26.02.2026

Strike against death machine

There has not being anything like the February 6 coordination in terms of scale so far. Toby Abse welcomes the overtly political strike action taken by dockers against Israel’s continued assault on the Palestinians

February 6 saw the first International Dockers’ Strike - against the “growing militarisation of transport infrastructure”, but primarily in solidarity with Palestine. It was initially called by the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) in Italy, Enedep in Greece, the Basque union, LAB, the Turkish Liman-İş, and the Moroccan ODT.

The call to action by these five unions was taken up elsewhere in Europe: for example, French dockers in Marseilles, and German dockers in Hamburg and Bremen also participated. Whilst there had been some previous internationally coordinated dockers’ strikes in the past - most notably against the liberalisation associated with the EU’s Bolkestein Directive in the early 2000s - there had never been anything on the scale of the February 6 strikes. Moreover, although the unions raised the question of both falling real wages and the threat to their jobs posed by increased automation, the action was in essence a political strike against wars and the international arms trade in general - primarily, but not exclusively, in relation to the continuing Israeli assault on the Palestinians.

The strike must be seen as the culmination of a series of disputes about arms transportation that started in Genoa in 2019, when the dockers blocked the port to demand that the government respect Italian law 185/1990, which prohibits the export of arms from Italy to any country engaged in war. On that occasion, the dockers’ target was not Israel, but Saudi Arabia, which was bombarding Yemen. The conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine that have exploded since then have led to an increase in orders for Italian arms exports. Dockers’ mobilisations increased in response to this, spreading from Genoa to Livorno, Naples and eventually other Italian ports.

All this reached its height in Italy during the September-October 2025 general strikes in solidarity with the 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla, which attempted to break the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, but was intercepted by the Zionists’ naval forces. Solidarity with the flotilla also drew in a variety of workers in engineering factories and other workplaces. Although sympathy strikes for Palestine have largely faded out as a result of Trump’s so-called ‘Peace Initiative’, the dockers have continued to raise the issue.

The February 6 strike not only affected the traditionally militant ports of Genoa and Livorno, but also brought out the dockers of Trieste, Ravenna, Ancona, Civitavecchia, Salerno, Bari, Crotone, Palermo and Cagliari. The unions’ demands were crystal-clear, including “the immediate end of the genocide of the Palestinians carried out by Israel with the support of its US, EU and Nato allies”.

EU regulation 1236/2005 prohibits the export of arms from the EU to countries at war, but not their transit via EU ports - something which has increased since the outbreak of war in Gaza in October 2023. José Nivoi, the national coordinator of the USB’s dockers’ section, and the spokesperson for the Genoese dockers’ group, CALP, pointed out: “We do not want to be accomplices in a traffic that serves to kill innocent adults and children. The transit of arms is both a legal and an ethical problem.”

The 24-hour strike had immediate practical effect in a number of Italian ports. The Israeli ship, ‘Virginia’, belonging to the ZIM company, was unable to dock in Livorno with its cargo of arms. A second ZIM ship, ‘Australia’, was prevented from landing in Venice, and a third, ‘New Zealand’ , was kept away from the port of Genoa. A ship called ‘Eagle 3’ , belonging to the Italo-Swiss company, MSC, which was on its way to Israel, did not even try to approach the Ravenna docks, and abruptly changed course in response to the strike.

The strike was also particularly effective in Greece, which has seen many ships loaded with arms pass through its ports - especially in the Athenian port of Piraeus. Markos Bekris, the president of the Greek union, Enedep, addressing a rally in the Piraeus theatre, said: “They want us to be accomplices in wars that have nothing to do with the interests of workers. At the same time, they ask us to work 13 hours a day, and to accept greater flexibility, but with starvation wages, insecurity, repression and the theft of our pension funds.”

Bekris also criticised the arms investment programme of the Greek government announced last year, which had allocated €27 billion for ‘defence’ over the coming 12 years, saying: “the Greek people are expected to pay for equipment which does not serve defence, but the imperialist rivalry of the US, Nato and the EU in relation to China and Russia.”

These militant unions would, in the Italian case, best be characterised as ‘syndicalist’ and, in the Greek case, owe more to the ‘official communist’ tradition. However, the problem for the Palestine solidarity movement is that more mainstream unions, such as the Italian CGIL, are wary of calling their members into action over political rather than economic demands - particularly since Giorgia Meloni’s Italian government is always eager to brand all strikes as purely political to justify state action against them.

Nevertheless, February 6 has shown how large numbers of workers can be politically mobilised. But the question is, under what leadership?