elections taking place across Britain on May 7.
In the following piece, Amu reflects on running for office from behind bars and the contradictions of their electoral bid as a direct actionist and ex–hunger striker in prison. To date, prison staff have repeatedly barred Amu from receiving mail, seeing visitors, and accessing the internet. We are publishing this rare piece of writing from His Majesty’s Prison (HMP) Bronzefield to fight the isolation and silence of incarceration.
Two years ago, I arrived at the welcome desk of Oxford Action for Palestine’s (OA4P) student encampment. I had no money, no phone battery, no charger, nowhere to sleep, and I hadn’t eaten in a long time. The genocide in Palestine raged on, but it felt as though all of Oxford was carrying on as normal—except for this beautiful stain on the lawn of the Pitt Rivers Museum (which is stocked with colonial artifacts up the wazoo).
Immediately upon arriving at the encampment, my physical needs were met, and soon I was sitting in a loose circle under an open sky, listening to a Gazan student tell us of his city even as he swallowed the depth of a loss he knew we were incapable of fathoming. The ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians is a reckoning for all humanity.
Encampments and occupations do not un-bomb hospitals. Neither do electoral campaigns, yet I’m now part of one. I grew up in Finsbury Park, London. It’s where I learned about the world and about the occupation of Palestine, where I made my first memories, and where I’m running for local council. I’m doing this because I believe that all politics is local, from boycotting Israeli apartheid to fixing potholes; from stopping BAE Systems giving coloring books of F-35 fighter jets to primary schools—to shortening GP wait times. Movements need to contest every space; no singular space is a solution to combating genocide, but our combined methods and efforts can yield outcomes. Reclaiming spaces—from the patch of grass outside police stations to running for local government—is both an act of hope and desperation. You have to start somewhere because it’s never enough to just stay where you are. You have to stand and fight and keep moving toward the horizon of abolition.
Behind bars, I feel a responsibility to keep pushing for the liberation of Palestine, and I will always continue looking for ways to do so. Direct action is one way, the hunger strike1 was another, and this electoral campaign is what I’m doing now. Electoral politics is not the best option for me, nor my favorite. I’m not leaving direct action behind; I’m recruiting for it.
My friend Qesser of the Filton 24 once told me about a Hadith that says something like: When you can’t use your hands, use your voice; when you can’t use your voice, use your heart. Here at HMP Bronzefield, the state has taken away my freedom. I am physically restricted by incarceration, but my voice has been amplified by the network around me. My actions now, including this council campaign, are structured by the context I’m in—just like everyone else. Everyone should do what they can.
There are a thousand points at which we can intervene in the arms trade’s supply chain: by protesting shipping containers leaving docks full of weapons, excavators digging up indigenous land, and mining companies breaching human rights. A simple way you can act today is to make sure your money isn’t going to a genocidal regime. Those who can should make art and tell stories. Each and every one of us has a role to play in the movement for global liberation—and we need everyone.
As we said during our hunger strike: It is you, not the government, that we trust with our lives.
It is you, at the end of the day, whom we call upon to shut Elbit down.2
Images supplied by friends of Amu Gib
The idea for the campaign to run for local council came from people who saw the potential for someone in prison to participate in the dialogue of electoral politics. Current Islington Councillor Ilkay Cinko-Oner, who encouraged me to run with the Islington Community Independents, helped me understand what my role could be. When I talked to Councillor Gary Donnelly of Derry, he showed me a model of electoral politics that could transcend individualism. He told me that though he’s the elected one, there are 10 people around him actually joining in all the work. For me, that’s what this campaign is about: community.
I know that electoral politics is a disguise that barely covers His Majesty's arse. The point for me is not to go into these centers of power and reform them; the point is that this government is invested in sustaining the military-industrial complex at the expense of the people it is elected to represent—so it must be challenged.
I’m running not to win—but to make this government regret putting me in prison. I’m running so that this government thinks twice before it imprisons people for a year and a half before they even go to trial. The state knows what it’s doing when it represses us and uses everything it has to punish us. I’m running because I refuse to be silenced.
I’ve been thinking of the prison abolitionist metaphor of “Two Bricks,” where one brick is “thrown” to disrupt business as usual, while another brick is laid to build shelters for us all. Brick by brick, wall by wall is not just a chant—it’s a set of instructions. This metaphor didn’t come to me on my own. Qesser first mapped out this idea and fed it to me through the bars of House Block 2: divest, dismantle, and rebuild. My friend Ray and the actions of Dutch protester Olax also helped me think through this metaphor: One brick to dismantle systems of genocide and another to lay down the bricks of the world we want to see. Thanks to the wisdom and action of my friends, these are the two bricks I feel in my stomach: one for “throwing,” one for “building.”
So I want it to be known that Amu Gib, as an individual, isn’t who’s running for councillor. Two Bricks—the idea that represents our collective struggle for liberation—is what I want on the ballot come May even if I have to legally change my name to make it happen.3
I know that running for councillor while rejecting individualism is a contradiction. Again, I would not be doing this if I weren’t in prison. Here at HMP Bronzefield, individualism is forced upon me: As a “high-risk” Terrorism Act detainee, I am not allowed to share a cell, clothes, books, or flowers. But every day the isolating ordeal so desperately constructed by the carceral state is undermined by the complexities of the people they try to contain.
Recently, I was on the phone with my best friend Nida when a guard called me to translate the sentence “the nurse wants a urine sample for a pregnancy test” into Spanish for a woman whose other language is Quechua. Her city, Cochabamba, rose in protest to prevent the colonial privatization of water. New mining companies invited themselves to her land with a housewarming gift of the “choice” between death now or death soon. I asked her the word for “jail” in Quechua. “Jail,” she repeats, searching her mind for a translation before coming up empty.
We sit on the concrete floor of the fresh-air yard and close our eyes to the sun. She tells me you can buy coca leaves for £10 a kilo in the market, that they’re full of vitamins and good for indigestion. She hopes to be deported as soon as possible, despite the Bolivian economy being run down since the coup against Evo Morales. She says the prison officer on duty told her he’d met Morales when he played football in La Paz years ago.
“Life will not be simplified,” Mourid Barghouti wrote in I Saw Ramallah.
Amu with their best friend and campaign supporter, Nida.
The militarization of water, of the land, of the sky, of space, of our attention, and of our dreams is a race to the bottom line. These things are not commodities to be spent; they're our birthrights. Nowhere else is this clearer than in Palestine, where the Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza is a result of the Israeli sabotage of Palestinians’ relationship to their land and ability to feed themselves. Palestinians starving on their own land doesn’t happen overnight: It’s an Israeli policy that goes back to the limitation of water, targeting desalination plants, criminalizing foraging and the harvesting of rainwater, and more. Palestinians growing vegetables in the strips of land between tents is emblematic of a rootedness to the land that we might struggle to understand here in the UK, where our disconnection from land, the enclosure of the commons, and then industrialization happened so long ago. When a Palestinian woman is displaced for the 10th time and moves carrying an olive tree, she is not carrying that tree for herself alone. She is carrying it for her known and still-to-be-known community. This is what makes her indestructible.
Despite these nine months in a maximum security prison, I have never once felt alone. I know that this is a gift, and a victory—a victory that makes the prison population as much my community as an area where I’ve spent my whole life, like Finsbury Park. In a system that wants to isolate me and then grind me down, I choose the collective. I choose not to be Amu Gib, but to be 20 people, 30 people, to be all the people with whom I’ve ever had a conversation. I choose to be—as we all are—a root in the grass, a handful of sand on the shore. And I choose to fight the tide of complicity with genocide. I choose not to be washed out to a sea of lies and blood promoted by the British state and arms companies. I choose to dismantle and to build.
My commitment to the movement for a free Palestine hasn't changed. What’s changed is that I find myself in prison with nothing but time in my now uncalloused hands. I don't have the choice to be in a government building, nor do I have the choice to leave one.
You don’t need to vote for me. Many of you can’t vote at all, let alone for local council in Finsbury Park. You just need to do something. Think of Two Bricks and fight for your life. Fight for a free Palestine. We must withhold our labor, our rent, and our consent to be molded into the next generation of cannon fodder. We must fight until we have more than moldy walls and tents for shelter, more than poisoned food to eat, until we feel sunlight on our upturned faces, until we remember how to sing back to the birds. And if a detective in counterterrorism asks you, “What’s the alternative?” You can reply: “This.”
I’m doing this today because it’s one of the few things I can do in prison. I’m not asking you to join me here. Stay outside! Act in ways that are available to you. I want to be part of the government in the way a sledgehammer wants to be part of the prison wall: briefly, and with maximum impact. My feet are rooted in the same ground that has always supported my fruiting body, and I promise to swing from my hips. I promise that when this arc connects, sparks and brick dust will fly, concrete will become sand, and the trickle of resources will expand to a flood. I’m highly aware that running for councillor is not the only way to make change. It just happens to be what’s available to me now. The movement for liberation is wider than this and has been going on for longer than now. Our movement will flow toward our wide horizon. No matter where we are, what we can do, we must all find our own crews, each build our own ships, join the fleet, and plot a course—with Palestine as our compass and the same changing winds in our sails. Free Palestine!
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1 In November 2025, Amu and seven other prisoners allegedly associated with the group Palestine Action undertook one of the longest hunger strikes in British history. At the time of their hunger strike, all eight hunger strikers were imprisoned for allegedly targeting the Bristol facilities of the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems or the British military airbase, RAF Brize Norton. The hunger strikers had five key demands: immediate bail, the right to a fair trial, ending censorship of their communications, de-proscribing Palestine Action, and the shutting down of Elbit Systems. Amu was hospitalized after 50 days of refusing food and lost 10 kilograms over the course of their hunger strike. Amu wrote about their hunger strike here.
2 “Shut Elbit Down” is a campaign targeting Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms company with several UK factories. The campaign was primarily driven by Palestine Action, a group founded in 2020 and proscribed by the British government in July 2025. Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest private defense contractor and plays a critical role in the current genocide in Gaza.
3 Amu wanted to legally change their name to “Two Bricks” prior to the election—due to their incarceration, they were unable to file the paperwork in time.
