This October 7th marks 2 years since the Al Aqsa Flood, a just exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and liberation from settler colonialism. Ever since, Israel has unleashed the most blatantly genocidal war against the resistance forces, and against the Palestinian people, a lot of whom are workers.
Palestinian workers have been subjected to escalating anti-worker attacks by the Israeli government. Following October 7th, 2023, Israel cancelled work permits for more than 140,000 workers from the West Bank and Gaza. Thousands were rounded up and detained in Israeli prisons and military camps, where they faced torture and abuse at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Those few who were released, returned with their belongings stripped away from them and with their wages withheld.
This measure reflects the Israeli government’s intensified campaign against Palestinian workers post October 7th, branding them as national threats and moving to replace them – who, since the mid-1960s, have formed a significant part of Israel’s labor force – with workers from other countries. Even when Israel partially reopened access for Palestinian workers, first in West Bank settlements by late October 2023 and later in its construction sector in March 2024, only a fraction were allowed back. Those few who returned did so under heavy militarization and surveillance, enduring daily threats and abuse in the workplace.
Two years on, the economic consequences of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian workers, waged alongside its genocidal war on Gaza, have been devastating. As vital service and commercial sectors remain disrupted, unemployment has soared, poverty has deepened, and thousands of families have been stripped of their livelihoods.
These attacks on Palestinian workers post October 7th are only part of Israel’s broader settler-colonial project. For 77 years under the Zionist occupation, Palestinians have been systematically stripped of access to their land and denied the means to engage in agriculture and industry. Forced into conditions that rob them of self-sufficiency, Palestinian workers and their families have been pushed to depend on employment in Israel – now a significant part of the Palestinian economy – yet they remain marginalized and forced to endure harsh treatment. This is an intentional act of economic strangulation meant to weaken Palestinian resistance, tighten colonial control, and drive Palestinians off their own land.
Yet, after decades of colonial violence and in the face of genocide, Palestinians continue to resist. And everywhere in the world, people – and especially workers – are rising to demand an end to Israel’s genocidal war and its occupation of Palestine. This year alone, French dockworkers have refused to load weapons bound for Israel, Italian workers have launched strikes across multiple sectors to pressure their government to halt trade and military cooperation with the Zionist state, and Microsoft employees in the United States have repeatedly protested the company’s complicity in providing tech services to the Israeli military. Workers everywhere are organizing in solidarity with Palestine: South African healthcare workers have taken to the streets to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, while in Indonesia, workers from various sectors came together on Nakba Day to form the Indonesian Workers’ Alliance Against War and Colonialism, and countless others continue to stand against the genocide and the settler colonial project that is Israel.
More recently in Greece, thousands of workers took to the streets during a nationwide general strike to protest the increased flexibilization of working conditions under new labor laws. Amid the sea of demonstrators, the Palestinian flag was raised high. It serves as a powerful reminder that Palestinians and workers everywhere share the same struggle against oppression and exploitation. Across the world, from Athens and beyond, every workers’ protest against anti-worker labor laws echoes with the same cry: Free, free Palestine.
In this spirit, the People Over Profit network stands with the people and workers of Palestine in their just struggle for self-determination and liberation from the Israeli occupation. We recognize that their struggle is part of the struggle of workers globally against the drive for profit. Their liberation from the Zionist occupation is the first step toward dismantling systems that value profit over peoples’ lives. Thus, the Al Aqsa Flood, like all forms of Palestinian resistance, is not only justified, but also a necessary assertion of a people’s right to liberation.