Interrupting circulations: the politics of infrastructure in contemporary mobilisations for Palestine

Abstract

An unprecedented popular mobilisation for Palestine has in recent months engaged with the transnational infrastructures that enable and sustain the settler-colonial occupation and genocidal onslaught in Palestine. A series of mobilisations has taken flows of energy, armaments and capital as their terrain of struggle. Solidarity activists have targeted arms factories, military tankers, coal mines and oil companies in attempts to disrupt the production and circulation of key commodities that make Israel’s settler-colonial occupation possible. The authors argue that attention to the infrastructural politics of these disruptions is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, beyond symbolic actions, resolutions or condemnations, these disruptions take solidarity as a material practice, and offer a diagnostic tool to reveal the transnational, historical and material underpinnings of Israeli settler-colonialism. Second, the authors argue that locating ‘circuits’ of struggle, and centring the histories of indigenous anti-colonial resistance that inform contemporary tactics of intervention and interruption, opens up possibilities for a radical internationalist politics of solidarity, with Palestine at its heart.

Introduction

An unprecedented popular mobilisation for Palestine has in recent months engaged with the transnational infrastructures that enable and sustain the settler-colonial occupation and genocidal onslaught in Gaza. An insurgent cartography of pickets, blockades and encampments has emerged, which takes critical flows of energy, armaments and capital to Israel as its terrain of struggle. Beyond symbolic actions, resolutions or condemnations, these disruptions, in taking infrastructures as a point of departure, alert us to imperial histories and political economies that underpin contemporary systems of violence. In the targeting of sites of production and circulations of critical commodities, we understand these actions as mobilising an ‘infrastructural politics’ situated within a wider history of indigenous and anti-colonial resistance.

A growing body of scholarship draws attention to the political lives of infrastructures and their entanglement in global systems of power. By tracing systems of circulation and operations that move goods and commodities, these accounts show how infrastructures are not neutral, but implicated in violent and uneven geographies of extraction and exchange, mobility and securitised containment. Critical logistics scholarship exposes commercial and military infrastructures of contemporary capitalism through attention to maritime transportation, trade and shipping routes. ¹ Tracing these reveals the ways in which contemporary capitalist circulations harness routes carved by imperial seafarers. ² Cartographies of humanitarian logistics and military supply chains also overlap. ³ Similarly, ports, designed as secure spaces for the movement of goods and capital, and harbingers of progress and modernity, are analysed as key ‘protagonists of empire’ – securitised nodes in a matrix of global colonial-capitalist relations. ⁴ The Haifa port – planned, funded and built under the British Mandate, and now represented as a key regional ‘gateway’ that ensures the mobile flow of goods to and from Israel – is one such example. ⁵ On land, railroads constructed through indigenous territories highlight the infrastructural underpinnings of the US empire. ⁶ In this way, ‘following the infrastructure’ ⁷ provides a methodology for tracing material entanglements of global capitalism, imperialism and war-making across space and time.

As part of uncovering the violent cartographies of global supply chains, scholars have engaged with their disruption, highlighting the historical production of infrastructures as sites of resistance and contestation. ⁸ Blockades and strikes are powerful modes of disruption, not least in ‘just-in-time’ supply chain economies that rely on the fast and efficient movement of commodities. ⁹ Interruptions redirect flows of materials, capital and people, by targeting ‘choke-points’ and halting circulations. ¹⁰ They are also sites for forging durable worker and activist solidarities. ¹¹ In these disruptions, a collective infrastructural power can bring about alternative political and material forms of organisation. Infrastructural politics can, as such, be a practice of ‘worldbuilding’. ¹²

Building on this literature, we outline the politics of infrastructural contestation in contemporary mobilisations for Palestine by locating why and how this has happened. Attention to the flow of critical resources alerts us to the colonial histories and the transnational implications of the settler-colonial project, and the movements that oppose it. As such, we take infrastructural disruptions as ‘diagnostics of power’ ¹³ that make visible the webs of complicity embedded in material supply chains and political economies. First, we look at the military circuits that underpin Israel’s settler-occupation, showing how the flow of military commodities sheds light on the political economy that arms and funds Israel. We look at how movements have mobilised to halt flows of military technologies. Secondly, we turn our attention to critical energy flows, as illuminative of enduring colonial relationships and interests, and the actions that target them. Lastly, we analyse the tactical circulations of solidarity actions and how strategies for disruption vary and flow between sites. We demonstrate the necessity to situate contemporary infrastructural struggles within histories of indigenous and anti-colonial resistance across time and space. We argue that these mobilisations instantiate an internationalist politics of solidarity – the struggle for a liberated Palestine is also a struggle against the industries of militarisation, extraction and destruction everywhere. We finish with a brief discussion examining what historic mobilisations can teach us about future possibilities and imperatives when organising for Palestine and global liberation.

Targeting military circuits

The military circuits that form the bedrock of Israel’s technologies of occupation have been a site of intensified contestation in recent mobilisations for Palestine. Contemporary flows of arms and carceral technologies to and from Israel build on a history of imperial policing circulations, as the imperial powers that helped create the state of Israel continue to supply it with arms. During the British Mandate period, Palestine was a key site of exchange of military techniques and technologies, as counter-insurgency tactics, colonial policing soldiers, resources and technologies travelled between colonies, as well as back to the imperial core. ¹⁴ As Israel became a bastion of American strategic interest in the region, military supplies flowed primarily from the US. ¹⁵

Israel’s vast military and security apparatus is underpinned by global military circuits. A steady flow of ammunition, military helicopters, fighter jets (F-15, F-16, F-35), guided bombs, armoured personnel carriers, naval assets and white phosphorus are shipped to Israel from its imperialist partners. Israel’s biggest military partner is the US, which supplies 90 per cent of its arms imports, with Germany, Italy and the UK also providing significant contributions. ¹⁶ Tracing the circuit of military commodities – like the F-35 joint strike fighter jets – reveals the concrete reality of the political relationships between imperialist states and its Zionist clientele. ¹⁷ Fighter jets are the easiest military good to trace, with 408 links in its supply chain, production, assemblage and transportation lines, ¹⁸ and are a vital instrument for the bombardment of Gaza.

Multinational arms manufacturing companies are key protagonists in such military circuits that fortify Israel’s genocidal campaign. Companies like BAE systems, Teledyne and Elbit Systems are crucial to UK weapons manufacturing to Israel, earning billions through exports. ¹⁹ Similarly, Rheinmetall Denel manufactures South African weapons and exports them to Israel and Germany via companies like Rolls-Royce Power Systems and ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems. ²⁰ Leonardo is a key partner in the Italian nodes of the F-35 supply chain. ²¹ It is in the operations of such companies that corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation and genocidal campaign is clearest.

In turn, Israeli security and military practices, surveillance technologies and weapons are exported to its global partners. Indeed, Palestine, and Gaza in particular, has long been used as a laboratory to test military and security practices that Israel exports to the world for profit. ²² Elbit System infamously describes its technologies as ‘combat-proven’ – inspiring much of Palestine Action’s protest against the corporation. ²³ Similarly, we witness the intensification of military contracts between Israel and other states – including Cyprus, Greece and India. While India remained a ‘friend of Palestine’, offering occasional words of support for Palestine at the UN, its burgeoning alliance with Israel manifested in its status as the largest buyer of Israeli weapons between 2003 and 2013 – a demand underpinned by its military occupation of Kashmir. ²⁴ Tracing such military circuits reveals the ways colonial projects are mutually sustaining, with surveillance technologies, checkpoints and arms circulating to police occupied populations.

Contemporary mobilisations take military circuits as key sites of engagement. In October 2023, the largest coalition of Palestinian trade unions, official and independent, including the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), issued a global call to end all forms of complicity with Israeli crimes and stop arms going to Israel. ²⁵ Subsequently, unions and workers staged actions across the world in support. Groups like Workers in Palestine (WIP), which brings together Palestinian trade unionists with international allies, were critical in building support and organising around this call in the US and the European Union, where military and diplomatic support for Israel is fiercest.

Recognising the crucial role of maritime routes and shipments in enabling the continuous supply of military cargo, activists mobilised across ports to interrupt the global circulation of arms. Trade unions and dockworkers were critical agents in halting this flow. In November 2023, several unions heeded the call and refused to transport or handle weapons and surveillance technology. Belgian trade unions called on members to refuse the handling of military equipment being sent to Israel. ²⁶ Dockworkers in Barcelona followed suit, alongside fourteen Spanish trade unions which launched campaigns to cease handling armaments. ²⁷ Escalating these calls further, dockworkers in Genoa blocked the loading of cargo on an Israeli-operated ship and called on other Italian ports to prevent the transport of weapons to Israel. ²⁸ In nine ports across twelve countries, the European Dockworkers Council organised a day of action that included a refusal to handle arms transfers to Israel. By February 2024, workers in India were refusing to load Israeli weapons, ‘rebuking colonial ideologies of Zionism and Hindu nationalism’ in displays of transnational solidarity. ²⁹ As ports emerged as imperial protagonists, the dockworkers became key agents of struggle. By refusing to unload cargo, these workers exposed complicit governments and intervened in the machinery that enabled them.

Mobilisations also took the arms factory as a site of intervention. Workers For a Free Palestine (WFFP), a grassroots collective of workers and trade unionists in the UK, coordinated actions in response to the Palestinian Trade Union call to disrupt the Israeli war machine. They launched mass pickets at weapons factories across the UK. In October 2023, trade unionists and solidarity activists formed a community picket targeting the weapons factory ‘Instro Precision’ – a factory linked to the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems – and encouraged other factory workers to join the picket. ³⁰ In November 2023, WFFP targeted the BAE systems site supplying parts for F-35 fighter jets in Rochester, and coordinated blockades of a series of arms factories in Bournemouth, Brighton, Lancashire and Glasgow. ³¹ They mobilised workers and trade unionists to shut down the Department for Business and Trade and coordinated pickets in several other locations across the country. Through these actions, WFFP protested against the steady stream of military exports and laid bare the extent of historical and present British complicity in settler-colonial violence. ³²

It is not just in the manufacturing and circulation of military technologies that activists have staged interventions. In university campuses across the world, student encampments sprung up to demand disclosure and divestment of university funds implicated in the flow of weapons. Capital flows and corporate complicity have been the target of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement since 2005. Echoing longer histories of anti-militarist and anti-imperialist student organising, these encampments protested the material terms of education, institutional complicity in epistemicide and the destruction of universities in Gaza. Students and staff at the London School of Economics authored a historic report detailing investments of £89 million in egregious industries, over half of which were directly implicated in crimes against the Palestinian people. ³³

But universities were not just confronted as conduits of militarised capital and investments. At the very heart of the supply chain are the knowledge production and scientific expertise that enable the development of Israel’s technologies. Across University of California campuses, unionised academic workers went on strike, to protest concrete and traceable ties to militarised research as well as the university’s crackdown on protesters. Their actions, coordinated by the United Auto Workers Local 4811, representing non-tenured academic workers, responded to the Palestinian Trade Union Call to disrupt military funding and research. In a statement, they asserted that as researchers they were ‘no longer willing to support genocide with their labour’, and pointed to the $7.4 billion spending by the Department of Defense within US universities in 2021 alone and the implication of university structures like labs, institutes and departments in the military circuit. ³⁴ While the US military boasts about being a world leader in science and technology, it relies on universities as spaces of ‘farm’ expertise. ³⁵ In this way, by centring voices of Palestinian workers and trade unionists, such mobilisations along transnational military supply chains bring about a labour internationalism that is not reliant on the sympathies of governments, bureaucracies and corridors of state and legislative power. ³⁶

Targeting energy circuits

Energy circuits are likewise a critical flow that underpins Israel’s regime of settler-colonial domination. Circulations of coal, crude oil, jet fuel and fossil gas provide a steady influx of fuel and capital that enables Israel to perform and fund its ongoing genocidal violence. As such, energy circuits and infrastructures are a historic and contemporary site of contestation in the Palestinian liberation struggle, recently revived in calls from Palestinian trade unions and organisers to disrupt the flow of energy to and from Israel. ³⁷

A historical perspective is essential to understand the role of energy circuits, especially oil flows, in the inception of Israel and contemporary regimes of colonial violence in Palestine. Against attributing the West’s unconditional support to the Israeli lobby, Adam Hanieh points to the materialist underpinnings of the US-Israel alliance. He highlights Israel’s emergence and the dispossession of Palestinians as entangled in two critical global transformations: the rise of American hegemony and the (earlier) global transition to oil as the dominant fossil fuel. ³⁸ Each transition had significant implications for the Middle East, as the site of the world’s largest oil supplies, and thus became critical to US imperial interests and foreign policy. Oil is the key strategic resource globally, and as such, American hegemony over how it circulates, at what price and in what currency is critical to maintaining its global power. ³⁹ As a highly militarised and racialised settler-colony that is geographically embedded within the Middle East, the financial (and military) maintenance of Israel contributes critically to keeping oil-producing nations – particularly the Gulf states – within the orbit of American power. ⁴⁰ This helps to explain why the financial and military support of western states for Israel remains unwavering and why American leaders consistently push for Gulf normalisation deals with Israel. Both the inception of Israel as a western imperial outpost and the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people is in this way entangled with crude oil capitalism.

This link can be followed along multiple energy circuits that each play an active role in fuelling Israel’s military apparatus and sustaining its settler occupation. Fighter jets, Apache helicopters and military tanks cannot run without steady supplies of imported crude oil, diesel and jet fuel, that flow from Azerbaijan, Brazil, Greece and the US respectively, through a network of pipelines, ports and sea routes. ⁴¹ Likewise, Israeli arms factories, training facilities and illegal settlements in the West Bank cannot function without electricity produced from either coal – imported from Colombia and South Africa ⁴² – or fossil gas extracted from stolen Palestinian waters in the Levantine Basin. In fact, the securitisation of gas infrastructures is used as a principal justification for the seventeen-year naval blockade on Gaza – a blockade that allows Israeli naval vessels to illegally patrol close to the shore to protect Chevron’s pipelines and platforms. ⁴³ This has enabled a systematic reduction of Gaza’s maritime areas from twenty nautical miles to three, as the Israeli navy shoots live bullets at any Palestinian fishermen or children who dare to cross this invisible border. ⁴⁴ Before the genocide in 2023, these shootings happened every month up to one mile off the Gazan coast. As such, energy circuits and their infrastructural nodes, far from being benign commodity flows, are carceral systems that carve the Palestinian geography and fuel the ongoing genocide.

The tracing and interrupting of imperial energy flows have been crucial sites of political engagement and mobilisation for the Palestinian movement during this ongoing genocide. These activist projects intend to make visible the colonial infrastructures and circulations that have been black-boxed, turning them into sites for forging solidarities. A clear example is Colombia’s ban on coal sales to Israel and the transnational grassroots mobilisations that accompanied it. ⁴⁵ Colombia is Israel’s largest coal supplier, providing 60 per cent of Israel’s coal imports in 2023. ⁴⁶ The two companies mining Colombian coal are American Drummond and Swiss Glencore, the latter holding the worst human rights record amongst ‘green metal’ mining companies. Their abuses range from corruption, to attacks on indigenous activists and violations of environmental law. ⁴⁷ In Colombia, the damaging effects of coal mining particularly affect the Afro-descendant indigenous peoples of the country’s Caribbean North, who are displaced from their lands and killed by toxic coal powder. ⁴⁸ Between 2018 and 2019, forty-two indigenous Yukpa children were killed by malnutrition that was a direct result of this violence. ⁴⁹ Similarly in Palestine, the coal Glencore mines for Israel directly powers the electricity grid used for illegal settlements that brutally expel indigenous Palestinians from their land. ⁵⁰ During mobilisations these parallels were drawn by indigenous Colombian leaders who insisted Colombia cut commercial ties with Israel ⁵¹ in recognition that both Palestinians and indigenous Colombians are similarly woven into and affected by Glencore’s international web of complicity in settler-colonial violence. This web of complicity became a site to forge a counter-web of transnational solidarities, as global movements confronted the same corporation responsible for a shared destruction of indigenous lands and lives.

The Colombian government’s ban on coal sales was a direct result of these global mobilisations across the coal supply chain, organised by a coalition of indigenous Colombian groups, trade unions, Palestinian organisers and European solidarity activists. In the first few weeks after the start of the genocide, the main Colombian mining union, Sintracarbon, issued a call to the government to ‘suspend the shipment of coal, or other metals . . . to Israel’. ⁵² This built momentum and prompted groups across the world to organise disruption against Glencore on a global day of action on 29 May 2024. ⁵³ Swiss groups interrupted the corporation’s annual general meeting, whilst other solidarity groups blocked Swiss embassies and Glencore offices across the world. ⁵⁴ In conjunction, Palestinian organisations sent a letter to the Colombian president to amplify grassroot demands directed at the president: stop exporting coal to Israel. ⁵⁵ On 8 June, the president replied and the circuit became jammed. As such, we see how contestation erupted across an energy circuit; from extraction point to its nodes of transport, to the offices and embassies of the circuit’s managers and beneficiaries. In action along the transnational energy circuit, solidarities were forged as indigenous groups in Colombia mobilised for their own survival and refused complicity in the devastation of Palestine.

A similar cartography of interruption can be traced along jet fuel circulation, from Texas to Ashkelon. Jet fuel, or JP-8 fuel, is a military-grade fuel that is produced by oil and gas companies from crude oil. ⁵⁶ It is the fuel used to power Israel’s military aircraft, and as such, is a critical circuit to interrupt. The US is Israel’s primary JP-8 supplier through Defense Logistics Energy Agency contracts. In 2020, the US issued a $3 billion contract for one billion litres of JP-8 fuel – covering multiple years of supply. ⁵⁷ Furthermore, a recent report by DataDesk revealed that Valero Energy was the contract holder and jet fuel supplier to Israel, via an oil refinery it owns in Corpus Christi, Texas. ⁵⁸ The jet fuel is shipped on tankers from Texas across the Mediterranean to the Ashkelon oil terminal – with each tanker holding the capacity to refuel a fighter jet 12,000 times over. Researchers and organisers have traced the ships’ transport routes, mobilising grassroot groups across port cities to transform this jet fuel’s deadly circulation into a route of disruption. ⁵⁹ For example, indigenous American activists in Corpus Christi – where Valero’s refinery toxifies their land and air – have been raising awareness amongst community leaders and organisers on the connections between their local struggle, Palestine and Valero’s involvement. ⁶⁰ This remains an engagement with the infrastructures of genocide, making visible the global commodity circulations and multinational operators that bind indigenous struggles. The act of ‘making visible’ energy circuits that are made unseen to the communities violated by them is an act of infrastructural resistance. Similar mobilisations happened in Crete in February 2024 as the Overseas Santorini – a ship carrying fuel to Israel – crossed the Atlantic to Souda Bay, on the north-west coast of Crete. Activists hurriedly planned activities against the ship, diverting a march towards the port with banners decrying the ‘fuel station for genocide’. ⁶¹

Sustaining anti-colonial circuits

It is not just critical commodities that circulate. Crucially, tactics of anti-colonial insurgency and intervention also flow across spaces and times of struggle. Such modes of resistance, their long-term horizons, and short-term tactics, are varied and dependent on the context of their inception – continuously informing one another. Dockworker mobilisations, pipeline disruption, road blockades and other economic interruptions are not new, but have been at the core of indigenous struggles for centuries. Narratives that exceptionalise Palestinian resistance and Israel as the ‘last, unfinished settler-colonial project’ erase other ongoing settler-colonial projects in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and crucially how they continue to be resisted. ⁶² Not only do these erasures reproduce narratives of the ‘defeated Indian’, ⁶³ but they also omit rich histories of anti-imperialist struggles and the strategies that have transmitted across movements, informing contemporary mobilisations today. In the following section we will analyse the patterns in these strategies and tactics, moving to what the Palestinian solidarity movement can learn from other indigenous resistances going forward.

Blocking roads, interrupting energy circuits and targeting ports through the mobilisation of its critical operators (dockworkers) are tactics emergent from indigenous movements in Turtle Island and South Africa, more recently circulating through the Palestinian solidarity movement. ⁶⁴ Pipelines and energy circuits have long been an important site of mobilisation – most famously by the Standing Rock Sioux who targeted the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in 2016. This crude oil pipeline was set to travel through unceded territory that was governed under the 1868 Laramie Treaty, which outlawed ‘white settlement without Indigenous consent’ for nearly seventy acres. ⁶⁵ Critically, the pipeline also crosses beneath the region’s water reserves, including Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers – each a sacred site for First Nation peoples. As such, thousands of indigenous water protectors and land defenders gathered to fight the DAPL, blocking its construction to prevent the illegal seizure of their land, nature reservations and waters. In September 2016, the Palestinian Youth Movement sent a delegation of Palestinian youth to North Dakota, caravanning from Southern California to Standing Rock to join the protests against the pipeline. ⁶⁶ They pointed to a mutual understanding of resisting settler-colonial power, drawing parallels between the settler-colonial regimes of the US and Israel. ⁶⁷ Indigenous-led blockades gained power through the disruption of capitalist economic flows and engagement with critical infrastructures ⁶⁸ like pipelines, as a strategic point of interruption in a larger struggle against settler-colonialism.

Road blockades have not been extensively used by the Palestinian movement, except for some airport and highway disruption in California, as these actions are harder for racialised Palestinians to organise in the context of anti-terror laws and the increased criminalisation of protest. Nevertheless, recent solidarity actions by the A15 network used road blockades as a central tactic in attempts to create a global coordinated economic blockade that clogged flows of capital. Similar tactics have been employed in the northern European climate movement, by groups like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Last Generation. Logistical and road blockades are yet another tactical circulation that originates from First Nation communities. In 1990, the Oka Crisis saw the Mohawk people erect a road barricade that blocked access to Route 344 and land known as ‘The Pines’ where a golf course was set to be built over indigenous burial land. ⁶⁹ Mohawk militants held the barricade, despite brutal police raids and siege. The Mohawk and other indigenous solidarity activists escalated attacks to blockade the Mercier Bridge that was crucial to access several roads and local railways. Similarly, in 2008 the Algonquins formed the Barriere Lake blockades – also resisting the Canadian settler-colony – instrumentalising road blockades despite serious police repression and tear gas violence. ⁷⁰ Again in 2021, roadblocks by indigenous land defenders were utilised to resist the construction of the Coastal GasLink (a liquified natural gas pipeline) through Wet’suwet’en territory in Turtle Island. ⁷¹ Highways, railways and commodity conduits are key sites of settler-colonial and capitalist power, and as such, a tactical understanding of them as fertile ground for anti-colonial resistance circulates between movements and across temporalities.

This long history also extends to port disruptions and military circuits. Contemporary mobilisations amongst trade unions and dockworkers for Palestine take root in previous internationalist mobilisations that prevented the flows of armaments during anti-imperialist struggles. As early as 1935, Durban dock workers, mobilised by the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), refused to load food on Italian ships to protest Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. ⁷² Dockworkers were also instrumental in the anti-apartheid struggle against South Africa, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area where decades-long protests from longshoremen and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) were involved in consistent refusals to unload South African cargo in coordination with anti-apartheid activists. ⁷³ This rich history formed a crucial bedrock for the Block the Boat (BTB) actions in 2014 and 2021. Here, dockworker action and community pickets organised with the Arab Resource and Organizing Centre (AROC) caused serious delays to ZIM vessels – an Israeli shipping company – and led to the company discontinuing its west coast service for several years. ⁷⁴ Dockworker actions blocking the transport of arms to Israel in the contemporary moment is therefore built on this much longer history of solidarity organising. Particularly in the last decade, fervour from BTB has erupted across Canada, South Africa, Tunisia and Italy as community activists allied with trade unions to try and prevent ZIM ships from docking and unloading. A distinctly different tactic to A15 and pipeline blockades, the strategic disruption of ports alongside dockworkers we see today is embedded within decades of stoppages and historic uprisings against other settler-colonial and imperial regimes.

Conclusion

To conclude, in the targeting of critical flows and the infrastructures that sustain Israel’s occupation and genocidal campaign, these contemporary mobilisations alert us to transnational systems of violence, and the ‘intersectionality of struggles’ ⁷⁵ against them. Engagement with histories, critical learnings and strategies of indigenous resistance, and wider struggles against settler-colonial power, is crucial in building an infrastructural politics for liberation. From these struggles, we see three emergent points instructive to future mobilisations. Firstly, integrated research which joins grassroots, activist and academic knowledge for in-depth information gathering around supply chains and circuits is crucial. Mapping the flows of weapons, fuel and capital is key to locating strategic points of intervention, and the dissemination of research and methods is an important mobilisation tool. Second is the importance of relationship building and forging solidarities across struggles by ‘showing up’ for others in their fights. In the BTB actions, boats were stopped only through relationships built over decades with Bay Area longshoremen. Actions drew on networks forged by previous generations organising against apartheid in South Africa and long-standing attendance at the port workers’ rallies. As well as solidarity with worker actions, showing up for indigenous resistance and nurturing enduring reciprocity and trust between movements is vital for building the transnational support systems necessary to fight transnational structures of oppression. Palestinian solidarity with Standing Rock was an important manifestation of this.

Finally, sustaining long-term struggle, through crafting actions integrated with other movements, practices of care and collective future horizons, is essential. Movements must organise around targeted, well-crafted and durable strategies, using specific tactics as part of a sustained and long-term struggle. If these different strategies can be knitted together, complementing and strengthening each other, rather than counteracting one another, movements will have greater capacity to achieve necessary systemic change. This also means reflecting on what the contemporary targeting of critical flows, infrastructures and chokepoints can mean for mobilisations going forward. Indeed, following military and energy circulations can open spaces for a transnational politics of solidarity. It is the attention to how these solidarities and collective strategies are forged that will be essential for a liberated Palestine and a liberated world.