In the early morning hours of Friday, November 3, activists received word that the Cape Orlando, a US military supply vessel, was set to unload and depart from the Port of Oakland in California on its way to deliver military equipment to Israel.
The tip came just a day after the US House of Representatives approved a proposal to send more than $14 billion in military aid to Israel (in addition to the $3.8 billion already pledged for 2023), though the bill has since stalled in the Senate.
According to organizer Lara Kiswani, she and other organizers had just a few hours to galvanize protesters to form a picket line at the port around 6 a.m. Kiswani is the executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), one of the organizations that led the demonstration. She says they were alerted about the Cape Orlando by “courageous workers.” By 8 a.m. at least a hundred people had gathered, ultimately delaying the vessel’s departure for nearly nine hours. Several protesters breached the fence to the pier and climbed the vessel’s ladder, refusing to move until the Coast Guard physically removed them.
AROC led the first #BlocktheBoat campaign, in 2014, alongside a coalition of local organizations, picketing for days and discouraging rank and file workers from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 from working ships owned by Zim Integrated Shipping Services, the largest Israeli cargo shipping company. In 2021, when a Zim vessel attempted to return to the Port of Oakland for the first time in seven years, ILWU 10 workers refused to cross the #BlocktheBoat community picket line, heeding the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions' call for US labor unions to “boycott the Israeli occupation” in part by “refusing to unload their ships.”
Since the October 7 Hamas attacks, when approximately 1,200 Israelis were killed (revised from the original estimate of 1,400) and around 240 were abducted into Gaza, the Israeli military’s ongoing siege on the Gaza strip has so far killed nearly 19,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; more than 7,700 of these deaths were children, according to the World Health Organization.
Since October 7, Israeli forces have also detained more than 2,200 Palestinians, according to Amnesty International, which — alongside other leading human rights organizations — has condemned Israel for committing “crimes of apartheid” and asserted that there is “damning evidence” of war crimes currently being committed by Israel in Gaza.
On November 22, Israel and Hamas announced an agreement to free Israeli hostages in exchange for the release of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and a temporary four-day truce that went into effect on November 24. Currently, more than 2,000 of the more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons are being held without charge or trial in a practice called administrative detention, which Israel has been condemned for using by human rights groups for decades.
On Monday, November 27, it was announced that the truce had been extended by two days, during which Hamas agreed to release 10 additional hostages per day. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said that upon the end of the truce, “We will return with full force to achieve our goals, the elimination of Hamas; ensuring that Gaza does not return to what it was; and of course the release of all our hostages,” which left little hope for a lasting reprieve from bombing in Gaza.
On December 1, the truce ended after seven days and the release of 100 of the roughly 240 Israeli hostages held by Hamas, with the Israeli government and Hamas each blaming the other for the impasse in negotiations.
That same day, the Israeli military dropped leaflets in Khan Younis, where many of Gaza’s 1.8 million internally displaced people are sheltering, telling them to “evacuate immediately.” Israeli official Benny Gantz, who is part of Israel’s emergency war cabinet, has said that the fighting will “expand to wherever it is needed throughout the Strip. There will be no cities of refuge."
Polls show that about 63% of Americans disapprove of how President Biden has handled the issue, but Biden has remained adamant that there is “no possibility” of a ceasefire. A more recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that only 32% of Americans believe the United States should continue to support Israel in its fighting, nearly a 10% decrease from the same poll a month before. The US has been Israel’s largest provider of military assistance since Israel’s founding, and has provided Israel with a total of $158 billion in military aid since 1948, according to Foreign Policy.
Reflective of the global uprising and unrest over Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the demonstration at the Port of Oakland is part of a wave of direct actions across the United States in recent weeks aiming to disrupt the operations of companies and facilities that manufacture and ship weaponry to Israel. Without a political path to a ceasefire in sight, organizers are taking the call to end the assault on Gaza into their own hands.
“Actions that engage worker solidarity are emblematic of a longer history of social change," says Kiswani, who is Palestinian. "We've always known that worker and community solidarity can truly move mountains. This is not one person or one organization, it's a movement, and really a reflection of cross-movement building. Our coalition that we built in 2014 includes other racial justice organizations, our anti-Zionist Jewish allies, and so many different sectors and movements across the Bay. We activated those same partners and communities within hours.” According to Kiswani, this time the boat was operated by non-ILWU workers, one of whom was so moved by the action that he got off the vessel.
A few days later, organizers in the state of Washington saw the news from Oakland and tracked the Cape Orlando, preparing to receive it at the Port of Tacoma, where hundreds of protesters blocked vehicles from entering the facility on the following Monday. According to Bissan Barghouti, an organizer and member of Seattle’s chapter of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, organizers dispersed the crowd after about 12 hours, upon learning that the ship had been covertly loaded by military personnel rather than the union workers initially hired to do so.
“Diversity of tactics is essential in speaking out against our tax dollars funding genocide in Palestine," Barghouti says. "Along with us being out in the streets and making other calls, direct action is an essential component in all people’s movements across the globe. We as everyday people have an enormous amount of collective power and we have the ability to disrupt business as usual. With direct action, in particular, harnessing people power can be incredibly effective in meeting your objectives.”
On October 30, organizers from Palestine Action US assembled a crowd of about 200 to protest at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters of Elbit Systems, one of the largest weapons suppliers to Israel. After the crowd clashed with police, nine arrests were made. Cambridge police said in a statement that protesters had assaulted officers, but protesters said the police had initiated the violence by surging on and pepper spraying the crowd. This was after a demonstration earlier in October, during which Palestine Action US activists blockaded the entrance to the same facility. Elbit Systems also has facilities in Texas, New Hampshire, Alabama, Virginia, and Florida.
“We support mobilizing for mass rallies, boycotts, and education around Palestine," says Calla Walsh, a 19-year-old organizer and founding member of Palestine Action US. "But if there are hundreds of people who are willing to put their bodies on the line and get arrested, we think those people should be doing that at weapons companies. We see our role as directing that energy toward the very arteries of this imperialist supply chain, which means targeting factories and companies like Elbit.”
On November 20, Palestine Action US protesters targeted another Elbit Systems location in Merrimack, New Hampshire, this time spray painting the building, breaking windows, attaching a bike lock to a front door, and accessing the roof of the building. Walsh and two others were arrested and are being charged with rioting, sabotage, criminal mischief, criminal trespass, and disorderly conduct.
The same day as the Tacoma port protest, a coalition of activists from Kansas City, Chicago, and St. Louis, following the youth-led antiwar group Dissenters, blocked entrances at a Boeing plant in St. Charles, Missouri, just a few weeks after the company expedited the shipping of 1,000 bombs to be used by the Israeli Air Force. Boeing received a $2.2 billion contract from the US Air Force in 2020 to manufacture bombs, and also manufactures military equipment at facilities in St. Louis County and St. Clair County, Illinois. On November 21, an even larger group of about 150 protesters returned to the same Boeing plant to again attempt to disrupt operations.
Protesters were prepared for the possibility of arrest, but none were made, according to Mahreen Ansari, who traveled to St. Charles for the action and is the campaign lead at a local chapter of a youth-led climate justice organization. “Direct nonviolent action is so important,” she says. “Blockading them, preventing workers from coming in for hours — that actually makes a tangible difference.”
A representative from Dissenters tells Teen Vogue that around 8:40 a.m. on Monday, November 6, they were told by a Boeing employee (who wishes to remain anonymous) that he received a message informing him that all gates were closed and encouraging him to work from home. Soon after, some organizers declared the action successful and dispersed protesters.
Maryam Khalil, a recent Stanford graduate and the former president of Stanford’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), also traveled to St. Charles for the action. “It’s amazing that we did that, but I was actually willing to stay longer than we stayed,” she says. “For me, if we’re going to ‘shut Boeing down,’ we should shut Boeing down. We could have had people in groups, rotating in and out, blockading for 24-plus hours.”
Khalil continues, “I’m Libyan, and I lived for part of my life in a war zone. Community building is great, but when are we going to actually go full-send? When are we going to get there as organizers in this country?” She points to the ongoing violence and humanitarian crises in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, adding that to neglect to connect those struggles with Palestine is akin to a failure on the part of activists.
Some of the attendees of the protest at the Port of Tacoma echoe a similar desire for further action, saying that the demonstration should not be declared a success because the Cape Orlando still departed.
Sarah O’Neal, a community member who supported the organization of the action at the Port of Oakland, says she gets why organizers can be hesitant to escalate tactics even at direct actions. “If their organization’s name is on a flyer, and folks are harmed, they’re going to bear the brunt of it on some level, so I understand why some decisions may be being made,” O’Neal explains.
She continues, “But Israel is not stopping the bombings; they’re escalating. So we need to be thinking strategically. Folks who came out to support the action [in Oakland] took it upon themselves to climb the barbed-wire fence, physically hung on the boat for hours, took those injuries and risked arrest.”
Furthermore, O'Neal says, “The fact that we held it at the port for as long as we did isn't in-and-of-itself a victory, but it was at least a demonstration for me of what real collective power can look like. Because it was community members here in Oakland that decided, ‘No, f*ck that! We didn't come here to picket. We came here to stop this boat by any means.’”
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