On October 16, 2023, just weeks after the beginning of Israel’s intensified genocidal assault on the Gaza strip, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions issued a historic call. The federation asked workers across the world to refuse to build and transport weapons for Israel, as well as to take action against complicit companies and pressure their governments to end military trade. On October 31, Belgian transport workers’ unions answered, announcing that they would not handle arms shipments to Israel. “The loading and unloading of these weapons,” they wrote, “helps to provide organisations to kill innocent people… As trade unions, we declare our solidarity with those who are campaigning for peace.”

The Belgian unions have since been joined by dockworkers in Italy, France, Spain, Morocco, Greece, Sweden, and more, who have refused complicity in the supply chain of genocide and refused to handle shipments of arms, ammunition, airplane parts, and other military equipment. In Italy, general strikes have swept the country in solidarity with Palestine, as not only transport workers but all working people withhold their labor from a national and global economy that enriches war-makers with the blood of Palestinians.

These workers did not wait for their governments to officially declare an arms embargo, but realized their power as laborers to enact one directly (not for nothing, many of these governments have since issued formal arms embargo legislation). Nor are these spontaneous uprisings. They are the result of long-term organizing, research, and international coordination towards collective action that is both material and symbolic, both practical and highly politicized. They are an expression of the working class’s political consciousness and autonomy, over and against capital. They are, in other words, acts of class struggle.

The labor movement in the United States has been slow to follow our comrades overseas, for a variety of reasons that are too numerous and complex to treat here—decades of anti-communist repression, bourgeois cooptation, class collaboration, Zionist propaganda, and legal restrictions on strikes and other labor organizing. Despite valiant efforts like those of dockworkers in Oakland, the vision of a worker-led arms embargo has remained marginal to pro-Palestine, socialist, and labor organizing in the US.¹ The idea that American workers could leverage their collective power to directly weaken the supply chain of genocide has been widely dismissed as far-fetched and idealistic. As a result, the bulk of arms embargo campaigns in the US have hinged on making appeals directly to members of Congress; an approach that has evidently borne limited fruit.

I argue here that an arms embargo campaign that centers workers as protagonists of the struggle and actively cultivates anti-imperialist consciousness in the US labor movement is an indispensable task for socialists in the present moment. It is our best chance to impede Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which continues despite the so-called “ceasefire,” as well as its campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and south Lebanon. An arms embargo is also a powerful vehicle of class struggle within the US, as it requires us first to cultivate class consciousness through mapping the relations of capital and imperialism, then to act on that consciousness to seize hold of and transform those relations. 

Launching Break the Chain

The principled actions of international workers in solidarity with Palestine inspired the formation of DSA’s national Labor for an Arms Embargo campaign (LFAE), which seeks to “organize and use [the] power [of the working class] to end the genocide of Palestinians.” I have spent the last year working on the Break the Chain campaign, a local iteration of LFAE. Break the Chain was established in NYC–DSA in June 2025 after research from the Palestinian Youth Movement revealed that New York’s airports and seaports are a major shipping hub for Israeli military cargo. 

In the face of these revelations, amidst a horrific livestreamed genocide that continued despite years of protest, organizers in NYC–DSA’s Anti-War Working Group felt compelled to halt the deadly shipments. They convened an organizing committee and drafted a campaign proposal, which passed a branch-level vote with overwhelming popular support to become an official chapter campaign.² 

The initial phase of the campaign was the most challenging (so far). On the surface, our demand was simple: end the transfer of arms to Israel. But who exactly could end it, and how? Should we focus on one facility, or multiple across the supply chain? Had anything like this been attempted before in New York City, or anywhere in the US? We knew from the beginning that Break the Chain would be labor-centered, but which specific workers were we trying to reach, and how? These questions opened up a period of intense research, strategizing, and debate. We gathered as much information as we could, including by talking to other organizers in our networks, and used it to create power maps. We explored many avenues that turned out to be dead ends. 

Eventually, after months of fact-finding and deliberation, we decided to focus our efforts on JFK airport, which is the biggest exporter of goods to Israel of any US airport or seaport, with over 20% market share, as well as an iconic and accessible location for NYC residents. Since then, we have been popularizing the demand for an arms embargo by speaking to workers and community members directly. We have volunteers go out every week to flyer, table, and canvass, to let people know about the arms shipments and invite them to join our campaign. We created a website and Instagram, and worked with our DSA-endorsed candidates and elected officials to create promotional videos for social media. And we are continuing worker outreach and training efforts, offering organizing trainings and workers’ circles for hundreds of union members who want to take action for Palestine in their local.

After a year of research, mapping, flyering, tabling, one-on-ones, and (so, so many) meetings, I am more convinced than ever that the struggle for an arms embargo is not a pipe dream but one of the most important sites for socialist class struggle in the United States today. I hope the Break the Chain campaign can serve as an inspiration for other socialists, anti-imperialists, and labor organizers across the country who are ready to take up the call for an arms embargo.

What Is An Arms Embargo?

I should clarify briefly what I mean when I say “arms embargo,” because the term has been used with imprecision. In short, I mean nothing more or less than the total end of all military trade, including exports, imports, and transport, of material goods like weapons, ammunition, aircraft and vehicle parts, fuses, etc., as well as intelligence, research, software, and technical knowledge.³ This definition of an arms embargo, as opposed to other important but ultimately insufficient goals like the end of US military aid to Israel, is necessary because Israel relies on the “qualitative military edge” provided by American technology to perpetrate genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. Israel could theoretically use its own money to purchase this equipment at full price and continue the genocide, but it could not develop the sheer productive capacity necessary to maintain military domination on its own (at least, not for a long time). 

The arms embargo operates within the circuit of capital—it disrupts, by definition, the existing systems of production, distribution, and consumption. Purely political demands like the end of military aid, however commendable, depend ultimately on the actions of powerful politicians. The arms embargo, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of direct, democratic intervention by the thousands of people materially implicated in the production and circulation of military goods. No collection of laypeople, however large, could simply push the figurative button to stop aid packages going from Washington to Tel Aviv. But dockworkers can refuse to load ships, cargo handlers can refuse to load airplanes, truck drivers can refuse to move containers, pilots can refuse to fly, and mechanics can refuse to repair. It is not only possible; it is happening across the world right now.  

This line of argumentation has earned myself and my comrades plenty of charges of naïveté. The US is too large. Union density is too low. The existing unions are too conservative. There is truth to these critiques (though I remain optimistic despite the odds). But an arms embargo campaign need not necessarily rise to the level of a general—or even a dockworkers’—strike to be a potent and necessary form of class struggle.

Cognitive Mapping & Class Consciousness

Class struggle requires class consciousness—an understanding of one’s position in the relations of production, of oneself as shaped by and acting within vast, powerful material systems that both place objective constraints on and create opportunities for subjective action. The economic conditions of global capitalism and its ideology of neoliberal individualism have made such an understanding exponentially more difficult. But an arms embargo campaign requires the intentional exposure of the relations that capital hides—the work of mapping power, which is simultaneously the work of mapping vulnerability.

In his brilliant Postmodernism, the late Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson diagnosed an objective situation: due to the immense complexity and increasing globalization of late 20th-century capitalist systems of production, it had become more difficult for individuals to apprehend their own role in these global systems. As labor was abstracted, outsourced, and atomized, old class relations seemed to fade and disappear. Against this obfuscation of the means and relations of production—the apparent disappearance of “class” as a category can only benefit the ruling class—Jameson proposed a strategy of “cognitive mapping.” Cognitive mapping is “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.” For Jameson, “cognitive mapping” is a solution to an aesthetic problem, but I have never been satisfied to render such essential work entirely unto the poet. In my work on Break the Chain, I have experienced firsthand how the practical task of mapping the supply chain is also a political act of cognitive mapping.⁴ 

For most of us, the vast sprawl of global logistics remains abstract and only breaks through into reality at moments of crisis (who knew what the Strait of Hormuz was before it was blockaded?). But an arms embargo campaign requires us to intentionally and proactively combat that abstraction, for the simple reason that to stem the flow of military cargo, it is necessary first to know precisely where that military cargo comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there. 

Our investigation has uncovered, so far, 38 companies complicit in the movement of military cargo from the NYC metropolitan area to the Israeli military, with hundreds more suspected but unconfirmed. These companies are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. Many are obscure, tiny contractors that produce only one specific part, but others are household names: FedEx, Delta, and United Airlines all transport weapons and military cargo out of civilian airports. Many airlines that Americans use in their daily lives are part of the US Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a program which allows private airlines to contract with the Department of War (DoW) to provide aircraft in case of wartime emergency in exchange for receiving DoW business during “peacetime.”

Our investigation is an act of cognitive mapping. It resituates the seemingly isolated and innocent activity of flying on a commercial airline in the global flow of people, goods, and capital and reattaches the subjective experience of daily life to the objective totality of capitalist production—in particular, to the historical situation of imperialist exploitation that has facilitated the genocide of the Palestinians. It is also an act of burgeoning class consciousness: to recognize oneself as belonging to the class that rides, loads, builds, fuels, directs, cleans, or flies the plane, rather than the one that profits from it and decides where it will go and what it will carry, or the one for whom the contents of its belly mean death.

Collective Action Across the Map

But to have a map is one thing. To use it is another. This is the real power of an arms embargo campaign: it requires the creation of a map that is not sterile and academic but living, dynamic, and burning with a call to action. The arms embargo invites us to take our complicity in the global military supply chain as the starting point of struggle, rather than as the endpoint of analysis. It not only points us towards the multiple nodes and vectors of commodity flow that capital wants so badly to hide but gives us a concrete goal that can only be achieved through collective action.

Again, this collective action need not necessarily be a strike. Workers may opt to pass a resolution in their local, form an investigative committee, hold a rally, write an open letter, speak to the media, or testify at a local port authority board meeting. As we have seen with Break the Chain, the demand for an arms embargo often functions as a catalyst for unionized workers to get seriously involved in their union when before they had been passive “paper members”—it may even act as an impetus for non-union workers to unionize or form other kinds of affinity groups. Once workers realize their unique positionality and power as workers, they can begin to imagine new ways to enact material, democratic control over the conditions and products of their labor.

The arms embargo campaign is also unique in the ways that it marries the practical and the political. This sets it apart from, on the one hand, “bread-and-butter” labor issues that improve workers’ lives but fail to adequately politicize those improvements and, on the other hand, abstract political claims that demand workers take this or that position without responding to the material needs of workers themselves. It is often bemoaned that socialist and anti-imperialist organizers fail to “meet workers where they’re at” and instead expect them to go from apathetic to quoting Lenin in a matter of weeks. 

A democratic, worker-led arms embargo campaign provides this missing link: these weapons shipments are dangerous and unfair to American workers as well as deadly to Palestinians. At JFK, for example, research from The Intercept revealed that one cargo flight bound for an Israeli weapons manufacturer contained 14 tons of nitrocellulose, a highly flammable and explosive compound used to produce ammunition. An accident could affect not only the workers handling this cargo directly, but anyone in the vicinity—nitrocellulose was responsible for a 2015 explosion in Tianjin, China, that killed 165 people, recent factory explosions in Bloomfield, CT, and Prescott, WI, and more.

The demand for an arms embargo cuts across issues of safety and democracy in the workplace for domestic workers and life and dignity for people under siege in Palestine. At one stroke, it provides us the framework to understand the deep connections between our everyday lives in the US and the lives of people overseas, and the means to seize hold of and transform those connections. It challenges us to create the kind of cognitive map Jameson envisioned, and then to put that map to concrete use—not merely to describe the world, as Marx would say, but to change it. 

Beyond even the project of the arms embargo itself, the Break the Chain campaign has brought people together in new ways, spawning new connections and ideas about how to organize for a better world. It has not only helped empower people to become active as union members, but brought people into DSA and introduced them to or helped them to deepen their understanding of the ideas of socialism and internationalism. It has built and strengthened ties between the labor movement, the Palestine movement, and socialist organizations. At the time of this writing, three union locals have passed resolutions calling for an arms embargo at JFK, fifteen labor and community organizations have officially endorsed the campaign, and many of them have been involved in the campaign itself. It has expanded the structures of collaboration between DSA’s rank-and-file and our elected officials, who have supported the campaign by hosting joint canvasses and appearing in campaign videos (more to come…). It has helped hundreds of ordinary people—including myself—develop concrete skills to lead the fight against capitalism and imperialism.

When we began this campaign, we had a handful of dedicated organizers with one ambitious but deeply-felt goal. An arms embargo in New York City felt distant—just shy of impossible—but vitally necessary. A year later, we have hundreds of people involved in the campaign across several areas of work: creating communications, conducting research, speaking to workers in the field, hosting events, and more. We have plenty of work left to do, but an arms embargo, led by working people in solidarity with Palestine, feels closer than it ever has before.

What is class struggle but this: the identification and exploitation of contradictions in the material system of capitalism; the politicization of working-class life as it already exists and the construction of new forms of collective power; the recognition of our shared destiny as peoples of this world and of our shared enemy in the class which destroys the conditions of life for its own enrichment? There are, of course, other forms of class struggle. Our task is the size of the world, the shape of the whole human project. To achieve it will require a diversity of tactics and struggle on many fronts. 

But to those for whom the arguments and ideas in this essay have rung true, to those who seek new avenues of action in solidarity with the people of Palestine, I invite you to join us in the fight for an arms embargo. If you are in New York City, you can fill out this form to get in contact with an onboarder for the Break the Chain campaign. Comrades in other chapters can reach out to DSA’s national Arms Embargo Organizing Committee to get connected to ongoing campaigns in your area or discuss how you might start one.

Until Palestine is free—until victory.

This article’s photograph was placed in the public domain by Wikimedia Commons user Ukrain4pal. It depicts the general strike for Gaza in Ancona, 2025.

1.  Oakland dockworkers with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union refused to unload cargo bound for Israel in 2021 and have participated in protests against Israeli shipments in Oakland.  ︎
2. I joined the campaign a few months after its creation. Shoutout to my incredible comrades who were there from Day 1! ︎
3. Refer to the BDS Movement’s definition of a “military embargo.” I am choosing to use “arms embargo” because it is more familiar to a general audience and to maintain terminology from LFAE. ︎
4. You can explore some of the mapping Break the Chain has done on our website: wecanbreakthechain.com. ︎

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