Inside the Campaign to Block Israel’s War Ships

As violence continues in Gaza, a new strategy inside the Palestine solidarity movement is taking shape — one aimed not at city streets or college campuses, but at the arteries of the global economy. Around the world, dockworkers have refused to unload ships tied to Israel’s military supply chain. In Italy, Morocco, India, and Sweden, those refusals have sparked national strikes and port shutdowns. But in the United States — where 70% of Israel’s weapons originate — things look very different. This episode dives into the complicated reality facing American activists trying to “block the boat”: a divided labor movement, powerful unions with clashing politics, and a military-industrial complex that shields its most sensitive logistics behind military bases and Air Force cargo planes. We meet East Coast organizers struggling to reach conservative longshore workers, West Coast veterans who once helped stop South African apartheid cargo, and the researchers studying how social-movement unionism succeeds — and fails. What power do workers really have to stop the flow of war? And what happens when activists push that power to its limits? Guests: Tova Fry, organizer and activist with Port Workers & Communities for Palestine Katy Fox-Hodess, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield Rafeef Ziadah, Senior Lecturer at Kings College Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource & Organizing Center Clarence Thomas, retired dock worker at ILWU Local 10 Charmaine Chua, Acting Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley Additional Resources: Community picket lines and social movement unionism on the US docks, 2014–2021: Organizing lessons from the Block the Boat campaign for Palestine , Katy Fox-Hodess and Rafeef Ziadah, Critical Sociology Reds or Rackets? The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront , Howard Kimeldorf This Union Is Famous for Opposing South African Apartheid. Now It’s Standing With Gaza. , Sarah Lazare, The Nation Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area , Peter Cole

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Inside the Campaign to Block Israel’s War Ships is an episode from Things That Go Boom by PRX.

This episode is 43:25 long.

This episode was published on Dec 1, 2025.

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