No to Guardianship over Gaza. No to a New Mandate over Palestine.

Block the war and genocide economy

Build working-class solidarity with Palestine

As workers and trade unionists meeting across borders, we join the Union of Professors and Employees of Birzeit University in denouncing the so-called “peace plan” endorsed by the UN Security Council [UN-SC 2803] as a new colonial project. 

For more than two years, Palestine has faced an unrelenting genocidal war across all the geographies of historic Palestine and beyond: mass murder, siege and starvation in Gaza; accelerating settler violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem; mass incarceration of political prisoners; attacks on refugee camps across the region; and Zionist strikes in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar. 

The proposed “transition authority,” “international stabilisation force,” and “reform programme” are brazen instruments to entrench Zionist settler colonialism, fragment the Palestinian people, and disarm the resistance under the guise of “peace.” 

We reject all forms of international guardianship, mandates, or trusteeship over Gaza and Palestine, and affirm the Palestinian people’s right to resist colonial domination, to return to their land, and to exercise full self-determination across historical Palestine.

The struggle for a free Palestine is a core trade-union issue. Imperialist war, militarism, austerity, and racism are tightening working-class exploitation, union repression, and authoritarianism everywhere. Activists are targeted under counter-terror legislation, banned from campuses, threatened with deportation, or criminalised for pickets, direct actions, and blockades. 

We reject the false division between “economic” and “political” struggles, and recognise that our task is not only to campaign but to organise industrial action that answers the call of Palestinian trade unions for material solidarity with their resistance.

Across the world, strikes and blockades for Palestine have shown that workers have the power to block the war and genocide economy: from ports to logistics hubs, universities, hospitals, railways, and public services. The strikes in Italy, Greece, Spain, and beyond demonstrate that organised labour can disrupt the supply chains of genocide and challenge the same imperial system that sustains the Zionist project and drives workers’ exploitation and repression everywhere.

As Birzeit University workers insist: power that does not guard rights cannot abolish them.

Tonight’s meeting brings together trade-unionists from Palestine, Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland, the UK, Egypt, Nigeria, South Korea, Argentina, Australia, Norway, and beyond to deepen coordination. 

This meeting reaffirms:

• Our commitment to defeating Zionism as a racist, settler-colonial project upheld by imperial powers and global capitalism.
• Our solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the unity of refugees, prisoners, workers, and youth across all geographies.
• Our rejection of the new regime of guardianship over Gaza and new mandate over Palestine.
• Our conviction that the international working class has the power to confront militarism, imperialism, and their global systems of exploitation.

We commit to:

• building international workers’ action to confront militarism, imperialism and repression, in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance;
• supporting campaigns to boycott and divest from institutions and corporations complicit in genocide;
• advancing a popular, workers-led embargo – economic, military, logistical, academic and cultural – against the Zionist state and all institutions complicit in genocide;
• defending workers and students facing retaliation for Palestine solidarity;
• preparing further coordinated international workplace actions and strikes as part of the emerging international movement to block everything that fuels genocide.

We call on trade-union bodies, workers’ organisations and social movements everywhere to endorse this statement, intensify mobilisation, and take concrete steps to bring broader sections of the labour movement into this struggle.

No to guardianship over Gaza. No to a new mandate over Palestine.

Block everything, everywhere!

Long live the Palestinian resistance!

Freedom for Palestine, from the river to the sea!

• University and College Workers for Palestine (UK)
• Union of Professors and Employees of Birzeit University (occupied Palestine)
• SI Cobas (Italy)
• Giovani Palestinesi d'Italia 
• AGD-UBA, Union Association of Teachers- University of Buenos Aires (Argentina)
• Egypt Solidarity Movement
• Stop the War Coalition - Solidarity to Palestine (Greece)
• Argyri Erotokritou, Board of National Union of Doctors in Public Hospitals (Greece)
• Sujin Cho, Co-Governance Member of Teachers in Solidarity with Palestinians (South Korea) 
• Padraic Gibson, National Councillor with the National Tertiary Education Union (Australia)