This Wednesday, three months into Israel’s total blockade on Gaza, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) union of port workers at Fos-sur-Mer, northwest of Marseille, announced they had set aside nineteen pallets of ammunition belt links from a cargo ship headed to Haifa. In a statement, they said: “The dockers and port workers of the Gulf of Fos will not participate in the ongoing genocide orchestrated by the Israeli government.”
While searching the cargo, they discovered two other containers, with canon parts manufactured by engineering firm Aubert & Duval, also destined for Israel. The next day they released a second statement: “These two containers have also been blocked. . . . The workers of Fos do not wish to be complicit in the massacres and human losses. If others wish to pass this type of merchandise through our port, we will respond in kind in the coming days and weeks by mobilizing all the dock and port workers of the gulf of Fos.”
Thirty miles away in Marseille, 400 people gathered on Thursday evening on the sunny square of Joliette. “We’re here to salute the actions of the dockworkers, who are showing us an exemplary fight against the genocide,” said one activist with Stop Arming Israel, a nationwide collective organizing against France’s military links with Israel.
Thus far, union tactics have been mostly absent from the Palestine movement in France. The dockers’ announcements have been met with much support from pro-Palestinian activists, but also from other unions at an unprecedented level, speaking to a deeper shift in public opinion. The echo has been such that Sophie Binet, the national leader of the CGT, has called on the government to halt arms shipments to Israel.
The reaction to the…
Auteur: Kadal Jesuthasan
