Jonathan Nault spent a couple of years playing his drum at protests against the genocide in Gaza. At a recent action Nault attended, he was silent, lying down with his arms in chains. He feels he’s finally making some noise.
He was part of a group of activists who used their own bodies and some extremely used vehicles purchased on Craigslist to block a shipment of components headed out of Elizabeth-Port Authority Marine Terminal in New Jersey en route to Elbit Systems, the largest weapons manufacturer in Israel. They held up the boat and all other activity at the busy port for about three and a half hours at the May 22 action.
“We keep proclaiming feelings of solidarity for these people that are getting destroyed by weapons paid for with our tax dollars,” Nault said. “If you spend two and a half years proclaiming solidarity, it gets to a point where you have to prove it.”
Nault is part of a wave of activism that combines worker solidarity, local organizing, and direct action against economic interests. The goal is to disrupt what’s happening in the Middle East and more broadly to oppose racism and militarism. Activists are encouraging other Americans to do likewise.
“It’s our time to get active. It’s our time to be unruly and rowdy and a nuisance and a menace,” said Mayowa Willoughby, one of the protesters arrested for blocking the port. They noted that there is a history of collaboration between dockworkers and activists to disrupt shipping from the U.S. to apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
“I believe No Kings was seven million people. If we had 100,000 people, just 100,000 people, we could … shut down … all of the ports in the United States,” they said.
Willoughby and nine others face multiple charges, which as of June 16 had all been reduced to misdemeanors, for stretching a recreational vehicle and boat with a trailer across the port entrance. The group secured themselves to the vehicles with homemade devices called sleeping dragons, typically PVC pipes that a protester can use to latch onto another protester or an object. The devices are popular enough that FEMA offers a training for first responders on how to deal with them.
These particular sleeping dragons were reinforced with duct tape, metal, and concrete, which required the Port Authority Police to resort to power tools. One protester has photographs of burns on his arm that he said came from sparks flying in the process.
Willoughby’s group, which calls itself an “autonomous collective” without adopting any name, hoisted a banner at the port that read, “ZIM and Maersk Ship Genocide and Ecocide.” ZIM is an Israel-based shipping company, while Maersk is based in Denmark. Both operate out of the port in New Jersey.
ZIM, THE OWNER OF THE SHIP delayed by the protest, did not respond to a request to comment for this story. Maersk declined an interview but referenced previous statements denying that it ships weapons. Francesca Albanese, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, says otherwise. In a 2025 report, she included Maersk on a list of companies supporting the Israeli military in Gaza as they “transport components, parts, weapons and raw materials, sustaining a steady flow of United States-supplied military equipment post-October 2023.”
A more recent report from the Palestinian Youth Movement and Oxfam Denmark found that Maersk shipped more than 1.42 million kilograms of bullet cores and brass case cups, at least 1,996 bomb bodies, and 204 projectile bodies to Elbit Systems in the years after October 7th. These components were used in the production of Israeli military weapons and small-arms ammunition.
Between March and September of 2024, as the assault on Gaza intensified, ZIM share prices went up 150 percent. A group of Belgian NGOs have filed a criminal complaint against ZIM, alleging that the company is illegally shipping ammunition out of the port of Antwerp and Liège airport. Belgian law prohibits the export of weapons to Israel.
Albanese concluded in her report: “While life in Gaza is being obliterated and the West Bank is under escalating assault, the present report shows why the genocide carried out by Israel continues: because it is lucrative for many.”
The activists want ZIM and Maersk banned from the New Jersey port and want dockworkers represented by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) to stop moving cargo for these companies. The port is controlled by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a body whose members are nominated by the governors of the two states and confirmed by the state legislatures. “The Port Authority doesn’t determine what’s carried on cargo ships or what cargo is accepted by the companies operating at the terminals,” spokesperson Steven Burns said via email. He added, “The companies operating the marine terminals determine what they do or don’t want moved through their facilities.”
The company operating that terminal is the Australian multinational Macquarie Asset Management. Macquarie did not reply to a request for comment.
The dockworkers union, ILA, did not respond either. Activists describe the ILA as to the right of the union that represents dockworkers on the West Coast of the U.S., the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). In 2014 and 2021, ILWU members supported pro-Palestinian protesters in Oakland and refused to load ZIM ships. The port was closed to Israel’s largest shipping company for years, though ZIM has resumed activity there. In several European ports, dockworkers have refused to handle ZIM cargo.
Oakland’s port is located at a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stop, giving protesters easy access. The port in Elizabeth is not accessible to public transportation and doesn’t have much parking. Thus, the kind of activism possible there is different, according to “Fatima Patel,” an organizer with Dockworkers and Communities for Palestine (DCP). She uses an alias because of fear of retribution for her activism, she said.
Given the challenges to mounting large-scale protests at the site, DCP has been doing long-term labor organizing at the port to one day build up the power to “interrupt the supply chain of genocide,” she said.
IN ADDITION TO UNIONIZED DOCKWORKERS, port truckers are part of the crew moving goods ultimately bound for Israel. The Palestinian Youth Movement and Progressive International issued a report last year that identified a single warehouse in Jersey City as a conduit for 90 percent of the commercial sea cargo headed from the U.S. to the Israeli military. The report based the calculation on publicly available bills of lading and noted that these commercial shipments are smaller than those going through U.S. military bases.
Some port truckers are refusing to bring shipments from the warehouse destined for ZIM ships, Patel said, even though the trucker population is not unionized and is heavily immigrant, and therefore more vulnerable than other workers on the docks.
Isaiah Martin is a Virginia-based trucker who refuses to haul ZIM containers because of the role that the shipper plays in the genocide. Martin is self-employed and has no boss to penalize him for this action, though it can cost him a day’s fees. He realizes he’s privileged in that he can still pay his bills and said that the sacrifice is tiny given the scale of the crisis.
Recently, Martin participated in a protest at the Norfolk International Terminals, in Virginia, where activists handed out flyers to educate workers on the role shipping plays in the genocide. He also talks with colleagues about how tariffs and the monthslong closure of the Strait of Hormuz affected their bottom lines. “We can’t sit and wait for diesel to be $10 a gallon for us to start caring about geopolitics,” he said.
Martin is a member of Truckers Movement for Justice, a grassroots advocacy group, and acknowledges that the solitary nature of the profession can make it hard to organize. Nevertheless, he believes truckers united could make it extremely difficult to ship arms to Israel. “The biggest thing is just to change the consciousness of our working class,” he said.
MORE THAN 1,000 PALESTINIANS have been killed since a cease-fire was declared last October, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. That conflict is the urgent concern of activists. But they believe that ending the genocide will require changing larger systems.
“If we just allow the inertia of white supremacy to march on unchallenged, the people of the Sudan, of the Congo, the death of Gaza, of the West Bank, will be nothing but a distant memory,” said Willoughby. “For me, that’s a future that I must challenge, where it’s not a death sentence just to be born Black or Indigenous.”
Ten people with an old RV closed down one of the busiest ports in the United States. That is a technique that activists believe can be deployed on a wide range of issues. “On other policy goals, if the government isn’t listening to you … we can pull on levers of the economy where tremendous amounts of wealth is moved,” Nault said. After the New Jersey action, some people online were referring to him and his comrades as heroes. “As though activists are not just regular people!” he said with a laugh.
The vehicles used in the protest are all impounded now and registered in the name of one of the protesters, Mark Colville. “I’m not interested in having a boat,” Colville said. But he is considering retrieving the RV. He believes it could be converted into a food truck to serve unhoused people.
Photos provided by the collective that shut down the port.
