‘Block everything with Palestine in our hearts’: Italy paralysed by Gaza actions

On 22 September, half a million workers, students and solidarity activists mobilised in more than 80 cities across Italy under the slogan “Blocchiamo Tutto” (Let’s block everything). The Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), which initiated the action, has called for “the immediate break-off of relations with the terrorist state of Israel”.

Major ports across the country were shut down from Genoa, Palermo, Livorno, Ancona, Trieste, Salerno, and Venice, where strikers braved police water cannons. Train stations were blockaded in Naples, Turin, Rome, and Milan, while strikes of railway staff paralysed transport networks.

Protests took place on a truly national scale, including in regional centres with little living memory of struggle, demonstrating the depth of support for Palestine and indignation at the government’s inaction.

At Rome’s La Sapienza University, students launched an occupation of the arts faculty, while campuses in Bologna and Torino were blockaded. Many schools were shut as students and staff walked out.

Demonstrators also took to highways, shutting main roads in Pisa, Florence, Turin, Bologna and Rome. In doing so, they were defying the Meloni government’s Security Decree passed in June, which makes blocking traffic and major infrastructure a serious criminal offense. This will be an early test of strength between protesters and the government over the enforcement of these laws.

The strike wave even reached the Vatican, where members of the Association of Vatican Lay Employees joined a march to parliament as part of the Priests Against Genocide network.

Italy’s solidarity movement has been galvanised by the Global Sumud Flotilla currently sailing to Gaza, the largest-scale attempt to break Israel’s siege and deliver vital aid thus far. One of the Flotilla’s departure points was the northern Italian port city of Genoa, and it was there that the Block Everything movement began last August.

As the convoy prepared to launch, a campaign to collect food aid for Gaza revived the city’s dormant but deeply-rooted activist traditions. Unions, neighbourhood committees and charities collected more than 300 tons of materials. On 30 August, 40,000 marched to see off the flotilla singing Bella Ciao, out of a population of 564,000.

The call to action was taken up early on by the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (CALP), a Genoan dock workers’ collective affiliated to the USB, one of the country’s many “grassroots” or “base” unions, which operate separately from the mainstream federations.

In a widely shared video, CALP member Riccardo Rudino pledged at the demonstration: “If, even for 20 minutes, we lose contact with our comrades on the flotilla, we will block all of Europe: from Genoa’s docks, not a single nail will leave, it will be a global strike”.

Under the slogan “Lets close the ports to war”, CALP has previously blocked arms shipments intended for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen, and on 7 August refused to load arms onto a Saudi ship allegedly bound for Israel. Last Thursday, dockworkers in the port city of Ravenna also took action, blocking two trucks suspected of carrying weapons.

Coming off the back of these actions, the impressive response to USB’s call for a strike on 22 September represents a significant leap forward for the movement. The call to block everything has been taken up in workplaces from ports to logistics centres, but also drawn huge sections of civil society behind it, from Trieste in the northeast to Sicily in the south.

The main union federation, the CGIL, which represents the majority of organised labour, has dragged its feet in mobilising its membership for Gaza, and didn’t participate in 22 September. CGIL instead organised its own four-hour strike three days before, which was strongly observed in some workplaces. But the more significant action on 22 September emerged from below. The hope is that this mobilisation can put pressure on larger, more conservative federations like CGIL to organise serious strikes.

The size of the demonstrations is an expression of a rising tide of struggle in Europe, fuelled by disgust at Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and a continent-wide turn to austerity and militarism.

In France, hostility to the government’s proposed austerity budget generated the first “Bloquons tout” (“Let’s block everything”) movement on 10 September, forcing the resignation of one prime minister, and pressuring the unions to call mass strikes against his replacement. This provided a clear model for Italy to follow.

In Spain last week, protesters forced the abrupt ending of the Vuelta, Spain’s Tour de France equivalent, in opposition to the inclusion of the Israeli team. Spain’s centre-left government, which has long traded on rhetorical opposition to Israel’s genocide, has been forced to cancel a €700 million deal to acquire Israeli-designed rocket launchers.

While governments across Europe attempt to cover their complicity in genocide and placate the movement for Gaza with meaningless gestures, Italy’s governing far-right coalition has refused even this concession.

Days before the strike, Infrastructure and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right Lega, went on Israeli channel i24news to denounce the Palestine movement, saying “I don’t think they know what they’re protesting about. Islamic terrorism is the main problem in the world today.”

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of the fascist-rooted Brothers of Italy, seized on small clashes in Milan provoked by police to demonise what she characterises as the “violence and destruction” of “hooligans”. The government’s attacks are not limited to words. Palestine protests, including those of high school students, are routinely met with brutal police repression.

Meloni’s highly authoritarian party is committed to ruling as the “party of order”, and to repressing any manifestation of left-wing opposition. It sees the militarised Israeli ethno-state as a model to be emulated.

But the government’s opposition to the movement is about more than ideology. It’s also about defending the nexus between the Italian state, the US-led NATO military alliance, and Italy’s highly profitable weapons industry. Meloni has committed to raise defence spending to meet NATO targets of 5 percent of GDP in the next decade. This will mean a massive windfall for companies like Leonardo, currently valued at €29.45 billion, which rely heavily on contracts with Israel.

The cost of this new arms race will be borne by workers already reeling after years of one-sided class war. In Italy, real wages have fallen 7.5 percent since 2021, precarity is rife and, on average, three people die at work every day.

Against this world of austerity and war, 22 September is another flicker of hope. It shows the possibility of a political response based on working class power and solidarity. As the USB said in a statement on the day of the strike: “Workers have returned to centre 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.”