[PADOVA] POPULAR CONTROL ON THE PORT OF MARGHERA: NO TO THE TRANSPORTATION OF WEAPONS TO ISRAEL!

As Power to the People in Veneto, a few months ago we began an investigation into the role of the port of Marghera in the logistics of weapons towards Israel. Thanks to what we could define as “popular control over ports” we realized how much our territory is involved in what is happening in the Middle East, beyond the false narrative of an Italian government that would like to portray itself as a peaceful actor inclined to a diplomatic solution, with a bipartisan position on the conflict. The truth is that we are directly involved in the ongoing genocide, and our arms industry is doing business at the expense of the Palestinian people and that our government is with Israel, it is not neutral. Like universities, ports are also essential places for the survival and success of the Zionist colonial project and for this reason port authorities are often opaque and reticent to exercise the control functions that the law assigns to them.

Blocking arms exports, preventing the docking of ships that use Venice (and more generally Italian ports) as a logistical stopover to go to Israel, would have an immediate and concrete effect on the war against Gaza: Israel’s supplies pass more from the Mediterranean to Suez, the embargo can have important repercussions on the field.

It is no coincidence that both BDS and the Palestinian Youth Movement ask us to boycott Maersk, ask us to put pressure on the logistics giants, and it is no coincidence that European governments oppose these requests.

After months of popular control, our suspicions on the role of Marghera (which we have dissected in this article https://www.seizethetime.it/navi-sospette-a-porto-marghera/), have received a first confirmation: between 25 and 29 May 2024, a ship named Borkum, already reported in Spain due to the presence inside of it of a load of weapons and explosives on behalf of IMI Systems (the Israeli Leonardo), passed through the Venetian port and there it stopped for more than four days.

The hypothesis that the other ships that we have traced on the route are also carrying weapons for Israel is becoming more and more realistic, and for this reason, together with the basic union USB, we have presented a request for access to the documents in relation to four ships owned by ZIM (Israel) and MSC (the largest shipping company in the world), to have documentary answers to our questions and not just the statements made to the press to try to dismantle the protest. On the Borkum, for example, the response from the three European countries in which it stopped follows an identical script: the ship is in order and does not transport weapons.

Faced with our requests, the prefecture of Venice first claimed that it was only “metal pipes”, and then retracted (see “The new Venice and Mestre” of 19 May 2024) saying that the merchant ship was carrying explosives but for building demolitions . European authorities had also ensured that the ship remained in European waters, yet, as we write this statement, the Borkum is heading towards the port of Umm Qasr in Iraq. As you will see in the article, there are many open questions, but precisely because we believe that it is important to shed light on these events, we were not satisfied with half-truths: we decided to reconstruct the journey of the merchant ship from India to Marghera, based exclusively on open source data and tools, trying to find ourselves the truth that the competent authorities persist in denying us.

Here is the complete article: https://www.seizethetime.it/navi-sospette-a-porto-marghera-pt-2/