To deliver real and lasting solidarity with Palestinians, we must transform our own societies from top to bottom.
Sai Englert is a lecturer in political economy of the Middle East at Leiden University. He is the author of Settler Colonialism: an Introduction. His research focusses on the consequences of neoliberalism on the labour movement in Israel. He also works on settler colonialism, the transformation of work, and anti-Semitism. He is a member of the editorial board of both the Historical Materialism journal and Notes from Below.
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Israel’s genocide in Gaza – supported directly by the ruling classes in the West, and indirectly by their counterparts in the Arab world – has shone a spotlight on many pre-existing political realities: the crumbling global liberal order, the crisis of US hegemony, the extent of Israeli integration into the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-centred Middle East, and the brittleness of civil liberties around the globe.
It has also clarified much for previously less-informed people around the world: the genocidal character of Zionism, the cravenness of our own rulers, and the hypocrisy of international law – to name but a few.
This unveiling is both terrifying and clarifying.
It lays bare the horrors upon which the global order is built – the extraordinary violence it needs to sustain itself, meted out to crush resistance, keep goods and natural resources flowing, and safeguard the accumulation of capital.
Palestine is crucial to our rulers because it lies at the crossroads of three continents and the trade routes that connect them. It sits to the east of the Suez Canal – the world’s most important maritime trade thoroughfare – and at the gates of a region rich in oil and gas.
To control it, western ruling classes know no bounds. Israel is the expression of that imperative to keep power stable and business going at all costs – even if it means destroying an entire people through war, expulsion and starvation. No price is too high.
In doing so, the genocide has clarified – in the unforgiving light of the unspeakable violence that continues to be rained down on Palestinians by Israel – the tasks at hand for all those who want a different world, whether the current ceasefire holds or not, the challenges we will face in taking them on, and the allies (and enemies) we can count on in the process. This demands honesty in assessing the current balance of forces – and the reality is hard to bear.
Levers of power
Despite pulling on every lever of power available to us; despite the marches, rallies, direct action, flotillas, occupations, disruptions and sit-ins; despite the policy papers, international court findings, resolutions and reports; despite the motions, public letters and patient explanations, our movements did not manage – for two whole years – to break the unconditional support of our governments for Israel.
At most, they have forced them to make largely symbolic concessions to the growing pressures they are facing from below.
Nothing captured this more starkly than the cravenness of our rulers in “recognising” Palestine, while doing nothing to stop Palestinians from being slaughtered and starved on live-streamed feeds. For two long years, the bombs, bullets, drones, diplomatic cover, strategic support, trade agreements and profits are still flowing to and from the genocidal state. They show no sign of abating.
The genocide, then, has cast a spotlight on our collective weakness and inability to take on our rulers when it really matters.
The task, without doubt, is gargantuan. This is not a limited confrontation over a specific policy or reform. We are demanding that our ruling classes break off one of the central prongs of western imperialism in a key region of the global economy.
The very people profiting from it are, unsurprisingly, unwilling to concede. Only extreme pressure will make this demand achievable. What would such pressure look like?
Early on in the genocide, Palestinian trade unions gave us a clear roadmap. They called on workers around the world – and especially in the West – to use their collective power to halt the flow of weapons to Israel, and to interrupt the supply lines of the killing machine.
They demanded that workers in relevant industries refuse to build weapons destined for Israel; refuse to transport weapons to Israel; pass motions in their trade unions to this effect; take action against companies involved in implementing Israel’s illegal siege, especially those with contracts with their institutions; and pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel.
These demands for practical solidarity were clear, precise and urgent – yet the response was limited.
Despite some early successes – for example, workers refused to handle Israeli cargoin Belgium, while in several ports around the world, boats were temporarily blocked from shipping western arms to Israel – the response from the labour movement in general was lacking. Motions of solidarity were sent, public letters signed, demonstrations attended. But the direly needed collective action that could shut down production, halt shipments, and force governments and companies to comply, remained elusive.
Structural weaknesses
In fact, the call for action from Palestinian unions highlighted the structural weaknesses of labour movements everywhere, after four decades of neoliberal restructuring, disorganisation and defeat – as well as the too-frequent political cowardice of trade union officials, to say nothing of social democratic political parties.
The “common sense” argument is that workers should not fight for political demands, and instead limit their struggles to issues such as pay and working conditions. Such claims are made either on supposed tactical grounds, or worse, on the assumption that workers just don’t care about what happens to others in the world.
According to this argument, only their immediate self-interest is important – as if the people joining the mass demonstrations that have rocked every major world capital since October 2023 were not also workers.
In the most appalling cases, trade union leaders are directly implicated in supporting Israeli settler-colonialism, and workers have had to fight them before even being able to think about taking on their employers or the state.
To say that the Palestinian call for action highlighted our collective weaknesses, is not to say that it was ignored. On the contrary: around the world, minorities of pro-Palestinian workers set out to answer the call as best they could, often led by Palestinian activists from groups such as Workers in Palestine or No Harbour for Genocide, among others.
The shape that these initiatives have taken is instructive.
In western Europe, the most visible responses came from the least-decimated part of the labour movement: those in the public sector. Teachers, university staff, public servants and health workers set up Palestine solidarity networks, and called on their employers to cut ties with the Israeli state, its institutions, and companies profiting from the oppression, dispossession and murder of Palestinians.
Yet while health workers protested in uniform and called attention to the attacks on their colleagues in Palestine, they did not take industrial action to demand an end to the use of Israeli products or collaboration with Israeli institutions. Similarly, university staff signed open letters, held teach-ins and highlighted the many institutional links making their workplaces complicit in occupation and genocide, but few went on strike to end such relations, with a brief notable exception in the Netherlands.
Turning up the temperature
The point here is not to undermine activism that takes workers out of their workplaces and encourages them to participate in direct action or blockades, nor to question the great sacrifices made by these activists. It is simply to point out that they did not find ways to translate their demands into workplace organisation.
While they have played a crucial role in increasing pressure at the political level, along with heightening scrutiny of their own employers, most have remained unable to take on their employers directly through collective action as workers. This highlights key challenges that our movement needs to address.
Some are working hard to do exactly that, even in the most unexpected of places – like the workers in UK arms factories pushing for an end to their employers’ complicity, alongside wider demands to retool these factories towards socially useful activities.
In recent months, the temperature has been turned up in a number of important ways. Most strikingly, port workers are using their key strategic position in the logistics networks of empire, along with their often more powerful – even if diminished – industrial organising power, to disrupt arms shipments to Israel.
They are doing so in a much larger and more militant manner than in the early days of the genocide. In Morocco, France, Italy and Greece, workers have refused to load and unload Israel-bound vessels.
The Casablanca dockworkers stand out here. They refused to handle cargo suspected of containing components for F-35 fighter jets destined for Israel. They did so despite the Moroccan regime’s craven normalisation and military collaboration with Israel – and despite severe political repression in the kingdom.
In a pattern that would be replicated elsewhere, mass street mobilisations in both Casablanca and Tangier, alongside strike action by the dockworkers, successfully shut down ports and stopped ships. Given the current countrywide uprising in Morocco, it is difficult not to see this episode as prefiguring it.
Lasting solidarity
More recently, Italy offered signs of a new shift in solidarity work with Palestine. Not only did dockworkers in Genoa, again alongside mass mobilisations outside the port, refuse to handle Israel-bound ships, but the rank-and-file unions called – and successfully pulled off – two general strikes across the country.
So effective was their action that even the traditional Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) unions, so wedded to a bread-and-butter approach, were pushed to participate when they understood that their members would join the general strikes either way.
These developments are crucial. They point to a radicalisation of the Palestine solidarity movement, but also to the emergence of the kind of tactics we will need to win. Our governments have demonstrated that they couldn’t care less about the fate of Palestinians, or about civil liberties at home.
The only language they understand is that of power and profit. Workers have the collective ability to shut down entire economies, and to force our governments into choosing between their geopolitical alliances and stability at home. Social movements can support that work – and must urgently do so.
It is a cliche to say that solidarity is not charity, but the recognition that one’s liberation is tied up with that of others. But it is only a cliche because too often, it is repeated like a mantra without much further reflection on either its meaning or how to make it a reality.
The demands for concrete solidarity made by Palestinians, such as through the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, are one way to make the slogan a reality. To deliver real and lasting solidarity, we must transform our own societies. We must rebuild our unions and networks of struggle.
We need to build institutions of resistance, and improve our ability to coordinate across different movements. We need to fight for the democratisation of our workplaces, and insist on our right to determine – collectively – how our labour, its output, and the profits it generates, are used by our bosses and governments. We must oust complicit managers and politicians. We must transform our own societies, from top to bottom.
The demand is massive and urgent, first and foremost for the Palestinian people, who continue to bear the brunt of the Israeli killing machine – including under the current ceasefire.
But it is urgent for the rest of us, too, because the challenges we face – rising authoritarianism and fascism, collapsing economies, climate chaos, shrinking civil liberties – require more than demonstrations and opinion pieces.
They require social mobilisation, strikes and mass struggles over the long term. Palestinian liberation and our own liberation are intertwined. They always have been. And it has never been so urgent that we learn this lesson – and act upon it.
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