Mask Off, Maersk

Lea Kayali: One of the reasons we targeted Maersk is because they are an industry leader. When Maersk does something like this, it sets the tone for other major corporations. Part of isolating Zionism is preventing their ability to do business with the rest of the global economy, hitting the imperialist economy writ large. 

In addition to Maersk cutting ties with businesses and illegal Israeli settlements, we’ve also seen that Spain has rejected two Maersk ships that were carrying military cargo. Months ago, there were significant delays to Maersk shipments carrying weapon parts or military cargo to Israel.

These wins are significant. They’re not a full victory, but they’re very exciting for a campaign that launched only a year ago.

Roua Daas: As of June 2024, Maersk has transported $300 million worth of weapons components for the top four weapons manufacturers to the United States, making them directly complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. And we know, of course, that the weapons are what are dropping on our people’s heads. But those weapons have to get to Israel somehow, and it is Maersk that is responsible for allowing Israel to have access to those weapons to murder Palestinians.

As a logistics company, Maersk has ties with many different weapons manufacturers. They’ve been contracted with the Department of Defense and the Pentagon, and have profited from these relationships. From 2001 to 2011, Maersk profited from the almost $12 billion granted to shipping companies in military contracts. Since the start of the genocide, Maersk has transported millions of pounds of military cargo to Israel from the U.S. Most recently in 2023, the Department of Defense awarded them $182 million, in addition to the contracts it has with companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other big weapons manufacturers and profiteers. We know that Maersk is no stranger to facilitating genocide and death. At the same time, Maersk is a logistics company that has many parts of its business. When we were thinking about what campaign we were going to take up, we asked, ​“What is a winnable target?” Part of what was notable about Maersk is that their company is not only transporting weapons; weapons transportation is only a portion of their profit margin. But that portion has been facilitating the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The Mask Off Maersk campaign demands that Maersk stop transporting military cargo that is complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people, and that Maersk terminate all contracts that support weapons and genocide, including its contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israeli Ministry of Defense. We are targeting Maersk because we want to disrupt the flow of weapons that make the genocide of Palestinians possible to begin with. So interrupting this chain will block the Zionist entity from acquiring the arms used to target Palestinian people.

We want to push the narrative that they are evil. We want to expose their complicity in genocide — shipping weapons and equipment to the front lines and making the killing possible.

When we think about the demands of the arms embargo, we’re pushing people in our movement to think beyond a cease-fire. The instinct is to demand that the genocide must end now, and we do. But what happens after that? How can we make sure that this never happens again? We’re pushing people to think about a long-term strategy, a long-term vision for Palestinian Liberation.

Lea Kayali: When it comes to creating a legal crisis, this is the avenue we pursued that has led to Francesca Albanese’s UN Special Rapporteurs Report that was released earlier this week. We analyzed how Maersk is complicit in violations of international human rights against the Palestinian people, knowing that kind of language matters to Maersk. The language of liability matters to international corporations. In advance of the 59^th session of the Human Rights Council, we submitted a report as PYM that included meticulous research about the weapons components that our research team had identified and paired that with on-the-ground research in Gaza to show how Maersk was participating in the genocide, directly, and how the weapons that Maersk is shipping are actually illegal according to international law. For those of us with a conscience, this is a no-brainer, but to be able to use that language against Maersk was an important avenue of pressure.

We’ve also worked with local organizers and left revolutionary forces to create an orchestra of pressure and produce the diplomatic crisis Maersk found itself at the center of.

And this is certainly new territory for us as a scrappy, grassroots organization that has no full-time staff. But we were able to — through that first report that we launched in November of this year that focused on Spain’s complicity in the flow of the arms trade — identify left, revolutionary and socialist forces within Spain and other countries and leverage those forces to create upwards pressure on governments to take action against Maersk. This required leveraging fertile popular support for the Palestinian people. That was very clear in Morocco, where we created a crisis between the desires of the masses of people in Morocco who stand in solidarity Palestine and the normalizing government. 

Similarly, we’ve seen that sort of diplomatic crisis forced in the Netherlands, where Dutch people are demanding an end to the F-35 program and the Netherlands’ role in it. The F-35 is one of the most pernicious tools in the imperial toolbox. It is the fighter jet that drops bombs on Gaza. It is used in all imperial wars. It’s a weapon that only NATO-allied countries have access to.

In Spain, the port of Algeciras is one of the primary ports on the European side of the Atlantic where these weapons travel to. In Morocco, there’s a Maersk-owned terminal that is highly critical to their ability to navigate the Mediterranean. In Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, it’s a core node of that F-35 supply chain that many parts have to flow through.

Roua Daas: Local actions and campaigns allow us to disrupt business as usual. 

For example, workers at the Moroccan ports refused to load the Maersk ships. So not only is Maersk now facing a legal battle, but their actual ships can’t do what they were meant to do. This is really, really important because we know that Maersk, as all companies are, is a machine of profit. When we disrupt a business, we disrupt profit, and we therefore disrupt Maersk. 

Another really important aspect of local actions for local campaigns is reputational damage. The Mask Off Maersk campaign has reframed Maersk from this innocent, ​“our ships go from here to here. … We’re not the ones actually bombing the Palestinians” company, to ​“you are the reason that these bombs can be dropped.” Without you, they wouldn’t have the bombs to drop in the first place. This kind of reputational damage is really important to any campaign. 

By taking up local actions and campaigns in other places, we can tell Maersk: All eyes are on you, not just in the UN, not just in Copenhagen, not just in Morocco, not just in Boston. In all these places people are watching what you are doing and making demands for you to stop. 

People power, ultimately, is what makes change in the world, and what’s going to liberate Palestine. We are increasing the movement’s capacity to build people power, and we are, of course, increasing the campaign’s capacity to be more effective. The local campaigns serve a really important role in broadening our movement. 

Lea Kayali: Intensive research has been super necessary in this campaign. To take down imperialism, we have to understand imperialism. And imperialism includes a lot of details! It includes all the spreadsheets and getting your elbows into shipping and bills of lading and websites. This campaign is critical because it’s expanding an anti-Zionist politic to a truly anti-imperial politic. That is, naming a target that is deeply complicit not just in the genocide of our people but in the entire global capitalist and imperialist system. To understand that, we have to do research, and we have to really sharpen our own tools to understand exactly how they operate. We can’t get into the gears of imperialist machines without knowing where the cogs are and what connects to what piece. And they’re not going to teach us all of those things. We have to teach ourselves.