Mass Strike for Gaza Brings Italy to a Halt

For International Strike Action
to Stop U.S./Israel Gaza Genocide!

Transport Workers: Block Arms and All Transport to and From Israel!

Build a Leninist-Trotskyist Communist Party!

As devastating famine spreads through Gaza as a result of Israel’s policy of deliberate mass starvation of the Palestinian population,¹ on September 17 the army launched its long-threatened, full-scale assault on Gaza City. Photos and wrenching videos show the exodus of 350,000 residents carrying their essential possessions on their trek to the latest declared “security zone,” which the Israeli military has repeatedly bombed in the past. Yet more than half a million people remain behind, refusing or unable to leave. The unrelenting Zionist slaughter, which by now has claimed over 100,000 lives,² is escalating daily. Horrified by the cataclysm they are seeing in real time, throughout the world millions of people are desperately crying out to stop the destruction of the Palestinian people.

Now this outcry has combined with a dramatic mobilization of working-class power. On September 22 Italy was convulsed by a mass strike against genocide in Gaza called by militant rank-and-file unions under the watchword, “Blocchiamo tutto!” (Block everything). There were protests in 80 cities, with marches of 20,000 in Genova, 50,000 in Bologna, over 60,000 in Milan where police battled demonstrators, and an outpouring of at least 300,000 in Rome (Il Manifesto, 23 September). Unions struck the Trenitalia, Italo and Trenord railroad lines. Rail stations were occupied, schools shut down, the A1 highway from Rome to Milan was cut by protesters in three different places and the ports of Genova, Livorno, Trieste, Venice, Ancona and Palermo were blocked. Three days earlier, a more limited “general strike” for Gaza was called by the main union federation, the CGIL.

The Gaza slaughter is not just an Israeli crime, it is a joint Zionist/imperialist genocide. It would not be possible without the direct participation of the U.S., which supplies all the huge bombs and all the warplanes that drop them, as well as of the other NATO imperialists, who send weapons, parts and munitions for this war of extermination against the Palestinian Arab population.³ From the outset, the League for the Fourth International has called for “workers action against the shipment of arms to Israel and Ukraine.”⁴ Leading up to May Day 2024, in response to an appeal by the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions – Gaza, the LFI campaigned for this. In the U.S., Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) voted unanimously to “refuse to handle military cargo to Israel.”⁵

The urgency of such action was underlined in a recent (September 1), appeal by the PGFTU to labor and human rights groups, in the U.S. and around the world:

“We call on you to mobilize all your energy, resources, efforts, and initiatives to ban Israeli weapons of mass murder, and to use all possible means to halt the ongoing holocaust to which our Palestinian people are subjected daily, and to prevent the US administration from supplying this occupation with weapons.”

Meanwhile, a Global Sumud⁶ Flotilla with relief supplies for Gaza has gained a lot of attention from media, human rights, labor and left groups worldwide. The flotilla of some 50 ships has hundreds of activists and volunteers from some 45 countries on board. Every such attempt since 2008 has been met with brutal Zionist repression. This one has already been attacked by drones while anchored off Tunisia. On August 30, as 40,000 demonstrators gathered on the waterfront in Genova, Italy, the night before ships set sail, a leader of the Colletivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali (CALP – Autonomous Collective of Port Workers) in Genova told the crowd that if the Flotilla is attacked, “We will launch an international strike, we will block the roads, we will block the schools, we will block everything.”

The Flotilla is intended to draw international attention to the carnage in Gaza, and also to pressure Western governments to rein in the Israelis. How little the Zionist regime cares about public opinion was demonstrated in 2010, when Israeli marines stormed the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and murdered at least nine of the activists, many shot at close range, and wounded 57.⁷ As for pressure from the NATO countries, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France and Portugal have announced they will recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly now in session (joining the 147 UN member states that have already done so). But that symbolic gesture will not slow down the Israeli mass murderers for even a second as the NATO imperialists continue to arm Israel.

Many liberals and leftists, and a fair number of unions look to “their” governments to stop sending arms to Israel. Many also advocate boycotts, divestment and sanctions (“BDS”) against Israel, which is ultimately an appeal to imperialist rulers. This is a dead end, as the Zionist state is a vital ally for Western domination of the Middle East, and it serves to hide the basic fact that the imperialists are co-responsible for the Zionist genocide. One account of the September 22 strike said that protesters sought to “force the Meloni government to stop supplying weapons and ammunition to the Israeli army, to cut diplomatic and commercial relations with a state that acts barbarically against all international rules” (Contropiano, 23 September). Call on Italy’s far-right fascist-led government to enforce “international rules”?!

The “rules-based” world “order” that has held sway since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the USSR and the Soviet bloc bureaucratically deformed workers states obeys the dictates of Washington. It included Italian expeditionary forces in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as 50,000 Italian troops and 150,000 German troops in the 20-year U.S. imperialist occupation of Afghanistan. These “forever wars” killed more than 1 million in the Middle East, far surpassing the Zionist butchers’ grisly toll in Gaza. Now these “democratic” imperialists want to put together yet another “coalition of the willing” to provide “security guarantees” for the imperialist puppet government of Ukraine and its fascist-infested military. In reality, such “peacekeepers” would only serve as a tripwire to set off World War III.

The millions who fervently want to put a stop to the monstrous genocide against the Palestinian people cannot look to the imperialist warmongers with their treacherous talk of “ceasefires.” It is up to the workers and oppressed to break the logistical chains, to take down the air and sea bridges supplying the Israeli war machine. Class-conscious workers must seek to use their proletarian power to drive the Zionist occupiers out of Gaza and the West Bank. We call on unions to stop arms shipments and, at the present time, as the war on Gaza escalates sharply yet again, to cut off all transport and cargo to and from Israel. At the same time there should be mass strikes against the imperialist rulers to shut down production demanding to stop the genocidal war on Gaza.

Port Workers Action Against Arms to Israel

The Zionists are worried. The Israeli website Shomrim produced an “exposé,” also published by the Times of Israel (19 August) and (in Hebrew) N12 Magazine, titled “Dockworkers across Europe Work Together to Halt Israeli Arms Shipments.” It warned:

“These worker-led protests, along with arms embargoes from some countries and the risk of Houthi attacks disrupting Asian transport routes, are putting heavy pressure on Israel’s already strained supply chain – a complex system vital to Israel’s access to arms. Despite the country’s push toward self-reliance in manufacturing military supplies, any disruption to the delivery of even small parts can lead to prolonged delays, potentially carrying strategic consequences.”

The article added, “The Foreign Ministry responded to Shomrim with a statement: ‘The issue is known and is being addressed with the relevant countries.’” In other words, Israel’s European patrons are expected to take measures against solidarity actions. So much for EU and NATO leaders’ hypocritical “concern” over genocide.

Israeli rulers’ worries are justified. Initially, there was little response by unions worldwide to Palestinian workers’ appeals to stop war cargo to Israel, and even statements by Barcelona dockworkers and Belgian transport workers were mostly on paper, as the PGFTU complained in a May Day 2024 appeal.⁸ But as the horrific reality of the Gaza genocide has sunk in, some unions have begun to take action. In December 2024, two-thirds of the members of the Swedish dockworkers union, Svenska Hamnarbetarförbundet, voted for a six-day boycott of military shipments to Israel. But although the union’s vice-chairman, Erik Helgeson, said it would “mainly be a symbolic thing,” as Swedish military exports to Israel were very low, on the first day of the boycott he was fired for supposedly violating “national security.”⁹

Then on April 14, the Union of Port Workers in Morocco called on workers at the port of Casablanca to refuse to unload or service the Nexoe Maersk, scheduled to dock a few days later and take on a cargo (brought from Houston, Texas by the Maersk Detroit) of parts for the F-35 jets used to bomb Gaza. In Casablanca, demonstrators broke through one police line but were stopped by a second, and some workers boycotted the ship. It was delayed 40 hours. In the port of Tangier, 1,500 people protested against the docking of the ship on April 20 and were attacked by the riot police of this pro-Israel Arab monarchy.¹⁰ According to the Drop Site news outlet, 18 out of 20 crane controllers on the first shift and 27 of 30 workers on the second shift refused to service the ship, delaying it for a day and a half.

On June 4 and 5, dockworkers of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) at the port of Fos-sur-Mer near Marseille refused to load military equipment (19 pallets of ammunition belt links and French-made gun barrels they had learned were in the cargo) onto the Liberia-flagged Contship Era bound for Haifa, Israel. The ammo belt links were removed, but unsure if they could locate the crates with gun barrels in time, the dockers contacted port workers in Genova, its next destination.¹¹ Later, on July 11, it was announced that a shipment of 122 tons of military grade steel from Barcelona to Israel Military Industries was canceled due to a strike threat by the left-wing Basque LAB union.

Shortly after, on July 14, the Japanese-owned, Panama-flagged Ever Golden docked at Piraeus, the largest port in Greece, to transfer a cargo of Indian military-grade steel to the Saudi-owned Folk Dammam. Destination: the Israeli port of Haifa. Dockworkers organized in the ENEDEP union refused to touch it, declaring: “We will not unload a single gram of this cargo of death.” ENEDEP is affiliated with PAME (the All Workers Militant Front), the labor federation associated with the Greek Communist Party (KKE). Already in October 2024, the Piraeus dockers blocked a container with 21 tons of ammunition from being loaded aboard the ship Marla Bull, bound for Haifa, and in November KKE protesters blocked a convoy of trucks carrying ammunition and rockets to the Zelensky puppet regime in Ukraine.¹²

On August 7, again in Genova, longshoremen boarded the Saudi ship Bahri Yanbu coming from the U.S. port of Baltimore to inspect it. They found it loaded with weapons, ammunition, and armored vehicles. The next day, the CALP blocked two port entrances to prevent loading of military equipment produced by the Italian arms firm Leonardo, including a canon from the OTO works in La Spezia. This time the CGIL transport workers union (FILT) also complained to the port authority about shipments of military cargo to the Middle East. This is the very same ship that the CALP, in collaboration with French dockers unions, had stopped in 2019 when it was filled with weapons for Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen.¹³

And now on September 22, up to a million protesters throughout Italy responded to the call from the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), the Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB) and other “rank-and-file” unions to strike and take the streets for Gaza. SI Cobas, one of the largest, said it would adhere to the strike. In the last two years, these unions have called three one-day “general strikes” (in February 2024, February 2025 and June 2025) in solidarity with the Palestinians, and organizers reiterated their call for international strike action if the Sumud Flotilla is stopped. To amplify this on a European scale, the USB has called a meeting of European port workers for September 26 and 27 under the slogan, “Dockers Do Not Work for War.” Hopefully this could spur workers action against the Gaza genocide worldwide.

Responding to the spreading workers actions to stop war cargo, on September 15 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the far-right coalition government including outright fascist ministers, made a speech saying that “We may find ourselves in a situation where our arms industries are blocked.” Given the country’s increasing isolation, he said, it may have to adopt an “autarkic” economy, producing everything in the Zionist fortress. In an insane fascistic rant, taking a cue from Donald Trump, he blamed “limitless migration” for imposing an “Islamist agenda” on West Europe. As Israel’s Merkava tanks were revving their engines to move into Gaza in force the next day, he said Israel would have to become a “super-Sparta,” recalling the militaristic state of ancient Greece.¹⁴

His delirious vision horrified many Israelis. The Tel Aviv stock market fell, the largest business forum declared “We are not Sparta.” “Historians also pointed out that Sparta lost its wars and was destroyed” (Irish Times, 19 September). Even right-wingers declared they didn’t want to live in a state in perpetual war with its neighbors. While liberal critics hold Netanyahu uniquely responsible for Zionist crimes and Israeli autarchy is a fantasy, he has certainly expressed the final logic of Zionism in all its forms – a reactionary “Spartan” state which would be hell for the Palestinians and, as Leon Trotsky warned in 1940, a death trap for Jewish people. But to escape from this dystopian nightmare, Hebrew-speaking workers would have to break with Zionism and fight for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state, joining in particular with the powerful Egyptian and Turkish proletariats in a socialist federation of the Middle East.

Class Independence from the Capitalist State

Revolutionary Marxists know full well that to look to bourgeois government to stop weapons shipments to Israel is a program for defeat. The United States, of course, both under Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Trump, maintains its “ironclad” support to the Zionist genocide. Trump explicitly calls for removing the entire Palestinian population from Gaza. The European imperialists, however, under popular pressure, are resorting to various face-saving declarations and schemes. The French and British governments now call for recognition of a “Palestinian state” (which does not exist). What they mean is suppressing Hamas, which continues to have support for fighting against Israel, and turning the ruins of Gaza over to the puppet Palestinian Authority¹⁵ or some reactionary Arab regime.

German imperialism (the second largest supplier to the Israeli military after the U.S.) under Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz (and Social Democrat “defense” minister Boris Pistorius) on August 8 announced a halt on military exports to Israel “that could be used in the Gaza Strip.” Yet, in addition to upholding the Zionist state’s supposed “right to self-defense,” on August 13, Germany approved the delivery of a sixth Dolphin-class submarine to Israel, a key platform of the Zionist nuclear arsenal.¹⁶ While Berlin seeks to pump up its military industry (with solid support of the bureaucrats of the metal workers union, IG Metall) for full-on war against Russia, its police not only viciously repress pro-Palestinian demonstrations, on September 1 they kettled and brutally assaulted a traditional pacifist march in Cologne.

The same shell game is pursued by other NATO regimes. After the Labour Party came into office in Britain in 2024, it claimed to prohibit “arms export licenses to Israel for use in military operations in Gaza.” Yet since then, it authorized the export of over 8,600 items which the Israeli government classified as “munitions of war.”¹⁷ And as Labour prime minister Keir Starmer talks of recognizing a Palestinian state, London police arrested almost 900 people in a 300,000-strong pro-Palestinian demo on September 7. Meanwhile, the Spanish and Irish governments posture as critics of Israel, yet the former has awarded contracts to Israeli military industry of over 1 billion euros since the start of the war on Gaza, and the latter supplies drone parts to an Israeli arms company as U.S. weapons to Israel transit via Ireland’s airports.

The Turkish regime of Tayyip Recep Erdoğan is a prime example of these maneuvers. In August, the Ankara government claimed to close Turkish ports and airspace to Israeli vessels and aircraft. But foreign-flagged ships still sail from Turkish ports to Israel. In May 2024 Turkey already claimed to have halted all direct trade with Israel, yet goods such as steel were simply rerouted through the Palestinian Authority. As the Lebanon-based news site The Cradle (28 August) noted: “This means that nearly two years into a genocide that Erdogan denounces almost daily, oil still flows from Azerbaijan to Israel via Türkiye, Israel still gets critical minerals from Türkiye, and the Incirlik air base in Türkiye is still used by the US to deliver weapons to Israel and monitor the region’s skies to defend Israel and aid its aggression.”

Revolutionary Program Key to Break the Bureaucratic Stranglehold

Even more than the “pro-peace” posturing by the various capitalist governments, the biggest obstacle to using workers power to put a stop to the Gaza genocide is the treachery of the union bureaucracies, the “labor lieutenants of capital.” In Britain, where union militants have participated in protests against the Israeli weapons and surveillance company Elbit, the union tops have done nothing and the fanatically pro-Zionist Labour government has witch-hunted and banned Palestine Action¹⁸ on the grotesque charge of “terrorism.” (Mass arrests of opponents of the ban are expected at the Labour Party conference this weekend.) On July 14, Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, which includes transport workers, finally voted to “support” members who refuse to build, handle or transport weapons for Israel. But not, of course, to organize anything itself.

In the United States, the May Day 2024 resolution by the San Francisco Bay Area Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union “to refuse to handle military cargo to Israel” and to “honor picket lines protesting the war on Gaza” reflected widespread revulsion among working people against the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Local 10’s history of respecting pro-Palestinian port pickets is such that the Israeli ZIM line no longer calls at the port. The Local took action against the South African ship Nedlloyd Kimberley in 1984, and on May Day 2008 the ILWU shut down every West Coast port against the imperialist war and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the ILWU tops sank Local 10’s powerful resolution at the union’s convention in June 2024.

The East Coast International Longshoremen’s Association is worse. Pro-Trump ILA president Harold Dagget ostentatiously exempted military cargo from the union’s three-day strike in October 2024. Moreover, as the ILA hosted a meeting in June of the International Dockworkers Council, led by Dagget’s son Dennis, in Charleston, South Carolina, along with a commemoration of the “Charleston Five” struggle against the repression of ILA members in their historic 2000 strike,¹⁹ Dagget Sr. put out a vile statement hailing Trump’s bombing of Iran. This made some IDCers in attendance uncomfortable, but their response was to issue a mealy-mouthed pacifist statement with not a word against Israel. Now the Daggets and IDC are organizing a conference in Lisbon, Portugal in November on resisting automation on the docks. Typically, rather than calling for workers action, they look to the U.S. president and the pope in Rome.

Meanwhile, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), the very pinnacle of the labor bureaucracy and a flagrantly corrupt outfit, is – unsurprisingly – missing in action. While its Africa division called in 2024 to stop arms to Israel, the ITF leaders are at war with the staff at its London headquarters, which they want to downsize by a quarter; strikes by these workers are on-going.²⁰ The failure or outright refusal by “mainstream” labor throughout the world to act against the genocide in Gaza, against the Zionist war on much of the Middle East and the U.S./NATO imperialist war drive against Russia and China means that the fight for class-struggle workers action must be part of a broader battle for revolutionary opposition to the pro-imperialist labor bureaucracy and its growing integration into the capitalist state.

In Italy, the “epicenter” of militant labor-led opposition to the barbaric slaughter by the Zionists and imperialists, the explosive mass strike of September 22 ran up against the far-right coalition government of Giorgia Meloni and her fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party. While reformists sought vainly to pressure the government, Meloni vituperated against “so-called ‘pro-pal,’ so-called ‘antifa,’ so-called ‘pacifist’” “pseudo-demonstrators” and declared her support for the police against “these hooligans.” Fascist Senate president Ignazio La Russa denounced “urban guerrillas” and transport minister Matteo Salvini of the Lega declared ominously that the government would have to “think about the right to strike” and in the future demonstration organizers would have to pay a deposit for damages.

In fact, the September 22 mass strike and mobilization was a test of the government’s draconian security law which bans just about everything protesters did: strike pickets, blocking traffic, occupying train stations, cutting off highways. It was a vivid illustration of the class nature of the state, and that “the law” reflects the balance of class forces. “‘So much for the security decree,’ noted an older militant of the rank-and-file unions. ‘If we have 300,000 we will take the beltway, and let them charge us!’” (Il Manifesto, 23 September). What this ultimately poses is the struggle for state power, for which a revolutionary leadership is indispensable.

Today, as in decades past, the different Italian unions and labor federations, rather than carrying out powerful united-front action, each do their own thing, holding partial “general strikes” on different days. The strikes and occupations were intended as tactics to pressure the fascist-led regime that resorts to police-state measures. The Nucleo Internazionalista d’Italia, section of the League for the Fourth International, has called “For a Real General Strike to Stop the ‘Security Decree’ and Arms Build-Up!” (The Internationalist No. 75, January-May 2025). And while CGIL leader Maurizio Landini declared in Catania on September 22 that Israel should be sanctioned just like Russia, we Trotskyists call to defeat the drive by the U.S. and NATO imperialists to dismember Russia, and ultimately to reconquer China and destroy its revolutionary gains, which the Stalinist bureaucracy is busily undercutting.

The fight to block weapons (or any other shipments) to the Zionist state must be an integral part of a struggle to smash the imperialist war drive. That struggle is undercut by widespread anti-Marxist misconceptions among leftists who equate Russia, an intermediate capitalist country, and China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state, with imperialism, including second-rate Italian imperialism, which sucks superprofits from the exploitation of semi-colonial and oppressed peoples and nations. Some currents which trace their lineage back Amadeo Bordiga even refused to take sides in the war between Zionist Israel and the Palestinians, or Iran. Genuine Leninists and Trotskyists, in contrast, stand on the same side of the barricades militarily as those fighting imperialism and Zionism, while giving no political support to the Stalinist, Islamist or other non-proletarian forces.

Currently, in various parts of Europe, class struggles are breaking out. In France, populists and trade-unionists are fighting, in separate mobilizations, against vicious austerity policies as the self-proclaimed “Jupiterian” president Emmanuel Macron cycles through one prime minister after another. In Germany, the fascistic Alternative für Deutschland feeds off discontent caused by the economic recession that is a direct result of NATO/EU sanctions on Russia. In Britain, outright fascists are leading mass marches against immigrants. On the other side of the Atlantic, the ultra-rightist administration of Donald Trump is entering the first stages of a police-state regime, with masked paramilitary forces marauding through cities picking up immigrants (and citizens) in its drive for mass deportations.

All of this, and the outbreak of wars around the world, is a reflection of the advanced decay of the imperialist system which, as was dramatically shown in the COVID pandemic with its horrific death toll (notably in Italy), can no longer meet the basic needs of the population. Neoliberal “globalization” has run its course, having destroyed whole swaths of industry in the advanced capitalist countries. The welfare state capitalism of the post-World War II period is moribund. The situation is rapidly spiraling in the direction of a thermonuclear World War III, which only international socialist revolution can prevent. The task that the League for the Fourth International has assumed is to cohere the nucleus of the revolutionary vanguard on the Bolshevik program of Lenin and Trotsky to wage that struggle.

As Trotsky wrote in the 1938 Transitional Program, “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” And as Rosa Luxemburg wrote amid the horrors of the first imperialist world war, the choice facing humanity is socialism or barbarism. If you want to know what barbarism looks like, just look at the genocide in Gaza today.  ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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