The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has a history of labor action pursuing demands beyond the shop floor. ILWU Local 19 member Al Webster was one of thousands of ILWU members who participated in a May Day strike to protest the Iraq War in 2007. Photo from WikiGolightly at English Wikipedia licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Over the last few months, Israel’s position in its regional war advancing the genocide of Palestinians has become more secure.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has not fared well in actual fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but was able to successfully employ a version of its strategy in Gaza: pummel the civilian population and their infrastructure and assassinate the top leadership of the resistance. Now there is a ceasefire with Lebanon – but one that actually allows Israel to continue bombing the country.
The swift dissolution of the undemocratic and repressive Assad government in Syria, which did logistically connect the Axis of Resistance, represents a successful blow to that coalition. Now Israeli forces have expanded their zone of occupation beyond the long-occupied Golan Heights.
Before apartheid fell, the South African government attacked and intervened in every nearby country: Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Zambia. Israel’s current multi-front war – against Palestinian fighters in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah and Lebanese civilians, the former Syrian government, the Iranian Islamic Republic, and Ansarallah’s missile blockade of the Red Sea while fending off drone attacks from Yemen – is a similar phenomenon.
But in the near-term, Israel is currently winning the military dimension of the conflict against its opponents. This matters most of all for the sake of ending the genocide of Palestinians.
With the power of the regional resistance weakened, people organizing effectively to stop the genocide elsewhere has become even more crucial. In particular, Americans can have an outsized effect on stopping Israel because of the United States’s role.
A year of massive protests and a decisive majority of the population condemning Israel’s genocide has not forced our political class’s support for Israel to waver. The problem is not awareness of the issue, or the level of political consciousness, or basic human empathy. Instead, activists and concerned members of the public do not know how we can end the genocide. It is not obvious what to do to help the Palestinian people. Our government seems so powerful and we have tried many things to change its policies.
But there is a credible path to disrupting Israel’s ability to conduct its genocidal war against the Palestinians and neighboring countries.
Recently, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Progressive International (PI) published a report outlining the role of U.S.-flagged Maersk ships in transporting military cargo from the U.S. to Israel, as part of the “Mask off Maersk” campaign. This included tactical vehicles (FMTVs) produced by the Oshkosh Corporation, which have been observed transporting detained Palestinians to Israel from Gaza and the West Bank, along with hulls to repair armored troop carriers sustaining the ground invasion of Gaza.
These Maersk ships were found to be carrying Israeli military cargo from the U.S. to Spain, after which this cargo was transshipped (transferred from one ship to another to its final destination) on to Spain, despite the Spanish government having a clear position as of May 2024 that their ports could not be used for the transport of Israeli military cargo. Following this report and subsequent confirmation by Maersk of Israeli military cargo on these ships, the Spanish government has since turned away four U.S.-flagged ships carrying military cargo from the US to Israel.
These ships were able to unload cargo in Morocco instead of Spain, but were met with massive protests, including ten workers at the Tangier Med Port who refused to unload military cargo destined for Israel. As a result of these protests and the critical nature of this port in the logistics chain, one ship, the Maersk Denver, was unable to unload all of its Israeli military cargo, delaying this shipment from the U.S. to Israel by almost two months. This delay in Israeli military cargo, through concerted action in the form of anti-war research in the US by PYM and PI, political action in Spain spearheaded by the Communist Party of Spain, and worker action in Morocco, represents the most significant disruption in the transport of military cargo from the U.S. to Israel since Biden delayed shipments of 2000 lb MK-84 bombs to Israel in May.
Diplomatic cover is not the most useful resource that the United States supplies to Israel, and global public opinion has shifted to be overwhelmingly on our side. What the U.S. provides, and what Israel absolutely requires, is military supplies and equipment. Without U.S.-made and -shipped weapons and ammunition and vehicles and parts, it could not fight its war. A recent Ynet investigation concluded that “after more than a year of war, the IDF’s stockpile is depleted” and that the IDF is now entirely dependent on procurement of military materiel, primarily from the U.S. This investigation also notes that, historically, the IDF has engaged in brief, weeks-long wars, and has not been preparing for the length of war in which it currently finds itself.
The vital arms connection between the U.S. and Israel illustrates a crucial lever that anti-war activists must target to stop the genocide. The Mask off Maersk campaign’s successes have demonstrated that military logistics is a chokepoint that must be taken advantage of through concerted international and domestic political action.
Our strategy for ending the genocide must be moving a political program through port cities around the country by cohering a section of the labor movement. Relevant unions can pass resolutions and coordinate and commit themselves to pressuring city and state legislatures, where possible in concert with supportive politicians, to end the shipment of arms to Israel through their ports.
Besides their conscience, port workers have a self-interest in an arms embargo: it is dangerous to handle arms, which are frequently not disclosed or handled appropriately by companies who defy regulations. By targeting Maersk, the movement for an arms embargo established a common enemy with sections of the organized working class. Maersk has been at the forefront of implementing automation and commits numerous health and environmental violations. The marine logistics companies that transport weapons and supplies to Israel make billions of dollars every year while violating the rights of workers and only paying pennies to use public port space.
There are two sets of workers whose unions can be the vehicles for achieving an arms embargo. First is all the workers who make ports function: longshoreman, tugboat operators, and truck drivers (where they are unionized) as well as construction and maintenance workers. These are the workers with a self-interest in taking on the rule-breaking companies complicit in genocide. Second is the local unions affiliated with the seven international unions that have taken strong stances in support of a ceasefire and an end to arms for Israel: the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), National Nurses United (NNU), the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), the National Education Association (NEA), the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the United Electric Workers (UE). Not all of these unions’ locals have individually passed resolutions in support of Palestinian solidarity, but that can be the first step in an organizing campaign for these relatively progressive unions to anchor a labor-based political coalition.
In the last year, many activists have flyered at the gates of port facilities, but this has not been an especially fruitful way to move relevant unions to take action. Small groups of activists have also tried blocking boats from docking, but this tactic can often alienate workers. In the U.S., it is unlikely to result in lengthy delays, as ships can simply move up or down the coast to pick up their cargo.
Instead, we should look to the successful organizing that led to those major unions issuing a joint statement for an arms embargo: this effort identified leaders in unions, whether they are elected officers or members who are trusted by their coworkers, and organized them around a particular goal. In some unions, elected leaders were already on board, while in other unions, this required organizing at the level of rank-and-file members. The campaign to pressure ports should seek to build the broadest possible coalition, rather than remaining limited to self-selecting activists or dividing along pre-existing internal rifts within unions.
Without a relevant section of the local labor movement supporting legislation, campaigns to pass bills and legislation will have much less likelihood of being impactful. But with their support – when workers themselves say no to genocide – we can win an arms embargo.
In cities that are not close to a port, targeting inland logistics hubs – which are also crucial for the surface movement of weapons and frequently operated by the same companies – could also serve as excellent targets for this approach.
Socialists believe that the working class has the capacity to run society. The working class’s power comes from its numbers and its role in the economy. Now we must organize and use that power to end the genocide of Palestinians.
The First International cohered around struggles related to the American Civil War, as British textile workers took action to prevent their government from intervening on the side of the the pro-slavery Confederacy, despite their own mass unemployment due to a Northern blockade of Confederate cotton exports. In the following decades, the socialist movement established itself as a political force everywhere.
Workers coordinating political action across borders is the definition of internationalism: from solidarity organizers in the U.S. to Communist ministers in Spain to protestors and port workers in Morocco. The struggle for Palestinian liberation has already united world opinion. It can also unite progressive workers and their organizations.
To get involved with the proposed campaign, email [email protected].