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Palestinian Youth Movement Vows to Make Genocide Support Too Costly for Maersk [1]
['Tyler Walicek', 'Arvind Dilawar', 'Schuyler Mitchell', 'Rimsha Syed', 'Kelly Hayes', 'Hend Salama Abo Helow', 'Atef Said', 'Ghada Abu Muaileq', 'Michael Arria', 'Shahad Ali']
Date: 2025-08-16 11:30:52+00:00
Part of the Series Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
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After two years of continuous effort in research, agitation and direct action, the organizers of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) celebrated a landmark organizing victory in late June. Their “Mask Off Maersk” campaign had sought to prove the complicity of the Danish freight-logistics titan A.P. Møller – Maersk A/S in the genocide in Gaza.
Maersk, as it’s generally known, was found by PYM to be contributing to the ongoing crimes against humanity in Gaza by shipping arms transfers to the perpetrating Israeli military; these shipments included critical parts for the F-35 fighters that have been used to bomb Gaza’s civilian population. Aligning with the broad strategy of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, PYM organized to make a material difference by interrupting Israel’s still-unfolding campaign of ethnic cleansing, mass displacement and, incontrovertibly, genocide.
PYM’s efforts ultimately applied sufficient pressure to Maersk to enact real, meaningful change: the company agreed to halt its work providing commercial shipping for enterprises that operate in illegal Israeli settlements.
With this strategy, pro-Palestine activists are seeking to exploit the strategic weak point that is the global logistics apparatus. As the Israeli military, having reduced its aerial bombing, continues to prosecute a genocide by other means — manipulating an aid system that is insufficient by design, creating distribution sites that are veritable death traps, and intentionally proliferating forced starvation and deprivation alongside active murder — the world’s most powerful nations and corporations continue to show up for duty as Israel’s reliable accomplices — and, of course, as eager profiteers. Some, though, are more susceptible to subversion than others.
The ability of the U.S. to blithely ignore international law, in service of abetting the supreme human crime of genocide, has thrown into relief the impunity enjoyed by the Global North in perpetrating even the most grievous legal and ethical violations. Despite the many measures taken to enact embargoes or other types of meaningful sanctions, leading global institutions have still proven unable to impose meaningful restraint on Israel and its main benefactor and arms dealer, our decaying superpower. Where the most vaunted chambers of international law have fallen short, it has been left to Palestinians themselves, and the vast and horrified publics worldwide that stand with them, to do all in their power to halt the genocidal machine.
Point of Intervention
Anti-genocide activists are doing all they can to slow the ever-mounting death toll. PYM is a globally distributed network of (not exclusively) young activists, many Palestinian themselves; their efforts have earned them a considerable following and a leading role in the cause. PYM’s sense of urgency matches the ethical stakes: Their tone and moral seriousness, mocked by genocide deniers, has been so absent on cable television and the organs of the mainstream consensus.
PYM organizer Aisha Nazar, a lead coordinator of the Mask Off Maersk project, characterized the group’s initial line of questioning in an interview with Truthout: “Where is the crack in the armor of genocide? Where can we be the wedge that forces it open?”
Their answer proved tactically savvy. It’s much easier, after all, to sway a shipping company to wind down a controversial part of its business, a mere fraction — as a logistics business would have many other clients — than to somehow induce a full-fledged arms corporation to dissolve itself. And by targeting logistics lines rather than the original sites of arms producers, noted Nazar, “instead of going after one arms manufacturer, with this target, we are going after them all.”
“Instead of going after one arms manufacturer, with this target, we are going after them all.”
Initially, PYM organizers pursued research — detailed analyses of cargo manifests, bills of lading and other logistics minutiae were required to prove conclusively that the F-35 fighter jet parts that Maersk ships were indeed destined for Israeli military use. They found evidence that left Maersk’s complicity beyond question.
The company, researchers determined, was also contracted to transport goods from companies based in Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory — colonial intrusions deemed illegal by the UN and even, at times, the U.S. The UN’s foremost human rights assembly, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), following Human Rights Council Resolution 31/36, maintains a database of commercial enterprises that are operating in these illegal settlements and are therefore complicit in infringements upon, per the UN, “the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people.” Maersk, PYM researchers found, was contracting with settlement-based companies on the OHCHR list, some of which were also arms manufacturers.
The organizers released these findings publicly in a series of reports, compiling information that the company was not eager to publicize. PYM’s attention then turned to running direct actions, which included protests, sit-ins, and facility shutdowns at Maersk offices in New York, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and elsewhere over the first half of 2025. As Nazar described, PYM members showed up at Maersk and generally “flooded the streets, confronted our politicians, disrupted their events [and] mobilized to city council meetings to pressure our governments and elected officials to sanction Israel and cut off arms.”
Nazar pointed out that Maersk’s globally distributed operation “allows us to employ a diverse set of tactics and demonstrates our movement’s strength by consolidating internationally.” By identifying and pressing into service a wide array of potential allies, their protests were able to bring together everyone from “environmental groups, to the labor sector, to migrant justice advocates,” as well as members of Parliament, lawyers, and more. They also employed tactics that were gleaned from a range of struggles like “city divestment, campus boycott[s],” and organized labor.
Mask Off Maersk and its allies mobilized a pointed intervention in March 2025, when, via an online campaign, they successfully urged Maersk shareholders to bring forth a resolution about its complicity. The company dismissed their resolution, but the secrecy was broken; at the meeting, Nazar said, “Maersk was forced to admit [to its shareholders] that it does indeed ship military cargo to Israel.”
Those revelations led to legal challenges against Maersk from the Spanish government, a country that does have an embargo on Israel and has called for the rest of the European Union to follow suit. To avert inspection and investigation, the company elected to simply halt the use of the Spanish port of Algeciras by cargo ships en route to Israel. Then, in June, French dockworker unionists refused to work on Maersk’s Israel-bound ships, forcing the company to further reroute arms shipments; a similar labor protest action took place in Morocco.
Naturally, these inconvenient workarounds are costly for the company. PYM worked to ensure that the cost of Maersk’s material support for genocide extended to their reputation, and their stock price. Clearly, Maersk corporate leaders must have rerun their cost/benefit analyses: in June, they acceded to a major demand, agreeing to halt commercial dealings with companies in Israeli settlements and promising that they would be “aligning [their] screening process with reference to UN standards.”
Veteran investigative journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory Antony Loewenstein told Truthout that PYM’s approach was worth replicating, as they’ve located a vulnerable node in the global war materiel network.
“With every Western state refusing to impose any economic price on Israel for its endless genocide in Gaza,” Loewenstein remarked, “it’s up to civil society to rise up.” He raised a historical example: “American dockworkers were central in the global fight against South African apartheid, and such people can again be a vital cog in stopping the shipment of weapons and defense equipment to Israel.”
Nazar has also noted that PYM’s findings are “bolstering arms embargo laws and targeting the supply line to Zionism across Tunisia, Morocco, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Spain … A couple of volunteer researchers and youth organizers created diplomatic crises for one of the biggest shipping giants in the world; what this tells us is that an arms embargo is possible, and it is within our grasp.”
“With every Western state refusing to impose any economic price on Israel for its endless genocide in Gaza, it’s up to civil society to rise up.”
PYM continues to center a “People’s Arms Embargo” as a key demand, hoping to build upon the Maersk win to further thwart the lines of industry and logistics that fuel the military machine of genocide. They are not alone: Palestine Action, the British “direct action network,” conducts direct subterfuge against military equipment and arms contractors like Elbit Systems (acts for which the group is now under severe censure and suppression), while, as Truthout reported, groups like Jews For Racial & Economic Justice and Port Workers and Communities for Palestine have also sought ways to interrupt the operations of companies like Atlas Air, ZIM, All-Ways Forwarding and others involved, to various degrees, in the flow of arms.
International Impotence
And yet why, we should ask, has it fallen to a small group of young activists to enforce the responsibilities of states under the 1948 Genocide Convention, not to mention numerous other strictures of international law? It’s not as if nation-states haven’t used legal and institutional means to register their dissent, even if that has not halted the unrestrained slaughter. In one notable example, South Africa has pursued a high-profile legal case charging Israel with genocide. And quite a few states, countries of the Global South in particular, have signaled substantial support for the patchwork of existing sanctions, embargoes, and arms limitations. Recently, at the Emergency Ministerial Conference on Palestine, convened by the Hague Group in Bogota, Colombia, in July, a dozen countries agreed to enforce arms transfer limitations.
However, even the grander declarations of dissent have not always been matched by sustained material action aimed at slowing the unfolding of a genocide, and the rulings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have so far more closely resembled symbolic gestures than legal enforcement. Such measures are not without worth — but hopes must be tempered. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is already wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court for egregious crimes against humanity, but it’s not yet clear that he will ever face consequences of any sort, and several countries have also expressed their lack of interest in holding him accountable.
As Jake Romm wrote for The Baffler, the international human rights model as it stands is structurally limited by the primacy it affords to the treaty-making nation-state: “States are ultimately able to decide whether they conform to [international laws] and the treaties on which they are based. All international human rights law thus … carries more or less persuasive power (but not coercive power) depending on the political moment.”
But the loftier ambitions of liberal internationalism tend to quickly run up against contrary prerogatives of capital and power. In this contest, it is clear which party is most often the victor. Between 2013 and 2023, Israel received more than 65 percent of its weaponry from the U.S., approximately 30 percent from Germany, and almost all of the remaining 5 percent from Italy. The genocide could not continue without U.S. largesse. This state of affairs, of course, leaves arms-exporting countries in the position of greatest leverage — though there are certainly other avenues that Israel’s powerful Western allies or other foreign critics could pursue.
In one telling example, a Dutch appeals court ruled in a landmark decision that the Netherlands must stop exporting F-35 parts to Israel. Yet, unfortunately, it seems compliance has been won merely in letter and not spirit; the Dutch state is now shipping the parts to the U.S., which subsequently sends them straight to the Israeli military. A wider ban on other arms exports was also rejected by Dutch courts.
“Volunteer researchers and youth organizers created diplomatic crises for one of the biggest shipping giants in the world; what this tells us is that an arms embargo is possible, and it is within our grasp.”
The international armature of capitalist allies’ mutually reinforcing power, epitomized by the United States and its unflinching defense of its client state, have proved immune to even some of the harshest judgments of the liberal international order. In turn, U.S. unaccountability and flouting of the law reveal the fundamental hollowness of that order: a framework of justice based largely on rhetoric, bereft of economic considerations. This framework also unduly constrains the legal right to armed resistance to national entities alone. Likewise, the moral space of international human rights is invariably warped and compromised by contradictions that owe their existence to the messy allowances necessary to legitimize state-perpetrated traditional war.
It should be noted that the U.S. is equally cavalier about flouting its own standards. For one, the Leahy Law — which prevents arms transfers to countries engaged in gross human rights violations — clearly applies in this case. (The eponymous former Sen. Patrick Leahy himself agrees.) So, too, does the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which states, “No assistance may be provided … to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights[.]”
Germany, for its role, has also faced internal calls for embargo and divestment from civil servants and academics, as well as legal challenges. Though it has at times slowed the passage of arms through its export review process in the course of legal review, Germany has been cagey at best with international courts. (Among other challenges, the nation of Nicaragua has charged Germany with Geneva Convention violations in the ICJ.) After a massive uptick, German weapons shipments have sunk back down “amid growing legal and political pressure domestically and internationally,” per Politico. Germany also recently announced a more widespread embargo — but there are signs its staunchly pro-Israel stance may be unchanged; as the BDS movement has charged, Germany has claimed to be imposing a comparable ban before, and may well continue to issue arms licenses via loopholes, contra public assurances.
The United States has done, basically, the complete opposite of anything like a ban, escalating massive continual deliveries — although the Biden administration would have liked you to think it was far more doubting and hesitant. Incredibly, former President Joe Biden and his diplomats pretended to be locked in debate with Netanyahu: a callow effort to manipulate the public’s perception in order to show far more U.S. reluctance (and moral backbone, it seems) than they ever really had. It was finally admitted by Biden staffers — after Kamala Harris lost — that at no point did the White House harbor the slightest intention of staying Israel’s hand. And naturally, the Trump administration has gleefully taken up that mantle, promising even more repugnant catastrophes extending to the wholesale ethnic cleansing and appropriation of Gaza.
To be clear, the many efforts of nations and organizations to impede the slaughter have been far from worthless; at minimum, they have measured the true degree of the world’s revulsion. But — with international law having run up against the immovable obstacle of the United States, which throws its weight around like a swaggering mob boss — it is everyday people who have broadened the boundaries of possibility and turned the world against a moral atrocity. It is the work of international organizers, and, most of all, Palestinians themselves — as journalists, or with their phones or their words — that have refused to let the world look away from this world-historical crime.
As Aisha Nazar said determinedly, “We know the truth. An arms embargo will not happen until the tidal wave of people power forces it to happen. We must enforce an arms embargo ourselves.”
It is safe to say that, when future generations reminisce on these events, the Palestinian people, PYM, and all those who saw this for what it was — those who full-throatedly condemned an utter evil and sought to put their bodies upon the gears and wheels of this odious machine, as Mario Savio famously put it — will be seen as figures of exemplary moral courage. Those who have posed gleefully with its top perpetrator, meanwhile, seem destined to be cast by history in a very different light.
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