Why Was Italy Able to Organize Around Palestine?

Italy’s ability to mobilize around Palestine is, firstly, the product of years of sustained grassroots organizing and strategic union activism. Palestinian solidarity organizations such as Giovani Palestinesi d’Italia (GPI), Associazione Palestinesi d’Italia (API), and Unione Democratica Arabo-Palestinese (UDAP), alongside student collectives, social movements, and Italy’s Arab and Muslim communities, have spent over two years building strong nationwide networks, tightly woven into militant trade unionism. This groundwork made broad-based mobilization across sectors possible for the general strikes.

At the heart of this effort were radical, organized dockworkers, strategically positioned at the points where global supply chains meet local labor power.

Genoa’s CALP, a key faction within the USB union, recognizes the strategic power and position it holds in global supply chains. With over 90 percent of global trade traveling by sea, ports like Genoa are critical junctions where maritime traffic meets local labor and infrastructure, making them checkpoints capable of halting the flow of goods, including weapons.

Despite decades of neoliberal restructuring, privatization, mechanization, and decentralization, CALP has maintained a stable and coordinated workforce, with roughly half of Genoa’s dockers affiliated with the collective, capable of decisive industrial action. Beyond operational capacity, CALP draws on decades of radical historical legitimacy, linking local labor struggles to international solidarity campaigns from apartheid South Africa to Palestine. By blockading gates, refusing to load ships, and mobilizing alongside students and community groups, CALP transforms ports into sites of both material disruption and political leverage, exposing the complicity of states, arms transfers, and militarized supply chains.

By focusing on port workers and seafarers, CALP and USB shifted attention to the core of global commerce: maritime supply chains. This strategy echoes the Maritime Union of South Africa’s anti-apartheid actions, which targeted oil shipments supporting apartheid, illustrating how organized labor can effectively influence the flow of capital and war materials.

The strikes demonstrated this power vividly: over 600 dockworkers in Genoa halted a ship suspected of carrying containers to Israel; in Livorno, dockers and students shut down the Varco Valessini gate to block arms shipments; and in Marghera, 20,000 marchers paralyzed port operations. CALP’s mobilization draws on decades of experience from blocking shipments of missiles and explosives in 2021 to coordinated European port actions against ZIM vessels in 2023 and 2025. Over decades, Genoa dockworkers have linked anti-fascist and national resistance movements to international solidarity campaigns, from supporting Vietnam in 1973 to blocking arms to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and apartheid South Africa.

The movement’s impact extended beyond Italy, forcing other European labor unions to confront the question: Which side are you on?

Building on this momentum, USB convened a two-day coordination meeting aimed at blocking shipments of weapons that could be used in Gaza, with the push potentially expanding into a broader trade boycott of Israel. Dockworkers and delegations from ports in Spain, France, Greece, Cyprus, Morocco, and Germany will develop a joint strategy. “The ports are now strategic battlegrounds — and we need a common stance and stronger coordination,” said Francesco Staccioli of USB’s confederal executive, who is leading coordination with international partners.

This approach is crucial as Israel’s economy and military apparatus are uniquely dependent on maritime supply chains; nearly all of its arms imports, energy supplies, and strategic goods arrive by sea, making coordinated labor action capable of disrupting its core logistics. By taking concrete action rather than issuing empty statements, CALP, USB, and allied unions forced the broader European labor movement to confront the ethical and political stakes of complicity in Israel’s military operations and ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Italy’s success also rested on the radical political orientation of USB. Founded in 2010 as a left-wing confederation, USB has consistently prioritized anti-imperialism, international solidarity, and Palestine as central issues. USB draws much of its base from public sector workers, logistics and industrial workers, and communities with large migrant populations. It formed in 2010 through a merger of rank-and-file unions and has strong roots in Italy’s base-union tradition, which emphasizes militant and grassroots organizing.

Politically, it identifies with anti-imperialist, socialist, and internationalist currents, rejecting purely service-oriented unionism. Its practice includes legal support and migrant rights work, housing campaigns, and consistent solidarity with struggles abroad, particularly Palestine. Unlike unions in the UK or United States, which often operate as apolitical worker guilds, USB explicitly links members’ labor struggles to internationalism, building deep ties with Palestinian solidarity networks, student collectives, and community organizations.

This was further amplified by Italy’s plural and politicized union landscape. Beyond USB, Comitati di Base (COBAS) unions cultivate a tradition of grassroots, conflictual organizing that privileges rank-and-file initiative over hierarchical negotiation. By bypassing bureaucratic and state-mediated structures, these unions pushed and pressured traditional institutional unions, including CGIL, Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (CISL), and Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL), to engage on Palestine and reconsider their positions.

Legal frameworks also played a role. Italy’s Law 146/90, which regulates strikes in essential public services, requires agreements to maintain minimum services but allows action against “serious threats to worker safety.” Unions, including CGIL and USB, interpreted this provision broadly to justify strikes in response to Israel’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla, legitimizing the general strike. CGIL leader Maurizio Landini framed it as a defense of universal solidarity: “This is not just any strike. We’re here to defend brotherhood among individuals, among peoples, to put humanity back at the center, to say no to genocide, no to a policy of rearmament.”

In contrast, British unions operate under a far narrower legal framework, with stricter notice requirements and limits on secondary action that constrain large-scale industrial action, including political strikes. In Italy, the combination of radical unions’ strategic expertise, USB’s anti-imperialist orientation, a pluralized union ecosystem, and flexible legal interpretation created a fertile environment for labor to mobilize effectively around Palestine, a model that highlights the potential power of organized, politically conscious unions acting in solidarity with international struggles.

What Coalitions Within and Outside of the Unions Led to the General Strike?

The September 22 general strike, called by five grassroots unions — USB, CUB, SGB, ADL COBAS, and USI-CIT — under the banner “Blocchiamo tutto con la Palestina nel cuore” (“Block Everything with Palestine in Our Hearts”), represented the culmination of Italy’s militant base-union tradition. These unions emerged from the fragmentation of postwar Italian unionism, which left space for radical, rank-and-file alternatives outside the dominant confederations (CGIL, CISL, UIL).

Unlike the institutionalized confederations, the base unions (or sindacati di base) developed in the 1990s among precarious, logistics, and public sector workers, often migrants, who were excluded from formal bargaining structures. They rejected bureaucratic corporatism and embraced direct action, workplace democracy, and anti-imperialist politics as part of a broader internationalist movement.

The coalition behind the September strike was forged through years of collaboration in struggles against austerity, privatization, and Italy’s complicity in wars abroad. USB, CUB, and SGB, each with strong presences in transport, logistics, and education, coordinated with ADL COBAS, rooted in the logistics hubs of northern Italy, and USI-CIT, a historic anarcho-syndicalist federation with deep anti-militarist roots. Together they formed a united front rejecting both Italian state militarism and the European Union’s role in arms exports to Israel. Their shared anti-imperialist orientation and grassroots organizational autonomy enabled rapid mobilization across sectors.

Beyond the unions, broad coalitions of students, civic networks, and activist groups such as Collettivo San Marino per la Palestina and Coordinamento Unitario a Sostegno della Palestina (CUSP) amplified the strike’s reach. This convergence of labor and social movements reflected Italy’s enduring pluralism: while major confederations like CGIL remained cautious and institutional, base unions and grassroots actors transformed outrage into organized disruption. Under mounting pressure from below, CGIL ultimately joined the October 3 general strike that mobilized over two million people, a vivid demonstration of how Italy’s fragmented but resilient labor landscape can unite around internationalist and antiwar causes.

Responses From the Right and Left

The strikes drew expected divided responses across Italy’s political spectrum. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government condemned them as “anti-national” and “illegal,” yet the mobilization proved resilient. In a country where new laws punish protesters who block key infrastructure, and as the world’s third-largest arms exporter to Israel after the United States and Germany, the strike was a defiant rebuke to state repression, showing the limits of government intimidation against organized labor.

On the Left, the strikes injected energy across Italy and Europe, illustrating the potential of militant, internationalist labor organizing. CGIL reported a 60 percent participation rate, with strong turnout in the education, transport, logistics, and metalworking sectors, demonstrating that solidarity with Palestine can unite broad swathes of the working class around the anti-imperialist struggle.

This was more than a symbolic victory: it marked a historic win for the Left, demonstrating that coordinated, cross-sectoral worker action can overcome state intimidation. The lesson is clear: the movement must build on this momentum, linking strategic labor power to students and communities, and transforming solidarity into sustained, global action that challenges war profiteering and government complicity.

Momentum spread internationally. Solidarity actions erupted across France, Spain, and Greece: Paris saw nearly 200,000 participants; Athens had over 20,000; and bus strikes in Alicante disrupted intercity travel. These actions revealed the vulnerability of everyday infrastructure and, by extension, global supply chains, underlining the strategic power of coordinated labor and civic mobilization in challenging militarized trade networks.

Solidarity Beyond Borders: Lessons From Italy

The general strikes in Italy demonstrated that solidarity across society and labor is neither symbolic nor dead; it is a living, potent force. Radical, anti-imperialist unions, such as USB, working alongside pluralistic grassroots networks, demonstrated that organized labor can reshape local conditions and alter global political realities. Their actions send a clear challenge to workers and unions in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere: solidarity cannot remain rhetorical; it must translate into decisive action.

Gaza is a mirror of the future. Placing it at the center of our struggle is both a unifying and radicalizing call. It forces us to confront the complicity of our institutions, workplaces, and governments. Trade unions cannot afford neutrality or stagnation; they must organize around this moment or risk irrelevance. Through Palestine, unions can reclaim their political purpose. Taking a principled stand against genocide strengthens organizations, deepens political commitment, and compels the broader labor movement to confront a world where militarism and oppression are intensifying and where the costs of inaction have been catastrophic.

British unions, like Unite, face a stark choice: remain on the sidelines and be complicit or step into history, wielding the immense power of organized labor to confront Britain’s central role in sustaining Israel’s war machine. The precedent is clear: in 1988, British dockers, unionists, and activists coordinated at the Maritime Transport Workers’ Conference in London, targeting South African apartheid. Refusing to handle South African goods, they struck at the arteries of international trade, proving that workers could wield global leverage to support justice abroad.

Today the situation demands no less. As USB declared during the strike: “Workers have returned to center stage and are calling on citizens, all citizens, to stand up. They are not doing so for a contract renewal but to demand justice for a distant and tormented people. In this age of selfishness and individualism, this seems unthinkable. But no, solidarity between peoples and brotherhood beyond borders are not dead and buried values; on the contrary, they are alive and kicking.”