Each day the headlines show the ways in which Israel’s offensive has shifted into a new and starker phase. The famine has become a weapon of war and nearly 400 people — many of them children — have starved to death. Over two million people have been ordered to flee Gaza City into al-Mawasi, a tiny strip of land already under bombardment. In the West Bank, raids, settler assaults, and mass arrests intensify to extinguish public life and resistance. Beyond Palestine’s borders, the war spills outward with the first-ever strike on Doha and lethal raids on Sanaa and al-Jawf in Yemen, showing how Israel is now treating the entire region as a battlefield. 

Yet these headlines coexist with their counterpoint: a deepening crisis of legitimacy that refuses to be resolved, visible in the mass demonstrations that continue to gather in city centers — last weekend’s protest in Brussels was among the largest — and in the stubborn insistence, across countries and sectors of society, that the siege is not a natural disaster but a political choice. Within this landscape, June’s Global March to Gaza and the flotillas condensed an internationalist determination to meet the moment with more than witness. The second flotilla included Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls, an unmistakable signal that segments of the labor vanguard are beginning to see themselves in the mirror of Palestine.

Now the Global Sumud Flotilla, the largest humanitarian convoy in history, sails with a wager that is humanitarian in form and political in content: to sail straight for Gaza with aid and put the blockade on trial before the world, forcing governments to say whether they will let the ships pass or continue to help keep two million people under siege. Among the volunteers are figures like Greta Thunberg, Susan Sarandon, Liam Cunningham, Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila, historian Kleoniki Alexopoulou, and human rights activist Yasemin Acar — but so are workers like Bruno Gilga, a university worker from the University of São Paulo, militant within the union SINTUSP, and leader of the of the Revolutionary Workers’ Movement (MRT) — the Brazilian section of the Trotskyist Fraction — who previously joined the Global March to Gaza. His role is politically significant: as a worker and socialist militant, he shows how the flotilla can go beyond being a relief mission to embody a kind of internationalist solidarity that is tied to the organized power of the working class.

It is precisely because the flotilla carries this political charge, and not only humanitarian cargo, that Israel has treated it as a threat to be broken in advance. Before the ships gathered, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir moved to brand participants as “terrorists,” authorize seizures, and consign crews to high-security prisons. As soon as the convoy reached Tunis, where thousands packed the port in a moving welcome, two attacks followed: drones struck the Família Madeira in Tunisian waters and later set the Alma’s upper deck ablaze. The Tunisian government provided political cover that normalized the aggression. The meaning could not be clearer: the siege is sustained not only by firepower but by the compliance of governments and trade routes. To prevent that truth from spreading, Israel seeks to break the convoy before it sails further and to scare off those preparing to defend it.

But these threats were not unexpected and sectors of the working class were ready to meet them. In Genoa, dockworkers anticipated repression and announced that an attack on the flotilla would be met by a strike of their harbor and the blockade of the 13,000-14,000 containers a year bound for Israel — “If we lose contact with our vessels, even for twenty minutes, we’ll stop all over Europe.” In the Spanish state, student unions in Catalonia pledged to empty classrooms if the flotilla is touched; teachers in Madrid adopted the same stance; the Barcelona Mothers called on unions to prepare a strike; and Barcelona port workers echoed Genoa’s position. These are incipient steps, and they matter because they do not simply express outrage. They disrupt power directly: cargo that moves or doesn’t, classes that meet or don’t, shifts that run or don’t — this is the grammar through which a siege is enacted and the terrain on which it can be contested.

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From Brazil, the link between words and pressure points is equally clear. The university workers’ union SINTUSP declared without euphemism: “Don’t touch a single hair on the Flotilla activists’ heads! The State of Israel is a terrorist!” Petrobras refinery workers launched Nenhuma Gota (“Not a Drop”) after exposing a 51 percent increase in oil exports to Israel during the genocide. They voted in their assembly to oppose those shipments and issued a public statement supporting the flotilla. Blocking fuel and defending the convoy are, they insist, fronts of the same fight. After the first attack on the convoy, thousands of protesters in Tunisia flocked to the docks, showing how repression instantly provokes mass solidarity on the ground. This chain — Tunisian crowds, Italian ports, Spanish assemblies, Brazilian shop floors — shows that Gilga’s path is not an exception but part of a wider tendency: from campus organizing to the flotilla, workers and militants are finding ways to connect their struggles to the fight against the siege. 

These examples are of vital importance to activists in the United Kingdom and the United States alike. In London, under the Labour Party, nearly 900 people have been arrested in the course of Palestine Action’s civil disobedience, a measure of how far the state will go to criminalize solidarity. In the United States, under the second Trump administration, repression has also deepened — encampments cleared by police, students expelled and prosecuted, immigrants and labor militants detained and deported or placed under a magnifying glass. Yet the encampments produced a different kind of precedent. When University of California academic workers walked out in defense of students, they turned repression on campus into a workplace fight, forcing administrators who had normalized police intervention to reckon with a strike.

Since then, the limit has not been imagination but authorization. Union leaderships, including those that correctly called for a ceasefire  — including the UAW — have largely stopped at statements. The UAW leadership, for instance, invokes solidarity but offers no plan to act. Yet these are the same workers who carried out the historic 2023 strike against Big Three autoworkers, and they include powerful academic unions like the Student Workers of Columbia who have been targeted by the repression — proof of the power they hold. The question is not whether they can act, but whether their leaders will allow that solidarity to move from paper to action.

Inside state politics, figures like Zohran Mamdani, a New York State Assemblymember and frontrunning Democratic Mayoral candidate, who has become a reference point for many youth politicized around Palestine, has the ability to amplify the cause through rhetoric. But tied to a Democratic Party that funds Israel and advances new restrictions on protest, amplification only goes so far. Nothing in that lane substitutes for the organized use of power by workers and the pro-Palestine movement itself.

This is why the defense of the flotilla has to be built from below. In the Spanish State, students and teachers have already shown one path by voting in assemblies to walk out if the flotilla is attacked. The lesson is straightforward: we need open assemblies where students and workers can discuss, decide, and act together. From there, committees can coordinate actions — whether walkouts, strikes, or blockades — that turn solidarity into real pressure. Repression is real, but the answer is not to wait; it is to spread decision-making across schools, campuses, workplaces, neighborhoods, and other sites of resistance so the movement’s strength comes from its own organization.

And to those who look to politicians who have finally begun to speak of “limits” on Netanyahu or the famine in Gaza: the test is simple — will they defend the flotilla? We don’t place our trust there, but posing the question makes clear that the power to truly defend it lies in our own hands, through assemblies, strikes, and collective action.

The Global Sumud Flotilla condenses the contradictions of this moment: an escalating genocide, open complicity from both parties of imperialism and from the Arab regimes, the passivity of union leaderships, and at the same time burgeoning solidarity from below. Its political significance explains why it has already been attacked. For those following from abroad, it is crucial to track the flotilla’s evolving timeline: after the attacks in Tunisian waters, crews are reassessing routes and schedules, but it is now — as the ships regroup and prepare to set sail again — when repression is most likely and international solidarity most urgent. The coming days will be decisive. The flotilla will only survive if it is defended — by workers, students, and youth across the world. 

The examples in Genoa, Catalonia, and Brazil show that disruption, however incipient, is possible. The defense of the flotilla is therefore not a symbolic question but a practical test of how far this movement can go. From the imperialist centers to the region itself, real self-determination will depend on Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, and other workers breaking with their rulers. That horizon points to a free, socialist Palestine — what we do to defend the ships now on the water is part of that fight.