UPDATE. Daybreak outpouring of Bay Area picketers stops unloading of Israeli ship
Reageer (0)by Henry Norr
20-6-2010
If anyone had any doubts that the movement for justice in Palestine is growing by leaps and bounds, in numbers, breadth, and determination, check out what happened this morning in Oakland, CA:
• somewhere between 700 and 1,000 demonstrators from all over the San Francisco Bay Area made their way at 5:30 on a Sunday morning deep into the Port of Oakland to stage a spirited community-labor picket line in front of a berth where an Israeli freighter, the Zim Shenzhen, was due to dock;
• dock workers from Local 10 of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union refused to cross the picket line;
• under the terms of the ILWU contract, an arbitrator was summoned to the site, he upheld the legality of the dock workers' refusal to cross the line, and the company was compelled to cancel the shift and send the workers home.
Waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and chanting "Free, free Palestine - don't cross the picket line" and "An injury to one is an injury to all - the Israeli apartheid wall will fall," the demonstrators blocked three gates to the berth for more than four hours. The turnout was all the more impressive because the BART, the Bay Area subway system, doesn't even start running until around 8 a.m. on Sunday, and even after people got to the assembly point in West Oakland, we had to walk more than a mile to get to the berth.
The event was organized by an ad hoc coalition of dozens of community and labor organizations. The main leadership came from Palestinian-Americans and other Arab Americans, with the Bay Area branch of ANSWER also playing a key role. The idea arose in response to a call issued in the wake of Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, which asked workers around the world to stop unloading ships carrying Israeli goods.
For veteran Bay Area activists, today's victory echoed a historic milestone in 1984, when ILWU workers in San Francisco refused to unload a ship called the Nedlloyd Kimberley, because its cargo came from South Africa. Just 10 years later, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and apartheid - in its South African form - was dead.
With today's day shift cancelled, most of the picketers have now gone home to get caffeine, food, and rest, but we're not done yet: we're going back to the site at 4 o'clock this afternoon to put up another picket line, in hopes that the ILWU workers will again refuse to cross the line and unload the ship. If you're in the Bay Area, be there or be square - it's your chance to make history. Just head for the West Oakland BART at 4 to march or get a ride to Berth 58. There's more information here.
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Mondoweiss
Update from Oakland: Victory!
by Henry Norr
21-6-2010
Quick follow-up on today's action at the Oakland docks: we won! Something like 400 or 500 people - many who had also been there at 5:30 in the morning, plus others who hadn't made the first shift - turned up to resume the picket line at 4 p.m.
I was surprised there weren't more: I had assumed there would be far more people in the afternoon, with the BART running, but I guess even in the Internet age it's hard to get people out with only a a couple of hours notice.
Still, there were more than enough people to re-create strong picket lines at all three gates to the berth where the Israeli ship was coming in. Faced with the prospect of workers again refusing to cross the picket line and the arbitrator again ruling in their favor, the company that runs the dock (SSA, or Stevedoring Services of America, which has also run the port of Basra, Iraq, since the American invasion in 2003) elected to cancel the evening shift. The ship docked while we picketed, and presumably it will be unloaded tomorrow - right now we don't have the strength to keep up the picket line indefinitely, and even if we did, we can't really ask the longshore workers to stay off the job forever. But we succeeded in delaying it for a full day, which was exactly what we'd hoped to achieve.
And while none of the local TV stations made it to the 5:30 a.m. picket - despite an extensive media outreach effort - they were there in droves this afternoon. The couple of segments I caught tonight weren't too bad, even though they gave disproportionate time to the two Zionist counter-protestors who camped out, waving Israeli flags, across the street from the afternoon picket. As of 11:00 p.m. PDT on Sunday, Google News finds 284 stories about the action, and my sampling suggests that most of them - such as this story from the Bay Area News Group, which includes the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and most of the other community papers in the region - are fair if not actually sympathetic.
One final observation: the Oakland police were out in force from before dawn until our closing rally at 7 p.m., but aside from bugging us to stay out of the almost completely deserted roadway in front of the pier, they made no effort to interfere with the picketing, even when we blocked the two or three cars that tried to cross the line. In fact, they weren't even dressed in riot gear, and some of them went out of their way to be polite. Quite a change from their behavior at the same location in April 2003, when we called a similar early-morning community-labor picket to protest a ship being loaded with supplies for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the cops responded by blasting us, without the slightest provocation, with an array of "sub-lethal" toys they had recently received from the Department of Homeland Security, including "flash-bang" grenades and guns firing wooden dowels and bean-bag rounds.
I'll never forget either that action or today's, but this one was a lot more satisfying!
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