By rimsha syed
This article was originally published by Truthout
Organizers and workers around the world are highlighting the invisible complicity of logistics companies in genocide.
On October 30, port workers in over 100 locations across the world stood in principled resistance to Israel’s ongoing genocide through an international strike meant to constrict the arms trade and physically halt munitions destined to be used in Palestine. From coast to coast, linking arms in the struggle against maritime transport has been a historic strategy to intervene in the material transport of weapons, ammunition, and military equipment, through coordinated direct action by the working class.
Three years into Israel’s livestreamed genocide, actions of international magnitude underscore the immediate and collective need to stop the flow of artillery into Gaza. Following the repeated demands of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions to “urgently halt the arms trade with Israel” and “take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege,” several grassroots arms embargo campaigns in port cities across the United States — including New York City, Oakland, and Houston — have been mobilizing alongside dockworkers, transportation crews, and unions.
In New York, the “Break the Chain” campaign is fighting to halt explosives and F-35 bomber components from reaching Gaza through the JFK Airport. In Oakland, the People’s Arms Embargo gathered hundreds outside FedEx’s massive Air Freight Center in East Oakland to protest the company’s complicity in shipping arms to Israel. Last year, the Palestinian Youth Movement shared a report stating that in 2025, at least 280 military cargo shipments, including parts for one of the world’s most lethal fighter jets, reached Gaza via Oakland’s airport. Now, the Houston arms embargo campaign is calling on Texans to join their week of action to confront logistics executives complicit in unfathomable violence and destruction at the 2026 Houston International Maritime Conference.
Houston Calls on Logistics Executives to Deplatform Genocide
In the sweltering September Houston heat, at a cafe with “ICE not welcome” signs plastered on every door and window, arms embargo organizers hosted a teach-in about the city’s port — a key transportation hub for the global weapons supply chain. Elsewhere in the cafe, others hand-crafted banners with calls that read “A Future Without Genocide, A Port for the People” as a response to the conference’s slogan “Lessons from the Past, Strategies for the Future.”
The fifth annual maritime conference, hosted from November 2-5, presents a unique opportunity to directly confront executives from logistics companies responsible for supplying the Israeli military with weapons. Roshni Ahmed, a member of the outreach working group, said that the arms embargo demands aren’t new: “Many people in the past three years have felt a deep sense of hopelessness and heartbreak watching the genocide unfold.” In May 2024, the Palestinian Youth Movement launched the #MaskOffMaersk campaign, in which Houston has played a critical role through a myriad of ongoing organizing strategies.
“Arms embargo campaigns, such as this one in Houston, give people a very tangible way to stop the genocide by cutting off the very weapons that are used to kill Palestinians,” said Ahmed. The movement against the blood-soaked military industrial complex in Houston centers on Lockheed Martin’s massive aeronautics production plant in nearby Fort Worth, where the F-35 fighter jet is assembled from components transported on Maersk container ships before being flown directly to the Nevatim Airbase and used to bomb the besieged population in Palestine. “From 2020 to 2025, Houston’s port processed 85 percent of all Israeli shipments of F-35 fighter jet parts,” said Ahmed, noting how logistics companies like Maersk directly facilitate U.S. and Israeli wars.
Logistics companies like Maersk “are integral to the arms pipeline sustaining Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza and its brutal military occupation of the West Bank,” said Dr. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, a professor of sociology at California State University. Over 2 million Palestinians are being intentionally starved in the Gaza Strip, a tactic engineered by Israel to exact maximum suffering as bombardments continue. Israel’s blockade on essential humanitarian aid cannot be understood in isolation from commercial networks that perpetuate these war crimes, and “through coordinated pressure, boycotts, and refusal to handle military cargo, the world can make these genocidal supply chains politically untenable,” Dr. Alimahomed-Wilson said.
Organizers hope to use the week of action to emphasize that Houston residents are invested in using the city’s infrastructure to better their communities rather than continue facilitating genocide. Simply put, the arms embargo campaign demands that no military cargo for Israel moves through Houston’s port. Through a multi-pronged approach that takes inspiration from previous organizing wins within the context of Palestinian liberation and beyond, Houston activists have planned several demonstrations throughout the week: a region-wide protest with Palestine Youth Movement chapters across the state, a picket with union and faith group members, and an installation honoring Palestinians killed by Israel alongside a people’s panel that will happen concurrently outside the conference at Hilton Americas in downtown Houston.
“The installations are incredibly powerful visuals to understand the depth of the organizing that has happened nationally and internationally,” said Ahmed. “The installation focused on logistics shipping company Maersk depicts the many wins we’ve seen around the globe from dockworker strikes across ports in Morocco and Italy, and Spain’s arms embargo as well as stopping trade with illegal settlements.” The October 30 International Port Strike brings together unions from France, Greece, the Basque Country, Turkey, Morocco, and Italy, representing workers from more than 40 European and Mediterranean ports. In a similar vein, Houston-based organizers are pushing for direct action initiatives to intervene in one of the material conditions that makes genocide possible: the invisible complicity of logistics companies.
Dockworker Solidarity and the Effectiveness of Arms Embargo Campaigns
The Houston arms embargo campaign is a fragment of the global struggle for a liberated Palestine. Organized worker strikes across the globe have gained momentum as ordinary people of conscience decide that their government’s complicity and inaction mean taking matters into their own hands. Arms embargo campaigns in Houston, as well as across the country and the globe, demonstrate vulnerabilities in the weapons supply chain that have historically been deemed “choke points” and thus targets of collective pressure.
“In fact, there’s a long history of dockworkers, seafarers, and other workers taking coordinated action to refuse to work cargo or commodities to protest injustice, imperialism, fascism, and war,” said Dr. Peter Cole, a professor of history at Western Illinois University and scholar of dockworker activism. It’s clear that the United States is committed to its multi-billion-dollar defense agreements with the Israeli military, and as Israel’s biggest arms supplier, “the thing [logistics and] business executives would most likely respond to is if their profits are interrupted,” said Dr. Cole. “Stopping work or being community activists who are able to stop the work seems like an effective tactic.”
Each vein of the campaign, from confronting logistics executives to tapping into the diverse organizing ecosystem in Houston, is meant to cultivate stronger relationships between allied organizations that support peace and justice. In doing so, arms embargo activists have called on labor unions, student movements, faith groups, and community-based organizations to join the week of action to halt the flow of capital and logistics that fund the Israeli death machine. On September 27, the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU)/ CWA Local 6186 voted unanimously to endorse the arms embargo campaign and join the ranks of union solidarity with Palestine, refusing business as usual.
Josiah Rector, a representative of TSEU, a union representing nearly 10,000 state agency and public university employees and retirees across Texas, co-sponsored the resolution to endorse the week of action, stating that “this week of action is an opportunity to increase pressure on Port of Houston officials, on war profiteers like Maersk, and on all other actors who are actively or passively complicit in this machinery of death and destruction.” After attending several arms embargo workshops and trainings in preparation for Houston’s week of action, Rector noted, “Houston is also headquarters to multinational oil and gas companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil that literally fuel the war machine.”
“Here in the state of Texas, public sector unions (except for police and firefighters) have no collective bargaining rights and no right to strike,” said Rector. “It is still important for us to stand in solidarity with Palestinian trade unions and the international working class by all the means at our disposal: passing resolutions, showing up at protest actions, doing public education, and generally participating in these campaigns.”
As these words are penned, more than 3,300 Palestinians have been forced from their homes in Hebron as Israel’s brutal lockdown of the besieged West Bank continues past Israel’s elections. As Israel’s rearmament continues, requiring a growing involvement of logistics companies and transportation schemes, a network of unionized masses and grassroots arms embargo campaigns is but one example of a path forward. Warehouses, ports, and distribution sites are inseparable from war, and the fate of Palestinians, as well as people in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and all other nations destroyed by war profiteers, requires our continued steadfast resistance. From Spain to Oakland, from Morocco to New York City, people are using all the tools at their disposal to disrupt the networks that make Israel’s genocide possible. Houston’s week of action is an essential node in the international struggle for liberation.
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