Eyewitness from Italy’s general strike for Palestine

Workers in Italy show us the disruptive power of solidarity, writes Lucia Pradella

Wednesday 08 October 2025

Issue

Banners of Young Palestinians and the Si Cobas union on the march in Rome the day after the general strike

“I have never been at a million-strong demonstration after Tahrir Square,” an Egyptian trade unionist told me just before the Palestine national demonstration in Rome last week. When two million people joined the general strike and a million marched in Rome, those memories from the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 were reawakened.

It was the clearest expression yet of the will of the masses against a government complicit in colonialism and genocide. Coming just after another general strike and a wave of blockades, this was an incredible show of strength.

It was a political victory for the Palestinian organisations, such as the Young Palestinians and the Arab Palestinian Democratic Union, which have mobilised in support of the Palestinian resistance.

And it was a victory for independent unions such as Si Cobas, which called the general strike on 3 October—its fifth for Palestine since 2023.

Their collaboration began after 7 October. Palestinian youth groups and Si Cobas realised that protests and marches were not enough. It was essential to respond to the call of the Palestinian unions and disrupt the supply chains of genocide in Italy, Israel’s third-largest arms supplier.

In November 2023, Si Cobas called the first general strike for Palestine, laying the foundations for a cycle of worker-led solidarity that has reshaped Italian politics.

This movement has supported Palestine not simply as a national cause, but as the cause of all the oppressed and exploited across the world.

Amid intensified inter-imperialist rivalries, Israel has become an even more central pillar of the counter-revolutionary order in the region that came after the Arab Spring of 2011. It has helped enforce a neocolonial regime of extraction, repression and displacement that forces millions to emigrate.

Many migrants in Italy are at the centre of increasingly militarised supply chains that sustain the very border violence they survived. For them, Palestinian’s steadfast resistance is part of their own fight against a global system of immiseration and exploitation, a continuation of their interrupted revolutions.

After a year and a half of relative isolation, the Global Sumud Flotilla galvanised broader sectors of society. When Genoa’s Autonomous Dockworkers’ Collective declared, “If they block the Flotilla, we block Europe,” it crystallised a widespread sentiment and gave direction to mass action. 

Crucially, it drew on the method long used by Si Cobas in logistics—blockades to disrupt production and circulation.

This was the explicit target of the latest Italian government’s security decree. It expands police powers, criminalises road, rail and port blockades with up to six years in prison, and threatens migrant workers with loss of citizenship.  

Yet repression has backfired. “Let’s blockade everything” has become the movement’s rallying cry, driving hundreds of thousands into action. As escalating crises, wars and military spending reshape living conditions in Europe, broader sectors of workers and youth see the Palestinian resistance as part of their own struggle.

Palestine: Two years of genocide

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Their mobilisation pushed Italy’s largest trade union federation, the CGIL, to call a general strike alongside independent unions.

Attempts are underway to limit disruption and channel the movement into a parliamentary alternative to the far right, sometimes even invoking “national pride” against prime minister Giorgia Meloni. But this movement expresses a rupture that cannot be easily contained.

During the general strike in Milan, a short blockade of the ring road had been planned and police were aware of it. Officers escorted the front of the march as it exited. But the demonstration was so large that more people entered the road and kept going, blocking an even longer stretch. 

Here lies both the potential and the political challenge. A country without a “big left” has become the vanguard of the global Palestine solidarity movement.

This is because the anti-imperialist and militant approach of an organised core of mainly migrant workers and Palestinian groups has resonated among broader layers of workers and youth.

Hidden behind the self-congratulatory and often nationalist narratives of Italy’s general strikes lies their true meaning. It is an international horizon of solidarity among all the exploited and oppressed. It is the conviction that solidarity means resistance, resistance here means strikes and blockades—and that this is the force capable of confronting imperialism at its roots.

This is the main lesson from Italy to revolutionaries everywhere – and it is what Palestinians have always asked for.

Unions have called another general strike in Italy for 25 October