The Palestinian hunger striker is an ever-present media sensation, one which garners special attention in the press when the days turn into weeks and even months. Images of the strikers often adorn billboards, grace the cover of local newspapers, and appear at university rallies. In the Palestinian national consciousness, the hunger striker has long been both a shaper and vessel of national identity. With a particular consideration for the messages these actions carry, this paper will examine the emergence of a Palestinian national narrative amongst these men carrying out their hunger strikes within Israeli prisons. Building on my recent work, which traces the emergence of democratic structures and a kind of civil society within the jails between 1967 and 1985, I will specifically focus on the ways in which the hunger strikers from the 1981 Northern Irish Hunger Strike have unintentionally helped shape the narrative of the Palestinians. In doing so, I will look at how the martyring and death of Bobby Sands became a trope in the Palestinian prisoner story and thus within the national narrative. Beginning with the letters smuggled out of Israeli jails and sent to Ireland, and paying careful attention to media coverage and political posters featuring Bobby Sands, I will ask how the Palestinians appropriated the Irish narrative and used it to augment their existing tradition of hunger striking. I will also ask how and to what end later Palestinian strikers, such as Khadar Adnan, mimicked this early ‘80s event and reinterpreted it to accomplish contemporary goals. My research draws on the written archives of the Abu Jihad Library on the al Quds University campus, newspapers from the past thirty years, and on extensive oral sources gathered from the West Bank.