Chicago Jewish Activists Embark on Indefinite Hunger Strike Over Gaza

“When I first heard it, my initial thought was … if there is some way I can use my body,” Bohrer said, ​“I am ready and willing to do it, and I think about it as a personal, moral and religious obligation to do so.”

Bohrer is joining five other members of Jewish Voice for Peace, Chicago — Becca Lubow, Avey Rips, Seph Mozes, Audrey Gladson and Benjamin Teller — in a hunger strike to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, unconditional military aid for Israel and the blockade of food and medical aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians now living amongst the rubble.

Bohrer, who’s also a scholar of social movements at Notre Dame, says she felt the moral and strategic call to use whatever resources or privileges she had to raise the stakes of the Palestinian freedom struggle in the United States as ​“our Palestinian comrades watch their friends and their family and their community members suffer a genocide in real time — starvation of truly epic proportions that comes [after] 19 months of bombing, 20 years of blockade and 78 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing.”

The strike kicked off with an opening rally on Monday, June 16, where a series of political leaders and allies spoke, including Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), one of 18 members of Congress who last week introduced the ​“Block the Bombs” bill in the House to condition aid to Israel.

Organizers have 22 events scheduled over the following 16 days, including Shabbat services, Palestine teach-ins led by a wide range of supportive organizations, vigils and a screening of the popular documentary ​“Israelism.”

Since the beginning of March, Israel has blocked food, fuel and medical aid from entering the Gaza Strip, which has caused what human rights organizations have called a situation of forced starvation. This comes at the end of an unprecedented year and a half of violence in the region, which experts have called a genocide, that has galvanized the Palestine solidarity movement around the world to push for an end to unquestioned U.S. support for Israel’s violence. While these movements have exploded in size, Israel has continued its barrage and is now continuing the attack by preventing basic resources from making it to a population in desperate need of support.

“[These were] images of what hunger looks like. And to see children dying of starvation, the images were seared into my brain,” Teller tells In These Times. ​“When his comrades from JVP Chicago returned from their national gathering with an idea on how to escalate their campaign to end the violence, he was compelled to join them.

“As we confront what it means to starve our own bodies and what happens to the body without adequate nutrition for days and weeks and, in the case of people in Gaza, for months on end — it is not a good way to go,” says Teller. ​“It shouldn’t be happening to anyone.” 

Palestinian partner organizations that JVP had been working with, explains Bohrer, approached JVP activists specifically to ramp up the pressure, with the idea that a hunger strike might draw attention to the starvation that their loved ones are facing in Gaza.

The hunger strike is an escalation tactic, meant to draw waning attention back to the situation in Gaza and utilize the often-privileged position American Jews have in discourse on this issue. Hunger strikes are a form of protest where demonstrators, often lacking other viable tactics, turn their attention to their own body and refuse to eat, often forcing institutions, and the public, to bear witness as their bodies waste away. Because of this, they are often a rare and late-term option for campaigns where other pressure points simply failed to work.

As the death count in Gaza continues to climb, the American Palestine solidarity movement is at a crossroads — forced to acknowledge that while public opinion has shifted, Israeli violence has not. These activists are just a few of the thousands reassessing what tactics are available, or useful, as we enter ever-worsening conditions in one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. By engaging in this very public, and risky, protest tactic, the hunger strikers are picking up on a long tradition of calculated starvation as a method of forcing a public confrontation with crises.

Hunger strikes can take a massive toll on the body, which is in part what makes them so influential. In 2012, Palestinian activist Khader Adnan was arrested and held in administrative detention. He went on a 66-day hunger strike to protest his imprisonment without trial, triggering international attention, a wave of solidarity protests, mass Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons and increased calls for prison reform. Adnan ended that strike upon reaching a deal with Israeli authorities for his release, but, after a string of arrests, refused food for 87 days following his final detainment in 2023. He died in his cell. 

Many Palestinian revolutionaries were also influenced by the well-publicized, and sometimes lethal, hunger strikes held by Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) members during their 30-year conflict with Britain and Ulster loyalist paramilitaries, known as the Troubles. Irish Republicans had long used the tactic in their struggle against the British authority, often because they were fighting from within Ulster-controlled territory, where protests were likely to lead to arrest. By 1980, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to view IRA prisoners as prisoners of war, which would have ensured certain rights. Instead she publicly declared them criminals. This led to a series of hunger strikes, most famously including ​“volunteer” Bobby Sands, who ran and won a seat in the British Parliament amidst his 66-day fast behind bars in 1981. But Sands — and nine others, including Irish National Liberation Army prisoners — ultimately died during their protest, and while they won many of the provisions they demanded for IRA prisoners, it came at a grave cost.

But as Nayan Shah, who studies the history of hunger strikes, explains, hunger strikes are not confined to inside prison cells; there are also solidarity strikes, when supporters on the outside take action in solidarity with incarcerated people to raise the stakes. These solidarity strikes, done as part of a larger community struggle against inhumane systems, also have a particularly successful history.

“In the case of a prisoner, you can only hear that prisoner’s voice through intermediaries. In the case of someone who is in public and is hungry, there’s lots of ways you could hear their voice, what they’re feeling and experiencing, [and] why they’re doing it,” says Shah. Whether it’s in partnership with incarcerated hunger strikers or people forced into like situations, it creates a pathway to public recognition of a struggle by creating a volatile stunt that forces the public to confront the causes of such an extreme response. 

And part of that public confrontation is the hope that a public action of this type can inspire others to take action.

“Something that we heard [from other hunger strikers]… if you start, people will come, which I think is really powerful,” says Rips, a 32-year-old Chicago activist whose family emigrated to the United States alongside the wave of Soviet Jews. ​“We’re optimistic that once this strike goes public we will be getting a lot more support.”

Marc Kaplan says he is mobilizing his organization, Northside Action for Justice, to support the launch of the JVP hunger strike, which he says will need outside support. Kaplan was part of a 2015 hunger strike to save Dyett High School in Chicago from former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s massive school closings.

“It’s hard to keep your focus and keep your consciousness and spirit when you’re hungry,” says Kaplan, who lost 20 pounds during the strike. But the action inspired attention and community support and led the campaign to victory.

And the six hunger strikers in Chicago aren’t alone. As the college encampments popped up in 2024, many activists at colleges like the University of Oregon, Stanford and multiple colleges in the California State University system went on hunger strikes. A number of New York City veterans are now in the middle of a 40-day Fast for Gaza, and Friends of Sabeel, an organization pushing for justice and equity in historic Palestine, are also engaged in a fast where strikers are forced to survive on less than 250 calories a day — same limit 25 activists with the Maine Coalition for Palestine set when they announced their strike last month. The Chicago solidarity strikers have been in contact with some of these other strikers, as well as Palestinian partners, to put their tactics into a larger framework of escalating pressure on the state to act.

“Both the bombing campaign and the starvation campaign are coordinated and maintained by the largest transfer of weapons the United States has ever done,” says solidarity striker Becca Lubow. ​“So the immediate call is for the money, the guns, the tanks, the bombs being sent to Israel [to stop]. Israel can no longer have a blank check [from the United States] to use against the Palestinians.”

Lubow works for an established Jewish organization and hopes others will hear the call and join the fight. 

As scholar of the Jewish left Benjamin Balthaser told me, solidarity has been one of the ways radical Jews understood their Jewishness, pointing to Jewish communists organizing with migrant laborers in the Imperial Valley or joining the Civil Rights Movement even when it could cause them material harm. ​“The hunger strike is a way to alert Americans to the desperateness of the situation.”

Shah also points to this history of Jewish activism, including Polish Jewish students using the tactic to win educational opportunities and a 1946 incident where 1,000 Jewish refugees were stuck on a ship bound for Palestine in Italy and needed to put pressure on Britain to let them in. In that case, it was communicating with world Jewry through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that sparked solidarity fasts in New York and Tel Aviv and won the demand handily.

Religion has been key for these fights, particularly given the moral weight of hunger strikes. In apartheid South Africa, 1989 saw a massive prison hunger strike of more than 600 political prisoners matched by solidarity fasts organized by faith leaders and activists. This raised the profile of the anti-apartheid struggle at the exact moment the media blockade was lifting. 

One of the six hunger strikers in Chicago is not Jewish, but as Gladson, who grew up Catholic, pointed out, Christian Zionism is a significant part of the massive political support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. And since the U.S. government is using tax dollars to keep Israel’s military stocked with weapons and resources, it is not only American Jews who have a stake.

The hunger strike’s potential success is that it works alongside other escalating tactics. The fight didn’t start with the hunger strike. In recent weeks there was highly publicized flotilla that received international attention as they tried to deliver aid, as well as a march to the Rafah border in Egypt. A hunger strike is a more extreme tactic, but that shift has been determined by the failure of established strategies to halt the violence for good.

This tactic is nothing new for Chicago. In 1994, 10 parents launched a six-day hunger strike to push the Board of Education and Mayor Richard Daley Jr. to abandon the plan to close a school in the Back of the Yards, which itself had a formative role in community organizing as the neighborhood where famed organizer Saul Alinsky once built anti-poverty campaigns. After marches, boycotts and teach-ins failed to stop the school closure, parents camped out in tents adjacent to the school board and refused to eat. Eventually six political leaders, including Congressman Jesús ​“Chuy” García (D-Ill.), initiated negotiations between the parents and the school board that resulted in a series of votes that ultimately ratified the parents’ proposal to build a new school for the neighborhood.

But as has been seen historically, bold actions, especially when they expose the gap between a society’s actions and its ideals, can spark moral reflection and even social change. “[These hunger strikes are] happening in states that claim to be democracies,” pointed out Shaw, who noted that most well-known hunger strikes happen inside modern countries that say they are governed by the rule of law. ​“So these are fundamentally crises of democracy.” In other words, hunger strikes, an extreme form of protest, point to a broader failure of political systems to uphold their stated values. 

The list of organizations formally backing the JVP demonstration continues to grow, with groups committing to participate however they can, further amplifying the voices standing in solidarity with Gaza.

But the question remains: Is it enough to push the U.S. government to do what other tactics have failed to achieve?