From June 17 to 21, officers, staff and members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) will meet in Vancouver, Canada, for their biennial convention. Delegates to the convention will undoubtedly be preoccupied with the immediate business of the union, which represents workers in industries ranging from bookstores to breweries, though it’s best known for unionizing dockworkers up and down the West Coast.

But amid the typical union business, convention delegates will also deliberate on a resolution submitted by Local 10, which comprises dockworkers from the San Francisco Bay Area. Drafted in response to the ongoing Israeli-perpetrated genocide — which has killed more than 35,709 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera — the resolution calls on all ILWU dockworkers to refuse to handle military cargo bound for Israel.

As surprising as this act of solidarity by dockworkers in the San Francisco Bay Area may sound, it is in fact only the latest effort in Local 10’s decades-long history of supporting Palestinian liberation.

“The ILWU has a long history of being interested in and supportive of Palestinian liberation, going back as early as the mid ‘80s,” said Peter Cole, professor of history at Western Illinois University, in an interview with Truthout. “And that was a direct result of the ILWU — especially its Bay Area branch, Local 10 — having a longer history of solidarity with people in South Africa fighting against apartheid.”

Cole examines the history of Local 10’s opposition to apartheid in South Africa, as well as its connections to Palestinian liberation, in Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. Made up predominantly of Black workers and motivated by both left-wing politics in general and anti-racism in particular, Local 10 took a........

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