Italy’s general strike for Palestine

Italy’s wave of mobilisation and general strikes for Palestine in September and October 2025 was unprecedented. Millions of workers and young people stopped work, blocking roads, railways and ports across the country to demand an end to the state of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and to Italy’s complicity.

This wave of mobilisation needs to be situated within a broader process of imperial restructuring and resistance. In the following two parts of this article, I argue that Palestine has become a key revolutionary node within a global system of immiseration—a system that sees the Zionist state as one of its garrisons in the Middle East and North Africa and that increasingly also affects the working classes of the imperialist centres.

The choice of the general strike as the form of action was not accidental. It built on the methods forged in the logistics sector: a “logistics spring”, which was inspired by the 2011 Arab uprisings. It was led by immigrant workers from the region who then emerged as key cadres within the independent trade union Sindacato Intercategoriale Cobas (Cross-Sector Syndicate, SI Cobas). In the post-2022 phase of open inter-imperialist conflict between NATO and Russia during the Ukraine war, SI Cobas used the general strike to link war and militarism to exploitation, racism and welfare retrenchment.

After October 2023, Palestine widened and further politicised this struggle. Palestinian youth organisations and radical unions such as SI Cobas responded immediately to the call of Palestinian trade unions, extending the blockades and strikes as tools of material solidarity with the resistance. After one and a half years of relative isolation and targeted state repression, the Global Sumud Flotilla—and the call by Genoa’s Collettivo Autonomo Portuali (Autonomous Dockworkers’ Collective, CALP) to “block everything” in the case that Israel attacked these vessels—catalysed a convergence between these radical forces and broader layers of the labour movement. Mass pressure from below pushed the largest union confederation, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General Confederation of Labour, CGIL), to adopt disruptive tactics that its own leadership had long resisted. The consequences are far reaching.

Counter-revolution and imperial restructuring

Since the 2008 economic crash, as the Marxist economist Michael Roberts has noted, major capitalist economies have remained mired in a “long depression”, marked by sluggish growth and declining profitability.1 Inter-imperialist competition has intensified, particularly between the Western bloc and China-Russia, accelerating a global scramble for resources, labour reserves and geopolitical influence. Emerging from decades of imperial neoliberal restructuring, and inspired by the Second Intifada and Iraqi resistance to occupation, the 2011 Arab uprisings revealed the transformative power of workers and so-called “surplus populations”. As Karl Marx argued, unemployed and under-employed workers are central to accumulation: imperialism expands these populations and deepens exploitation, but also generates new forms of class power.

The uprisings directly challenged Zionism, the US-led imperial order and the interests of world imperialism, with the state of Israel as its garrison against the Arab revolution.2 This is why both imperial blocs joined the Gulf monarchies and the Zionist state to support the counter-revolution that started to coalesce with NATO’s 2011 war on Libya and culminated in Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s 2013 military coup in Egypt. The result was a new counter-revolutionary order designed to crush dissent, entrench neocolonial extraction and expand labour reserves.

Italy played a central role. The 2011 war on Libya contributed to state disintegration and enabled a regime of predatory extraction in which Western corporations—above all the Italian oil giant ENI—secured strategic energy fields, while abandoning earlier commitments to pay reparations for Italy’s colonial crimes. ENI has long acted as a parallel foreign policy apparatus, striking deals with Libyan militias involved in fuel, weapon and human smuggling to protect its operations.3 The same militias were then recruited, funded and trained by the Italian state and the European Union (EU) to enforce “border controls”, that is, to maintain a now well-known system of detention, extortion, forced labour and pushbacks.

A similar dynamic unfolded in Egypt after ENI’s 2015 discovery of the Zohr gas field, which deepened the EU and Italy’s partnership with the el-Sisi regime. Under the banner of “stability”, the EU consolidated Egypt’s “militarised capitalism”, enabling a new cycle of extraction, debt and repression that dramatically expanded the Egyptian diaspora—from 6 to 12 million people from 2013 to 2021—feeding Europe’s racialised labour markets.4 In the same period, Italy became one of the Zionist state’s most reliable EU partners, strengthening military, energy and security cooperation. From 2021, Frontex deployed Israeli-made Elbit drones, tested in Gaza, to police migration in the Mediterranean.

The mechanisms are clear. Imperialism expands labour reserves, while EU-funded “border controls” trap immigrants in place and selectively channel them towards Europe as a racialised workforce under conditions of blackmail. As the EU entrenches extraction, detention and super-exploitation across North Africa, successive Italian governments reinforced its domestic counterpart through a series of security and immigration decrees tightening residence requirements, abolishing humanitarian protection, expanding detention, accelerating deportations, broadening police powers and seeking to criminalise pickets and blockades. The aim was to intensify exploitation and suppress militant labour organising in Italy as well.

As inter-imperialist rivalries escalated following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these imperial dynamics of extraction, exploitation and repression deepened further, intensifying Italy’s social crisis. The EU sought to diversify energy away from Russia, subsidise strategic industries, militarise its economy and cut social spending. The 2022 REPowerEU plan translated into a programme of neocolonial expansion, intensified nuclear and fossil dependence, and deeper ties with the Zionist entity and the Egyptian dictatorship.5 Far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Mattei Plan for Africa operationalised this plan by positioning Italy as the EU’s energy hub and aligning key state-owned corporations around a unified industrial-military strategy, spanning energy, logistics, border-enforcement and education.

In June 2022, the EU-Egypt-Israel gas deal (rolled over in 2025) routed “Israeli” gas via Egyptian Liquefied Natural Gas plants to Europe, paving the way for ENI and BP to divest from Zohr, making Egypt dependent on “Israeli” gas. Although the 7 October 2023 attacks disrupted this normalisation trajectory, in late October 2023, the Zionist state awarded offshore gas exploration licenses, including off the coast of Gaza, to a consortium including ENI. This embedded Italy even more deeply in the architecture of Zionist genocide. In December 2023, Italy’s National Recovery & Resilience Plan integrated RePowerEU, redirecting funds from post-pandemic recovery into energy infrastructure, dual-use technological innovation and defence-linked manufacturing.

Social crisis

Despite the scale of this imperial restructuring, Italy’s main trade union confederations have mounted no meaningful opposition over the past 15 years.6 After 2022, they largely adapted to Meloni’s sovereigntist project, with its open neocolonial ambitions, anti-immigrant racism, Atlanticist rearmament and authoritarianism—under the illusion that attacks on workers abroad and on immigrants and welfare recipients at home could be absorbed without undermining the so-called “working class”. They even bet that reinforcing Italy’s imperial posture might deliver selective gains in exchange for “responsible” behaviour. Hence, they followed a line of cooperation with the bosses and reduced themselves to the role of service providers, while repression of dissent deepened.

What these trade unions failed to grasp is that Italy’s post-2022 growth model cannot deliver better wages or secure jobs. As Luca Scacchi argues, Italy’s attempt to reposition itself within the Atlantic bloc’s reshoring of low-value production rests on low wages, fragmented contracts and deeper exploitation.7 Industrial production remains below pre-Covid-19 levels and is concentrated in machinery and capital goods, while defence spending—already above the 2 percent NATO threshold—will reach 3.5 percent in 2026, with armaments investment up 60 percent since 2022.8 Under the new EU-United States tariff agreement, the EU has pledged to invest $600 billion (£452 billion) in the US—three times Europe’s 2024 trade surplus with the US—further constraining domestic room for manoeuvre.

At the same time, deepening neocolonial extraction has further entrenched racialised exploitation throughout the system, driving down wages and conditions for the entire working class. This wage compression is not an aberration but a structural pillar of Italy’s competitiveness and militarised accumulation.

This context exposes the bankruptcy of the major unions’ cooperation with the bosses and the government: rather than defending workers, it delivered contracts that worsened conditions and deepened impoverishment. The only significant exceptions were in transport and logistics, where the sector’s expansion, along with sustained militancy by independent unions, forced employers to concede improvements. Instead of learning from these struggles, the major unions distanced themselves from the most militant sections of the working class. They refused to recognise, and at times actively repressed, the potential of immigrant workers’ struggles. In 2025, the CGIL shifted the focus of its initiative onto the terrain of a referendum on layoffs, precarious work, workplace safety and immigrants’ citizenship rights—and was defeated.

After three years of the Meloni government, the combined effect of crisis dynamics, inflation, government’s reforms, militarisation and lack of widespread workers’ initiative has been the erosion of workers’ living standards across all sectors. The only EU country where real wages have fallen for 30-years, Italy now has the lowest median wage in Western Europe. In-work poverty affects about one in ten workers—three times as many among immigrants.9 The rollback of the citizens’ income in January 2024 excluded nearly half of previous beneficiaries (526,000 households)—disproportionately immigrant (72 percent), tenant and working-poor households.10 In 2024, poverty and social exclusion rose to 22.8 percent of the population (13.5 million people).11 Absolute poverty now affects 5.7 million people, 9.8 percent of the population: about 6.2 percent of Italian families and more than five times as many immigrant families (35.2 percent).12 Although overqualification affects 22.6 percent of immigrant workers (vs 6.5 percent of Italian), the estimated wage gap averages 35 percent (42 percent among women).13 Youth unemployment climbed to above 20 percent in autumn 2025, and Italy is the country with the second highest percentage of youth neither in employment nor in education or training.14

Defiant material solidarity

To understand the radicalising impact of the Palestinian’s struggle in Italy, it is not enough to trace these counter-revolutionary threads. We must follow another thread, one that begins with the unfinished revolutions of 2011.

When they arrived in Italy, many of the Egyptian, Moroccan and other immigrant logistics workers who later became the backbone of SI Cobas faced 18-hour shifts, wages of €700-800 (£613-700) a month, wage theft and daily humiliations—conditions painfully similar to the ones they hoped they had left behind. For them, the 2011 uprisings were not just a struggle against dictatorship but the concrete possibility that their countries might break free of dependency, allowing them to return home and leave this super-exploitation behind. The uprisings, and the conjuncture that followed, profoundly empowered the diaspora. In their strikes, workers chanted “Here too, Tahrir Square!” and discovered, many for the first time, their collective power to shut down circulation and production. Under SI Cobas’s leadership, they built militant pickets, blockaded warehouses and forced employers into negotiations that doubled nationally negotiated wages, halved working hours and partially dismantled the subcontracting system. These victories produced a profound transformation of class consciousness: workers moved from feeling “clandestine” and “surplus” to understanding themselves as central to society. Their struggles reshaped the sector and the political horizon of the labour movement.

SI Cobas’s anti-imperialist orientation allowed it to grasp the nature of the new phase opened by the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine. The union denounced both Russia’s aggression and NATO’s escalation, rejecting any “lesser evil” logic between imperialist blocs. It argued that Italy’s government and media were instrumentalising solidarity with Ukrainians to justify rearmament, sanctions and rising living costs while intensifying domestic exploitation and repression. This war economy, according to the union, was inseparable from the militarisation of logistics, where the state intervened even more aggressively to protect corporate interests and contain the gains won by SI Cobas. The first general strike called by SI Cobas and other independent unions in October 2023 linked opposition to the war and the war economy to concrete demands on wages and conditions.

7 October 2023 marked a new phase in this anti-imperialist trajectory. As one organiser put it, “Palestine disrupts everything, radicalises the youth”.15 A network of Palestinian organisations, including the Young Palestinians and the Arab Palestinian Democratic Union, together with SI Cobas immediately responded to the call of the Palestinian trade unions and launched militant actions aimed at disrupting the supply chains of genocide and providing material support to the Palestinian resistance. Two general strikes and strategic blockades hitting warehouses, logistics hubs and ports (in November 2023 and February 2024) culminated in a national march in Milan, behind the banner: “With the Palestinian Resistance, Let’s Block the Colonial and Imperialist Wars!”. Actions multiplied and became more visible, including pickets outside arms manufacturer Leonardo and national broadcaster Rai. In Genoa, sustained pressure forced the municipal energy company Iren to cancel a contract with the Zionist water corporation Mekorot. In May 2024, solidarity with a student Gaza solidarity encampment in Bologna inspired workers at Dachscher Fercam to demand—and win—a clause banning the handling of Israeli goods, a measure informally implemented in the entire province. SI Cobas described this victory as a breakthrough:

[It] directly affects Israeli interests and is a material, not just political pressure on Israel. If generalised, it could force it to end its war of annihilation. We therefore call on freight and logistics workers throughout Italy and other countries to follow the example of the Dachser-Fercam workers in Bologna!16

Momentum continued to build. In June 2024, SI Cobas and Palestinian organisations called a national logistics strike, culminating in the successful blockade of Genoa’s port. Though tensions emerged with the militant Unione Sindacale di Base (Grassroots Syndicate Union) and Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali (Independent Port Workers’ Collective) over strategy, these actions helped normalise strikes and blockades as the main forms of “material solidarity” with the Palestinian resistance.17

The state’s reaction confirmed that this solidarity struck at the heart of Italy’s militarised accumulation. Minister of the interior Piantedosi explicitly named SI Cobas as a threat to justify a new “security decree” expanding police powers, criminalising blockades with up to six years in prison and introducing citizenship revocation for immigrants convicted of “terrorism” and “subversion”. The goal was clear: isolate and repress the most militant sectors of the labour movement—overwhelmingly immigrant workers—and sever their collaboration with Palestinian organisations and solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. For this reason, the government banned the 5 October 2024 national demonstration called by Palestinian groups in solidarity with the resistance. Although leaders linked to the Palestinian Authority retreated, Palestinian youth organisations marched anyway; the protest was authorised only at the last moment and met with heavy police repression. Soon afterwards, SI Cobas and the Rete Liberi/e di Lottare (Free-to-Fight Network) called a general strike and national demonstration against the security decree. 18 Yet, broader sections of the movement refused this strategy of confrontation—a stance that reflected their distance from the most combative sections of the class and the Palestine solidarity movement. This persistent fragmentation, which also characterised the November 2024 general strike, paved the way for the decree’s approval in April 2025, just days before SI Cobas’s third general strike for Palestine and the national demonstration in Milan called by Palestinian organisations.

From general strikes to General Strike

By the summer of 2025, the escalation of Zionist genocide and the deepening contradictions of Italy’s militarised accumulation generated broad opposition that began to erode this political fragmentation. In early June, parliamentary opposition parties mobilised 300,000 people in Rome for a “peace march” against the Israeli government.19 Days after, the predictable defeat of the union-initiated referendum triggered a crisis inside the CGIL, with widespread frustration at a strategy that had channelled labour discontent into an institutional terrain disconnected from workers’ organising. Meanwhile, international militancy intensified. At the beginning of June, French dockworkers in the Confédération Générale du Travail (Confederation of Labour) union refused to handle arms bound for the Zionist state, forcing a ZIM ship to leave Fos-sur-Mer without munitions. Workers in Genoa and Salerno organised pickets to prevent the same ZIM ship from docking. Moreover, the Madleen, the first vessel of the new Freedom Flotilla, sailed to Gaza, before being intercepted by Zionist forces on 9 June.

On 20 June, a new general strike called by independent unions against war, genocide and the war economy coincided with the national metalworkers’ strike for contract renewal organised by the three main unions.20 In Bologna, 10,000 metalworkers, including the general secretary of the Italiana Metalmeccanici (Italian Federation of Metalworkers), blocked the ring road: the first mass workers’ action that directly defied the new Security Decree. This pointed to a dynamic of radicalisation at the base of the major unions: workers were beginning to move beyond the narrow margins defended by their leaderships. This was happening when Italy’s expanded NATO commitments made clear that the margins for manoeuvre were contracting even further. The next day, two large but separate demonstrations in Rome (“Stop Rearming Europe!” and the anti-NATO “Let’s Disarm Them!”) confirmed both the scale of mobilisation and the continued fragmentation of the movement: a fragmentation that was becoming harder to maintain.

The turning point was the Global Sumud Flotilla. After a massive and unexpected mass collection for Gaza in Genoa, the CALP, the Unione Sindacale di Base (Base Trade Union, USB) and Music for Peace linked the fate of the Flotilla to strike action: “If they touch the Flotilla, we block Europe.” The CALP and USB’s call for a 22 September general strike saw the convergence of much of the independent union movement. Feeling the pressure, the CGIL leadership, despite its limited engagement in the Palestine movement, rushed to call a separate general strike for Palestine on 19 September. Because of legal restrictions, this manoeuvre effectively barred public-sector workers from participating. It backfired badly. By late September, the CGIL itself publicly tied its strike strategy to the fate of the Flotilla.

When Zionist forces intercepted the mission, Italy witnessed an extraordinary day of action on 3 October: over 100 demonstrations, mass work stoppages and more than two million people taking to the streets.

The numbers tell us an important side of this story. The 22 September strike—called by the USB and other independent unions—recorded higher participation among public sector workers than the 3 October general strike (164,000 vs 151,000 people), even though the latter involved the full weight of the CGIL. The participation of education and research workers was central: it reached 11.31 percent on 22 September and 9.19 percent on 3 October, with rates approaching 40 percent in Tuscany and Emilia as well as Milan and Rome, leading to many school closures. These figures far exceed participation in previous general strikes (6.09 percent in November 2024 and 7.16 percent in November 2023). Crucially, two-thirds of public sector strikers were education and research workers, whereas they typically constitute around a half.21 After mobilising for Palestine in schools and universities at the beginning of the school year, these workers were not allowed to strike on 19 September and therefore decided to go on strike with the independent unions three days later. This exposed the CGIL leadership’s miscalculation and its risk of losing members to more militant unions.

Another crucial factor behind the success of 3 October, highlighted by Luca Scacchi, was the question of legal strike coverage.22 SI Cobas had proclaimed the general strike well in advance, insisting that its timing should be determined by workers’ organisation rather than the fate of the Flotilla. The USB and CGIL, by contrast, argued that the state of Israel’s attack on the Flotilla was an “exceptional circumstance” that allowed for derogation from the ten-day notice requirement. Even if this interpretation was challenged by the Commissione di Garanzia (Guarantee Commission)—which signalled the possibility of sanctions—the USB and CGIL decided to defy this decision and go ahead.23 In this context, even if the CGIL and USB did not clearly communicate this to their members, SI Cobas’s timely proclamation provided the only effective legal coverage for the majority of workers, protecting them from potential disciplinary consequences.

This dynamic revealed intense pressure from below for a genuinely unitary strike, and a level of grassroots determination that overcame the manoeuvres of the major union leaderships. The legal protection provided by SI Cobas validated its long-held position that only a strike rooted in workers’ organisation and genuine anti-imperialism can become a tool of mass defiance.

International and national coverage highlighted an “unprecedented” youth presence and the important participation of organised labour. Three general strikes in two weeks generated a state of permanent mobilisation: repeated rallies, marches and generalised blockades of railways, roads, ports and highways. These actions spread well beyond major cities, including to smaller centres where such mobilisations had not occurred for years, if ever. On 4 October, one million people marched in Rome at the call of Palestinian organisations in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance. This was the same demonstration that the Italian government had first tried to ban and then repressed a year before. Over those two weeks of mobilisation, protesters showed the same defiance first expressed by SI Cobas and Palestinian youth groups. Even though the new security decree criminalises blockades with penalties of up to six years in prison, “Let’s Blockade Everything!” became the rallying cry that drove hundreds of thousands into action.

This wave of mobilisation disrupted the infrastructure of Italy’s militarised accumulation and its deep ties with the state of Israel. From 22 September to 3 October (and beyond), independent dockworkers’ unions repeatedly blocked ZIM vessels. The Maltese-flagged tanker Seasalvia was stopped from loading 30,000 tonnes of crude oil bound to the Zionist state; in Taranto, ENI was even forced to revoke authorisation for the ship to dock at its refinery. At the same time, workers inside Leonardo—Italy’s largest arms producer—launched the petition “Not in my name, not with my work”, which rapidly surpassed 20,000 signatures, publicly refusing to be complicit in genocide and demanding an end to all military cooperation with the state of Israel.

There is no way back

In the weeks following the writing of this piece, Italy was expected to see two general strikes, one on 28 November called by independent unions against the war budget and in solidarity with Palestine, and the 12 December strike called separately by the CGIL. This separation is not accidental. The radical nature of the September-October general strikes for Palestine cut directly against the CGIL’s long-standing line of cooperation with the bosses and the state. The CGIL leadership could also exploit the divisions that—despite the extraordinary convergence achieved in September-October—persisted both among leaderships and at the base. Even amid mass mobilisation, the strikes did not see a strong presence of industrial workers and lacked organised participation from workplaces. Attempts quickly emerged to contain disruption and redirect the movement into a “responsible” parliamentary alternative, at times even invoking “national pride” to challenge Meloni.

A parallel narrative has presented these as Italy’s first two general strikes for Palestine, erasing not only the three general strikes called by SI Cobas and other independent unions since November 2023, but also the leadership of immigrant workers within the movement.

When I stood on the picket lines this past year—alongside Egyptian, Moroccan, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Italian and Latin American comrades, just to name a few nationalities—the counter-revolution was never something abstract. It was a living thread linking the conditions they left behind to the humiliations in Libya, the deadly crossings of the deserts and the Mediterranean, and the exploitation, racism and repression they confronted in Italy’s warehouses and society. For these workers, Palestine means defiance, the same defiance they showed when they held their blockade while a truck driver revved his engine inches from their bodies: “We’re all going to die anyway.”

Palestine is not only part of their own story of dispossession and displacement; it is part of their struggle against what they described as the “time of slavery” and of their own desire to return. As a SI Cobas coordinator said during the April 2025 general strike: “Our story is part of the story of the Palestinian people. And when we defend the Palestinian people, we defend ourselves. Their struggle is our struggle”.24

The mobilisations in September and October showed that—as imperialist wars, genocide, militarism, impoverishment and exploitation fuse into a single global process of class struggle— Italy’s worsening social crisis is pushing broader layers of workers, youth and so-called surplus populations, including second generation youth excluded from citizenship, to see the Palestinian resistance as part of their own struggle. Something else also emerged in parts of those demonstrations: a growing awareness that defeating Zionism requires the revival of the revolutionary movement across and beyond the Middle East and North Africa—the renewal of the interrupted revolutions of the 2010s.

This lived internationalism must be the starting point and the compass. It is through this internationalism, anti-racist solidarity and mass defiance that we can break through decades of union paralysis, disrupting the supply chains of genocide that exploit and repress us here as well.

The genocide is not over. A new phase has begun, also shaped by the strength of Palestinian resistance and the international solidarity movement. In the face of the United Nations Security-Council endorsed colonial “peace plan”, the task of every revolutionary is to strengthen and extend this momentum and bring organised labour to the centre of the movement.

Lucia Pradella is an Italian Marxist based in London who helps coordinate University and College Workers for Palestine (UK).

Notes