At the time of writing over 50 ships from around the world are converging on the Eastern Mediterranean to break the Israeli apartheid state’s starvation blockade on Gaza. The volunteer crews from 44 countries on six continents include prominent activists, performers and scholars, such as Greta Thunberg, but also many more aid workers, seafarers and health workers. Tens of thousands worldwide have signed up to support and if necessary reinforce the Sumud (Arabic for ‘resilience’) Flotilla.
Previous flotillas have been seized piratically by the Israeli state. Volunteers are routinely detained, deprived of sleep, food and water, and then expelled from Israel without setting foot in Gaza. Ten volunteers on a 2010 flotilla were shot dead by the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force. Sumud hopes to overwhelm the Israeli navy by force of numbers and open small but significant cracks in the siege and genocide.
This is even more urgent now Israel has launched a land war to depopulate Gaza City and Trump has recruited Tony Blair from amongst the ‘walking dead’ of imperialist war-crimes to advise on turning the territory into a US/Israeli land-grab.
Solidarity needs to be stepped up
It will not however be achieved without building a world-wide movement in support of the flotilla, and the wider struggle against the genocide. As Northern hemisphere universities and colleges return at the start of a new academic year, campus campaigns must not just resume but must be stepped up to a new level.
The BDS movement must also be stepped up and, through mass demonstrations, the eyes of the world focussed relentlessly on the response of Netanyahu and his gangster state to the flotilla (whilst bearing in mind that the worst he does will almost certainly pale into insignificance alongside the holocaust of bombing and starvation he has rained down on the people of Gaza day-in-day-out and night-in-night-out for 23 months).
But attention must also be drawn to the role of the reactionary rulers of Arab states in allowing and even enforcing the oppression and starvation of Gaza and, increasingly, of the West Bank. If Egypt’s military rulers opened the Rafa crossing, regarded as ‘Gaza’s lifeline’ before October 7th, it would contribute far more to lifting the siege than any aid which can possibly be carried by sea, even on hundreds of boats. In the same way the Hashemite Royal family who rule Jordan continue their hostility to the national and revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinians dating back before the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from Jordan following the slaughter of a quarter of million Palestinian refugees and activists by the Jordanian army in 1970-71.
Palestinians betrayed by Arab rulers
Fawaz Gerges, Professor of international relations at the London School of Economics summed up the situation when he asked NBC “Where are the Arabs? The Arabs are napping. The Arabs are nowhere to be seen. The Arabs, and I’m talking about the Arab rulers, have buried their heads in the sand.” The economic power and social weight of the oppressed masses of Jordan, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula can and must be mobilised for the liberation of Palestine and their own societies.
As Gerges explained: “Palestine resonates deeply in the Arab imagination, Palestine reminds Arabs of the subservience of their governments. Palestine reminds Arabs of the hegemony and domination and the continuing colonialism and imperialism of the West…I would say that Gaza, the tragedy of Gaza, the destruction of Gaza, could really serve as a time bomb that implodes the Arab political order from within.”
But the destruction of the Israeli Apartheid state is not just the responsibility of the workers of West Asia, it is even more the responsibility of workers in the imperialist powers which have established, supported and armed Israel to defend their plunder of the region. Unless workers’ organisations fight for Palestinian liberation they will be unable to fight effectively for the genuine liberation of their own members.
Dockers threaten action
Speaking at a rally in Genoa to send off the Italian contingent of the flotilla a leader of the Dock Workers branch of the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) a million strong trade union federation warned : “If we lose contact with our boats, with our comrades – even for just 20 minutes – we will shut down all of Europe.”
“Our young women and men must come back without a scratch, and all this cargo, which belongs to the people and is going to the people, must reach its destination, down to the very last box. 13,000-14,000 containers leave this region every year for Israel. Not a single nail will leave anymore,”
A USB statement elaborated “Workers can play a decisive role … we must be ready to react with all the forms of struggle at our disposal. As many of us are repeating these days, we can’t stand by and watch … If they block the flotilla, we block everything!”
This is not an idle threat. A one day strike called on Genoa docks on August 5th was only averted when the Chinese Evergreen shipping line agreed to USB’s demand that they return a ship carrying three containers of military equipment bound for Israel which workers had been ‘blacking’ to East Asia. Workers had been mobilised around the demand “we will not work for war” and USB and organised a two-day international assembly of dockworkers against the war September 26th and 27th.
Political struggle needed
Building an effective workers’ movement against the war will however mean the rank and file taking up a political fight against the right-wing bureaucracies of most unions which refuse to step beyond the limits imposed by the crisis-ridden capitalist system and the increasingly militarist and authoritarian states which uphold it. Indeed, even nominally ‘left-wing’ union leaders confronted with the stark reality of the Gaza genocide avoid effective worker mobilisation.
Thus Sharon Graham the leader of Unite the largest UK union has prioritised ‘defending’ the jobs of members in arms companies such as BAE Industries and Lockheed Martin who continue to supply the genocide war machine. In a March 2024 letter to union officials Graham wrote: ‘The “first claim” on our priorities is always the protection and advancement of our members’ interests at work […] Unite cannot and never will advocate or support any course of action which is counter to that principle’.
Significant steps were made by rank and file delegates at the Unite’s policy conference to reverse this stance and commit the union to solidarity action, but a world wide solidarity movement with Palestine can only be effective in the long run if it is rooted in a consistent and thoroughgoing opposition to all forms of oppression and exploitation and an understanding that their lasting removal requires the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism