The Planes Across the Tarmac
At a civilian airport in a progressive city, the machinery of global war meets the question of who controls infrastructure.
Alex Press
From the warehouse floor at Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport (OAK), Talia Rose can see the FedEx planes.
“They’re directly across the tarmac from me,” they told me.
Rose works the overnight shift at the UPS air hub. Most days, they clock in before dawn, when much of Oakland is asleep. Metal containers — ULDs — are rolled off the aircraft and pulled into the building. Rose unloads them, sending boxes down conveyor belts to be sorted and routed. Sometimes they’re on the other side, throwing freight toward outbound trucks. It’s physical work, repetitive and precise.
Around six months ago, during a weekly organizing meeting at the Oakland Liberation Center, they learned that military cargo bound for Israel had been moving through the airport. Activists had just released research documenting hundreds of such shipments passing through OAK.
The report, published by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), identified more than 280 military cargo shipments to Israel since January 2025, including shipments of parts manufactured by U.S. defense contractors for F-35 aircraft. The report traced cargo moving through OAK, including the BRU-68 bomb release system — a product that enables F-35s to release 2,000-pound bombs. Similar research into Maersk’s shipping routes helped identify how military materials move across maritime corridors, underscoring that Oakland’s airport is one node in a larger commercial infrastructure serving the war effort.
FedEx — whose facility sits across the tarmac — was handling the OAK shipments.
Rose went home after the meeting and read the full report.
“I just kind of lay there all night,” they said. “I genuinely was in shock. I see these planes fly in and out every single day, and any of them could be carrying these parts.”
Since then, every landing feels different.
“Every single time a FedEx plane lands and I’m watching them land,” they said, “I wonder, ‘Oh, is that the one?’ ”
Rose has since joined a campaign called the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo (OPAE), a coalition of more than 30 organizations calling on city officials to stop what they describe as “killer military cargo” from flying out of Oakland’s publicly owned airport.
Organizers argue that if the airport is governed locally, the Port of Oakland can and should refuse to facilitate shipments of weapons components to Israel. The effort has garnered support from a wide range of labor unions, including the 100,000-member California Nurses Association. On November 10, the Alameda Labor Council — representing 135,000 Bay Area workers across healthcare, transportation, education, construction, manufacturing and service industries — voted unanimously to endorse the campaign.
A Harvard-affiliated geospatial study found that in the first six weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza after Oct. 7, 2023, nearly 600 such bombs were dropped across the Gaza Strip. Eighty-three percent of Gaza’s 36 hospitals had bomb craters within 800 meters, and at least nine had bombs land within what researchers describe as a lethal range.
Those bombs don’t move themselves. The United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion annually in military aid under a long-term memorandum of understanding, and since October 2023, Congress has approved additional emergency funding totaling more than $14 billion. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States supplied roughly two-thirds of Israel’s major conventional arms imports in 2023. Weapons move by sea and by air and pass through public civilian infrastructure.
Organizers argue that Oakland is a key link in a wider logistics chain linking U.S. manufacturers to overseas deployment. In recent months, activists across the globe have pressured shipping giant Maersk over its role in transporting military cargo. In Spain, organizers successfully alerted port authorities to Maersk shipments tied to Israel, prompting scrutiny and rerouting in some cases. In Morocco, dockworkers have refused to handle certain cargo. In Colombia, the government has announced an embargo on coal exports to Israel. None of these interventions have ended the war, but they did demonstrate that supply chains can be contested.
At OAK, nothing announces itself as part of a weapon.
“These pieces aren’t huge and heavy,” Rose said. “It’s not as if they’re not specially marked, outside of maybe a high-value marker.”
There is no crate labeled WAR. No flashing indicator that the freight in a ULD will end up as part of an aircraft over Gaza.
“It feels like there should be a big stamp saying, ‘This is a genocidal can,’ ” they said.
Instead, it looks like any other freight: socks, legal documents, medical supplies, machine parts. Containers inside planes inside contracts inside federal aviation rules.
“We’re all being made so complicit in this,” they said.
That complicity is structural, and responsibility is fragmented. A carrier moves the cargo. A port authority leases out the space. Federal regulators oversee the airspace. Congress appropriates funds. Each actor performs a discrete role and can plausibly disclaim the whole.
Oakland officials have expressed concern about the shipments. Some have argued that federal aviation law limits what the city can prohibit. Rose has attended Board of Port Commissioners meetings and heard the debate. “There are members that are absolutely on our side,” they said. But it has been “really disappointing” to hear others insist, “ ‘Well actually, it’s not our job.’ ”
“If our city says it supports human rights, but still lets this go through, then what does that actually mean?”
Asked what they would say directly to a Port commissioner, Rose did not hedge. “We have to put our foot down now,” they said.
If the city declines to act, she argued, it sets a precedent that publicly owned infrastructure can quietly facilitate military cargo so long as the paperwork is in order. “Old good precedents,” they said, referring to Oakland’s history of labor and anti-apartheid resistance, “will be trampled over, and we’ll have these new precedents that turn Oakland into a town for killer cargo.”
The Port of Oakland oversees both the seaport and the airport. In 1984, ILWU members in Oakland refused to unload South African cargo from the Nedlloyd Kimberley ship for 11 days. The action did not depend on federal permission; it depended on dockworkers deciding they would not handle it. The stand was part of a broader municipal divestment movement that eventually pressured the city itself to sever financial ties with apartheid. The episode remains a touchstone in local labor memory. More recently, Bay Area longshore workers have declined to handle certain cargo linked to Israeli shipping interests during moments of Israeli escalation in Palestine, as part of community pickets invoking that same tradition.
The airport, too, sits under Port authority. The question now being pressed by organizers is simple: If Oakland’s maritime side has been shaped by political and labor action before, why should its air cargo side be treated as untouchable?
This is what sovereignty looks like in practice. The Port Commission is locally appointed, and the airport is publicly owned. Yet the authority exercised within that space is threaded through federal aviation law, private carrier contracts, military procurement systems and international trade regimes. Sovereignty persists, but it is structured to facilitate movement.
The contradiction is not unique to Oakland. South Africa, which brought a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, has also faced internal debate over coal exports tied to Israeli energy supply. Multinational firms operating through subsidiaries and joint ventures can continue moving material even when public opinion or national leadership shifts. Corporations often operate across jurisdictions in ways that blunt the force of democratic mandates. The formal authority of a state remains intact, but the economic levers are harder to pull.
The modern global economy didn’t weaken states so much as repurpose them. Governments police borders, enforce contracts and protect investment. What they struggle to do, especially at the local level, is interrupt the movement of capital. The rules are written to keep goods flowing. Stopping them requires swimming against legal architecture built for efficiency.
The global air cargo industry handles more than a third of the value of world trade by air, even though air freight accounts for a small share of trade by volume. Air hubs exist to move high-value goods quickly. The infrastructure is built for throughput.
At OAK, the shipments identified by organizers are handled by FedEx, which, unlike UPS, is a nonunion enterprise.
“It’s not lost on me that it’s the one non-union company at the airport that is handling these shipments,” Rose said.
Rose is a member of Teamsters Local 70 and has been building support inside their local to secure formal endorsement of the embargo campaign. Should the local back the campaign, they can push the issue up to Teamsters Joint Council 7, which covers much of the Teamsters’ West Coast membership.
“If FedEx workers were unionized and knew about this, there’s actual action to be taken,” they said. There could be negotiations between the local and that facility or corporate, with workers making the argument that the shipments put workers in danger by involving them in the movement of weapons for a war that has been defined by international courts as a genocide.
Rose said they’ve talked about the shipments with coworkers across political lines. One former Marine they work with reacted immediately when he learned what was moving through the airport. “His exact words were, ‘It’s just fucked up and fucking evil,’ ” they recalled. “He was the quickest to draw the connections.”
Others, they said, don’t need convincing that something is wrong. The anger isn’t ideological so much as visceral. “Coworkers ask, ‘How is that not illegal?’ and get angry once they understand the issue.”
Mohamed Shehk, organizing director of AROC Action, one of the organizations leading the Oakland People’s Arms Embargo, framed the stakes in broader terms.
“Workers are the backbone of our society and of our economy,” he told me. “Without workers’ participation, none of this infrastructure would be able to function.”
The campaign continues to gather support. Organizers say additional unions are weighing endorsements, and pressure at the Board of Port Commissioners meetings has grown. The question is no longer whether residents know about the shipments; it’s whether the Port will act.
From the OAK warehouse floor, the stakes are not abstract. The planes sit less than a quarter mile away.
“I feel like I should be able to do something about this,” Rose said. “I’m right there.”
Individually, they cannot cross the runway and halt a shipment. Collectively, they believe workers and residents can force a decision.
“With collective action,” said Rose, “this key node can be interrupted.”
Alex Press is a labor reporter. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation and Jacobin magazine, among other outlets. You can follow her on Twitter @alexnpress.
