To those who find another way,

We know that American taxpayers supply the intravenous drip of bombs and missiles that rain death on Gaza. In the past year alone, the U.S. has delivered over 50,000 tons of military equipment to the IOF. How can we intervene?

The governments of Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Spain, and Belgium announced that they would halt certain weapons shipments bound for Israel after South Africa charged the entity with genocide at the International Court of Justice last December. But the Zionist genocide has only escalated since then. War criminals in Congress and the White House greenlight millions for additional weapons for the Israeli regime to blast apart Palestinian homes, neighborhoods, and lives. 

U.S. electeds in the pocket of AIPAC will never fulfill the demands of our movement. There is another pressure point more worthy of our scrutiny.

The U.S. would never be able to supply a steady stream of weapons to the Zionist entity without the shipping and logistics industry. In particular, the Danish logistics giant Maersk is responsible for transporting the majority of U.S. weapons used on Gaza.

According to a new report from the Palestinian Youth Movement, Maersk carried more than 2,000 shipments of military goods to the Israeli military from the U.S. between September 2023 to September 2024. These shipments included hulls, engines, specialized parts for armored personnel carriers, and tactical vehicles, as well as parts for aircraft and projectile systems.

“The evidence suggests that Maersk typically sends one ship per week from New Jersey to Spain, which typically includes approximately 1,000 tons of military cargo on this vessel on behalf of the Israeli military,” the PYM researchers wrote. From Spain’s Port of Algeciras, the shipments are routed to Haifa.

In light of these findings, the Spanish government, which has an arms embargo against Israel, announced that it would investigate the ships entering its ports. According to the PYM researchers, Maersk has been evading the Spanish arms embargo by using freight forwarders — companies that organize the movement of shipments — to obscure the original manufacturers of the military equipment it carries. 

Spain’s announcement marked a milestone for our movement. By analyzing publicly available shipping data, a small team of researchers was able to expose Maersk’s violations of the country’s Israeli arms embargo, risking the company’s ability to access the Port of Algeciras, their primary hub to the Mediterranean. These events angered the genocidal U.S. government, which now threatens sanctions against Spain for upholding its arms embargo of the Zionist ethnostate. 

PYM’s campaign against Maersk is a different kind of arms embargo, a people’s arms embargo.

“We’re not waiting for a decision from the top to stop the flow of weapons to Israel, but we are demanding from the bottom,” they write. Read on to learn how to get involved in various campaigns to disrupt the supply chain that feeds the Zionist genocide.

Saturday, December 14 is Mask off Maersk international day of action

• Register for the Palestinian Youth Movement’s phone blockade here to jam the company’s phone lines on Friday.

• Send an email to Maersk’s leadership.

Follow @palestinianyouthmovement for more updates on Mask off Maersk and the international day of action.

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Block the boat

Efforts to disrupt the supply chain for Israeli goods go back years.

An early major victory came in 2009, when the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) refused to unload the cargo from an Israeli cargo ship destined for Durban, South Africa in response to a call from the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement for dock workers worldwide to refuse to handle Israeli goods in response to the 2008-2009 Israeli massacre in Gaza. 

In 2014, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) launched the Block the Boat coalition, which aimed to stop the Israeli ZIM company, its largest and oldest cargo shipping company, from docking and unloading goods at the Port of Oakland. 

Oakland port workers with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 chapter refused to handle Israeli cargo in solidarity with AROC’s picket. 

ZIM cargo ships have made only one attempt to return to Oakland since this historic defeat, in 2021 — and met the same fate. That year, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) and a large coalition of all major Palestinian workers unions and professional associations called on trade unions and workers worldwide to boycott handling Israeli goods. Dockworkers in South Africa, Italy, and elsewhere heeded the call. 

Learn more about and contribute to these historic actions. They will succeed because of your attention, care, and time. 

• Find out more about the Block the Boat movement here.

• Follow more about the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement here. 

Boycott! Divest! Sanction!

People of conscience around the world mourn the Palestinians martyred by air strikes, starvation, and disease, and raise their voices against the Zionist entity’s unjust encroachment into Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and, most recently, the Golan Heights. One way to apply pressure to the Zionist entity, businesses, and institutions complicit in settler occupation is to join the BDS movement. An updated list of boycott targets, as well as a guide to boycotting and corporate pressure targeting, can be found here. 

Recent BDS wins include:

• Following protests and a call to boycott after providing IDF soldiers with free meals, global sales of McDonalds fell by 1.5% between July and September, more than twice the drop forecasted by analysts, following a 1% drop in the April to June period

• Norway’s sovereign wealth fund sold all its shares of Israel’s largest telecommunications company due to its “services to the Israeli settlements” in the occupied West Bank

• Another huge Norwegian investor sold its holdings in Palantir Technologies over concerns that its “work for Israel might put the asset manager at risk of violating international humanitarian law and human rights”

• The Japanese corporation Yokohama announced its decision to close the Alliance tire factory in Hadera, which employed close to 500 workers

• 7/11 has shut down all eight of its stores in Israel, another indicator that capital and business are fleeing the gradually collapsing economy

• In the second half of 2024, Israel’s debt skyrocketed to approximately $340 billion, a 20% increase from the end of 2022, forcing them to pay high interest rates

Get involved

Keep abreast of actions, protests, and digital campaigns by following collectives like Palestinian Youth Movement and Within Our Lifetime. Research the organizations agitating against the Zionist entity in your area and devote time and resources to them. Read about the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and push organizations near you to sign on. 

If you are an artist, arts worker, board member, writer, or other contributor to cultural publications and venues interested in PACBI, connecting with participants around PACBI adoption at a specific institution, or would like information about PACBI learning events, please write to PACBI@wawog.com.

Here are more of W.A.W.O.G.’s current boycotts: 

• Boycott, divest, and unsubscribe from the New York Times. 

• Boycott PEN America. The organization has sold us out. It has betrayed writers, readers, and its own staff 

• Boycott Penske publications: Artforum, Art in America, and ARTnews.

The path ahead towards a free Palestine is long and arduous. It will take all of us to get there. 

Help build the supply chain for Palestinian life

While Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza depends on a global network of supply chains, it, in turn, blocks and disrupts the supply chains which nourish and sustain Palestinian life as a tactic of permanent war against the Palestinian people.

Israel’s restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of the Gaza strip date back to the early 1990s, when the general permit of Palestinians to exit the Occupied 67 Territories was suspended during the First Intifada. This practice has intensified since 2007, with the occupation only allowing in a “humanitarian minimum” of medical supplies and food into Gaza, and reached its nadir in the current genocide in which Gaza is entirely blockaded and lacks running water, electricity, and food.

From the 2000s onward, activists from the Free Gaza Movement and others have organized a series of flotillas with the intended goal of bringing small amounts of humanitarian supplies and goods to the people of Gaza and raising global awareness to Israel’s cruel and illegal ongoing blockade of the strip. In 2010, the Israeli Navy attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters on its way to Gaza, martyring nine passengers and wounding 30, including a passenger who later died of their wounds. The raid was condemned globally, including by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which argued that Israel’s navy used “an unacceptable level of brutality” in the raid and engaged in “willful killing”. 

Reflecting on the legacy of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the risks taken and sacrifices made by its members, we might ask ourselves how we can take actions to break the blockade of Gaza in the present.

Donate

• The Gaza Soup Kitchen is a global-supported community initiative in Gaza that provides hot meals and water to Palestinians facing intentional starvation. (Read about one of its founders, Chef Mahmoud, who was recently assassinated by the Zionist army.)

• The two surviving children of slain journalist Wafa Al-Udaini, who was murdered alongside her husband, 3-year-old daughter and nine-month-old son. 

• The Sameer Project is a rapid-response initiative that is facilitating the sourcing and distribution of aid to displaced families all over the Gaza Strip. Started by 3 Palestinians living in diaspora and supported by ground teams in Gaza.

• Workshops 4 Gaza is a group of autonomous writers, artists, and educators organizing workshops and classes to raise money for Gaza.

Watch with us

Jocelyne Saab, the pioneering and prolific filmmaker, was born in Lebanon. Trained as a war reporter for French television, she became one of the few women to produce political documentaries in the Middle East. 

During the Lebanese civil war, Saab directed a trilogy of films — Beirut, Never Again (1976), Letter From Beirut (1978), and Beirut, My City (1982) — depicting the ravages of Zionist occupation. “Everything was suddenly annihilated,” she recalled in a 2013 interview with Olivier Hadouchi, excerpted here. “Our family’s domicile, off the map, gone from the city, a mass of ruins.”

Some of these movies are available on YouTube in full. 

• Watch “Letter From Beirut” (Run time: 48:24)

• Watch “Beirut, My City” (Run time: 34:49)

Read The Messengers edition of the New York War Crimes

• Stand with Fadi! Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi Al-Wahidi was shot in the neck by Israeli forces while reporting on the Zionist invasion of the Jabalia refugee camp Oct. 9 2024. The Zionist entity has refused pleas to evacuate Fadi to receive treatment for the shrapnel lodged in his skull. His mother and colleague spoke to the New York War Crimes. 

• Resisting on the Narrative Front. How the journalists of Palestine and Lebanon are overturning Zionist myths — and hastening the entity’s fall.

• Download the rest of the edition, dedicated to the brave journalists exposing the occupation’s crimes.

We leave you with the words of Hiba Al-Wahidi,

I want to send a message to the Western world that we, the people of Gaza, have endured the most hardships and witnessed the most wars. I wish my voice, and the voice of all the mothers of Gaza could be heard — the ones who lose their children every day, the ones whose children are here one day and gone tomorrow. I am sending a message to the entire Western world to stand in solidarity with Fadi, with the Palestinian people, with all the sick and the wounded. I hope my voice reaches all over the world: I wish you would stand with Fadi and with all journalists. They risk their lives to deliver the truth to the Arab and Western worlds, but, in the end, we can’t even secure Fadi his most basic rights.