Above photo: Protest in Milan Italy, Feb. 6, 2026. WSLS.com.
Last Friday, unionized workers shut down ports throughout the Mediterranean under the slogan “Dockers Don’t Work for War.” In materials announcing the action, the Italian Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) explained:
Ports are sending a sign of strong international solidarity against the militarization of ports, the ongoing genocide in Palestine, arms trafficking and the war race that we are witnessing. A strong sign against imperialism and violation of international law and in defense of self-determination of peoples.
At the heart of the protest are workers’ conditions. The war economy has already cut our wages, eroded our rights, and destroyed essential public services. The shift of economic resources to armaments and the war industry directly affects wages and working conditions, lengthens working hours, and makes it less likely that our work will be recognized as strenuous for pension purposes.
February 6th will also be the opening day of the Winter Olympic Games in Milan and Cortina. The presence of the fascist ICE militia is a sign of provocation that we consider unacceptable.
The actions in the Mediterranean were complemented by protests organized by social movements in anti-imperialist solidarity with the worker-led strike in countries from South Africa to Colombia, as well as in the United States.
The key to developing a good strategy is knowing your enemy. Friday’s actions were important precisely that because they stem from a clear understanding of how Zionist imperialism works. Some years ago Palestinian scholar Magid Shihade introduced the concept of Global Israel. One key element of his multifaceted theory is that that in order to maintain its genocidal project in Palestine, Israel has infringed on the basic human rights of people everywhere, and has worked to prevent nations from exercising their own sovereignty through replicating its settler colonial governance techniques and technologies around the world. This has both reaped tremendous profit for Israel, and perhaps more importantly, has ensured the installation of Israel-supporting liberal and fascist regimes (to be understood as close neighbors on a political continuum, rather than being in opposition to one another) throughout the world.
Israel trains national police and military forces around the world; and Palestine has served as a laboratory for the development of technologies of surveillance and violent repression which have in turn been exported around the world to be deployed against migrants, against dissident movements—like our comrades in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the United States fighting ICE—and also (as USB makes clear in its statement) against workers. The Epstein files give us countless examples of how Israel works to support and technologically facilitate this sort of repression, including recent revelations about Epstein’s efforts to connect Ehud Barak with Peter Thiel and Palantir. Palantir now has a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and has been used extensively by ICE to track all newly-defined “terrorists” who oppose it, regardless of citizenship status.
Most of us know about U.S. government interference on every continent in every election in any country where there’s a chance a leftist or socialist government could win, and about the fact that it is behind every coup against a government it doesn’t like. Fewer realize that Israel is no less involved in regime change around the world, sometimes taking on a greater role than its primary sponsor, in working to overthrow leftist and socialist regimes that are inclined to support Palestinians’ right to exist. Here again, the release of the Epstein files has helped bring these connections to a broader audience. As one Instagram account poignantly observed: “Virtually every single person in the Epstein files are [sic] incredibly rich Zionists who hate communism. The most evil people on earth love Israel and hate Marxism.”
To give one of dozens of examples from the Western hemisphere, Israel armed and financed general Rios Montt’s genocide against the Mayan people in Guatemala in the 1980s, with the full support of Rios Montt’s close friend, U.S. State Department ultra-Zionist ghoul Elliott Abrams. Rios Montt approached the genocide as an evangelical crusade, and his success in converting Guatemala to Zionist evangelism has ensured the consistent election of Israel-friendly governments since.
In 2019, Elliott Abrams was named special envoy to Venezuela while my comrades and I were defending that nation’s embassy—its sovereign territory—against the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC., after Trump tried to install Juan Guaido as president there. Incidentally at the time, Abrams was a member of the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s “Committee on Conscience.” The Committee—needless to say—has minimized the Guatemalan genocide (the Holocaust Museum does not even include Guatemala’s genocide in its abundant “country case studies”) and denies Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
Of course, Netanyahu was among the first to officially recognize Guaidó’s imaginary presidency, for which last year’s Nobel Peace laureate Marina Corina Machado immediately celebrated him on Twitter, expressing her excitement about reestablishing relations with Israel. Hugo Chavez had severed them in 2009, with a fiery speech declaring “Damn you, Israel” (Maldito seas, Israel) for its genocidal project against Palestinians.
In 2020, Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela, entered into a formal alliance with Likud, to “cooperate on political, ideological, and social matters…and advance the Western values to which both parties subscribe: freedom, liberty, and a market economy.” She had previously asked Netanyahu for Israel’s help to effect regime change in Venezuela, and has repeatedly claimed that “the struggle of Venezuela is the struggle of Israel.” And of course, last month after Trump did invade Venezuela, killing over 100 people and kidnapping the presidential couple, Machado gifted him her Nobel.
There are far too many examples to mention here of how the Zionist genocide is inextricable from U.S. and Israeli attacks on the sovereignty of peoples who have nobly defended the Palestinian people, like Venezuela and Cuba. I should note, however, that it’s no coincidence, as both the Epstein files and the Likud-Vente Venezuela accord clearly indicate, that the biggest enemy of Israel and its fascist allies around the world—are worker-led movements from and aligned with the Global South, challenging their precious “Western values” including the so-called “market economy.”
Writing on Global Israel, Shihade juxtaposes the concept to John Collins’s concept of Global Palestine, in which “the Palestine question has created such a powerful global solidarity movement because of the many issues intertwined with it that affect people all around the world, such as access to water, access to land, the right to mobility, the right to education, the right to work, the right to self-determination, the right to freedom of speech, and indeed, the right to life—a life with dignity.” The ongoing release of the Epstein files provides us further daily confirmation that many of these “intertwined issues” in fact directly result from the unchecked power of Global Israel—itself inextricably intertwined with U.S. imperialism, and capitalism itself.
The USB has made clear that February 6 was the “starting point” in port workers’ international and internationalist struggle against militarism and for sovereignty and human rights. They recognize, as we all must, that linking our struggles as Global Palestine is indeed the only way to defeat Global Israel.
