Italian Workers’ General Strike Shows How To Fight Israeli Genocide

On Monday September 22nd half a million Italian workers, from school teachers to dockworkers, bus drivers and metal workers, went on strike against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Local bus services and national railways were shut down under the call to “Block Everything!” - echoing recent protests by French workers. 90% of public transport was shut down and dockworkers blocked access to the ports.

There had already been local strikes to block trucks loaded with arms for Israel but this national strike was a real demontration of workers’ power.

In Milan and Bologna police violently attacked protesters and the far right Meloni governemnt, which supports Israel, declared the protesting workers to be “hooligans” and “criminals”.

That’s because she knows the secret of any display of workers’ industrial power - a working class that can shut the country down over Palestine can also shut the country down to protest the actions of her government.

Strikes are the ultimate direct action because they actually shut down the flow of profit and stop the machinery of capitalism from running. But strikes also empower workers to use the weapon of industrial stoppages to protest for housing, on the cost of living, against the government.

Here in Ireland the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called moments of silence for Gaza and recently put out a statement saying workers must not be put in a situation where they feel threatened by a boss for refusing to handle Israeli goods.

ICTU said: “we will not be found wanting in protecting our members where an employer seeks to discipline or dismiss a worker in such circumstances.”

The barrier to taking strike action after such a move by an employer isn’t the 1990 Act but the fact that the dispute has to go to mediation and the WRC. But we need to be willing to tear up bad collective agreements and challenge the 1990 Act when it’s used as an excuse to limit our response to actual genocide.

Direct action by striking workers is the ultimate lever of oppositional power.

We should at least have a national day of action where all workers are called on to join massive protests across the country that block roads and ports. We have to start using the power that the working class has and maybe when we discover that power we will stand up and challenge a system that treats workers like garbage, attacks out neutrality, all while allowing a genocide to continue.