Bloquejar-ho Tot / Blocchiamo Tutto / Let’s Block Everything

Lessons from Barcelona’s movement for Palestine, and how the Global Sumud Flotilla built power

By Caroline Nieto and Talia Reiss

Illustration by Ellie Lin

This piece was published in collaboration with The College Hill Independent, a Providence-based publication run by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design students. 

On the evening of October 1, 2025, Arnau Rot was drinking tea at a bar in Barcelona. He was gearing up for an early morning and a long day of protesting. As a student organizer with the socialist group ContraCorrent Catalunya, Arnau had helped send off the Global Sumud Flotilla one month prior. The flotilla, a coordinated fleet of 40 boats and 500 activists, had hoped to break Israel’s naval blockade around the Gaza Strip and deliver humanitarian aid. As the boats approached the shoreline, Arnau had a familiar feeling—based on past patterns of interception, it was likely that the Israeli Navy would stop the flotilla that night. By 8 p.m., he was watching the siege begin, live from the bar TV. 

We first learned about ContraCorrent when two students at the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), where we are studying abroad, interrupted our class to promote a socialist open house on campus. Our professor didn’t shoo the students away—she just smiled and nodded while they relayed the details, and repeated them to us in slower Spanish after they left. 

If we hadn’t already gathered it from the city’s plethora of leftist graffiti, it became clear at this moment that support for progressive student organizing was strong in Barcelona. Palestinian liberation in particular is overwhelmingly popular in Spain—a survey conducted by the Elcano Royal Institute in 2024 found that of respondents in a representative sample of Spanish adults, 78% supported the swift recognition of the State of Palestine. The left-wing party currently in power, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has also been firm in its rhetorical support for Palestine. Unlike the United States, Spain recognized Palestinian statehood in May 2024 and formalized a total arms embargo on Israel in October 2025. Still, Spain maintains some economic and diplomatic ties with Israel, an issue that has spurred massive protests. In the past two years, Spain’s pro-Palestine movement has built power by creating the kinds of intermovement and transnational coalitions that organizers in the U.S. have yet to manage.

At the open house, Arnau was tabling for ContraCorrent and the feminist organization Pan y Rosas. We got to chatting about our struggles with student organizing, frustrated by our respective universities’ cruel responses to student protests. UB’s student movement had started off small. In the first months of Israel’s assault on Gaza, UB students hosted assemblies with around 60 participants. “But then it started dying slowly; it just tore apart,” said Arnau. “There wasn’t any union in this fight,” he added, pointing to fragmented efforts by students, professors, and workers. So when the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) chapter in Valencia launched Spain’s first pro-Palestine encampment on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, students in Barcelona were quick to follow. Around 50 student organizers met that Friday to lay the groundwork, and by Monday, the UB encampment was up. 

Around 100 students slept in tents in a small garden on campus. “There were activities organized every day all morning. Formaciones, like charlas: speeches, seminars,” said Arnau. “We had a lot of concerts on Fridays […] Obviously Rosalía didn’t come, but some well-known artists were coming.” In the early days, students cooked meals in Antiga Massana, a nearby building that had been occupied by activists in 2020 to counteract gentrification and support people living in the neighborhood. Community members donated additional food and materials to the encampment.

Arnau attributed the size and power of the encampment to “una red”—a network—of activist organizations working together, including the University Network for Palestine, Universities with Palestine, the Student Committee of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, and the Prou Complicitat amb Israel (Enough Complicity with Israel) platform. This coalition assembled 200 to 300 people every day. At these daily assemblies, attendees voted on a basic political program. Although each organization maintained its own platform, people collectively voted that the UB encampment would be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonialist. “It was very democratic,” said Arnau. 

Students also formulated a clear demand: “for our university to leave any European program or international university program in which Israel was participating,” said Arnau. This included divestment from companies funding and arming the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Arnau pointed to entities like Santander Bank, which provides scholarships and grants to universities and their students. According to BDS, Santander finances companies such as Boeing and General Dynamics, which manufacture weapons for the IDF.

Private contributions account for a little under half of UB’s funding—just enough for the university to still be considered public. Whereas Brown and Columbia are not required to disclose the details of their private funding, UB has an online transparency portal detailing the university’s annual accounts. Economic transparency has made it simpler to demand specific investment changes from the school, but UB’s reliance on private investors meant that those demands were unlikely to be fulfilled. The university had an easy way out of financial accountability. Protesters were backed into a corner.

Unlike in the U.S., popular pro-Palestine sentiment in Spain created pressure for UB to support the encampment. “Because it’s meant to be a leftist university, they couldn’t publicly condemn what we were doing. It had a political cost for them,” said Arnau. “But at the same time, they as an institution were facing this barrier, which was that they couldn’t meet our demands to the end because they had some economic interests that they couldn’t ignore.” Despite agreeing to the divestment demand, UB prolonged its implementation and the movement fizzled. Similarly, the Brown Corporation agreed to negotiate with student organizers, but voted down the divestment proposal in secret months later. Columbia provided no substantive proposal at all, even when the Columbia College student body overwhelmingly passed a divestment referendum in 2024. Like at UB, the movement for Palestine at both Brown and Columbia has waned—perhaps because of the October ‘ceasefire,’ but also because violent repression from our universities and federal government has made protesting more dangerous. Though the climate for organizing differs between the two countries, Americans can learn a lot from the student movement for Palestine in Spain—namely, the importance of building coalitions and making decisions multilaterally. 

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In the year following the UB encampment, organizing for Palestine in Barcelona had shrunk to one protest every few months. The Global Sumud Flotilla sparked a revival. As the flotilla approached the Gaza Strip in the days prior to the October 1 interception, Barcelona celebrated. “It was talked about everywhere here,” Arnau said, rolling a cigarette. “I remember partying that same weekend […] in the streets, and people would sing chants for Palestine in the parties. Everyone was drunk and just very moved. It was very emotional days.” 

Organizers hoped the flotilla would both provide some much-needed aid and raise global awareness about the famine in Gaza. Israel controls the borders around Palestine, dictating the type and amount of aid that enters Gaza. For decades, Israel has blockaded border checkpoints and sea ports to weaponize starvation against the Palestinian people. As part of its 2007 attack on the Gaza Strip, the IDF imposed a strict naval blockade and closed the Karni Crossing, the primary terminal at the time for the import of basic goods into the Gaza Strip. The closure produced major shortages of food and medical supplies, yet the Israeli government blocked humanitarian aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Dov Weissglass, then a senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained that the closure was intended “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Denying civilians necessary food and medicine is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits militaries from intentionally targeting civilians. Amnesty International criticized Israel’s blockades as “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people for electing Hamas in 2006—the first statewide election in Palestine in a decade. Still, Israel permanently closed the Karni Crossing in 2011. 

Today, the most direct routes for aid are the border crossings on land, either at the recently re-opened Rafah Border Crossing between Egypt and Gaza or along the Gaza-Israel border. Throughout its genocide in Gaza, Israel has strictly controlled the movement of supplies through these crossings. “Anything they saw as being potentially usable by Hamas was blocked,” said Dr. Adam Levine, Professor of Emergency Medicine and International and Public Affairs at Brown. Israel’s definition of military use was sometimes “really ridiculous, like scalpels,” he said, and other times  “reasonable but still difficult—like concrete, for instance, which is needed for reconstruction but obviously can also be used for construction of military barracks and tunnels.” Israel has also blocked diesel fuel, which is essential for powering hospitals. For Israel to designate itself the arbiter of what constitutes a potential weapon has fatal consequences. 

In March 2025, Israel implemented a near-total blockade on Gaza for almost three months. By August, the United Nations confirmed that more than half a million Gazans faced famine—a classification marked by extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition, and starvation-related deaths, according to the World Health Organization. In response, the Global Sumud Flotilla prepared to set sail from Barcelona with a symbolic amount of aid—food, water, and medical supplies—to meet the immediate needs of some Palestinians. They could not carry enough to solve the humanitarian crisis, as the lack of deep-sea ports in Gaza makes it difficult to deliver substantial aid by ship. Instead, organizers largely intended the flotilla mission as an advocacy tool to draw attention to Israel’s blockade and the resulting famine. “They knew that they weren’t going to get to Palestine. It was just a call for people to get up again,” said Arnau.

The last time a maritime aid mission to Gaza succeeded was in 2008, when two boats from the Free Gaza Movement broke Israel’s naval blockade and landed in Palestine. In the eight years following, the Movement launched 31 boats with humanitarian aid, but none reached Gaza. The 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, for instance, carried around 700 passengers and 10,000 tons of aid. In international waters, Israeli soldiers boarded the ships and killed nine passengers. Israel also intercepted freedom flotillas in 2011, 2015, and 2018, detaining and deporting their passengers. 

Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, it is generally illegal for countries to seize ships in international waters, though wartime exceptions exist. But even if Israel intercepted the flotillas inside its own naval territory (12 nautical miles from the Gaza shoreline), the seizures would likely still be illegal. The blockade itself would be “probably perfectly reasonable under international humanitarian law, as long as Israel is allowing enough aid to go in through the Israeli crossings or the Egyptian crossings by land into Gaza, which, at this time, they are not doing,” said Levine. 

Israel’s bombings and blockades endanger the most immediate needs of Palestinians, culminating in mass starvation, loss of shelter, and death. Up against the machine of Israel and its allies, humanitarian groups without government backing or an aggressive military presence supply aid in the ways they can. Instead of providing substantial relief, which would be untenable for a single mission facing an atrocity of this scale, the flotilla leveraged symbolic power to highlight the realities of the ongoing genocide. Israel’s military and political domination is enough to demobilize a political movement, especially given the relationship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump. Israel’s genocidal tactics are anything but symbolic, which makes the position of political organizers even more fraught. Facing a horrific material reality, symbolic action alone cannot be enough. Still, a strong coalition of organizers can produce palpable results.

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For three days before the Global Sumud Flotilla set sail on September 1, thousands of people gathered for a festival by the port. ContraCorrent organizers volunteered to stock the ships and hosted comrades from neighboring chapters who had come to Barcelona to help. Public figures such as Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg and Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham gave speeches. Both Thunberg and Cunningham sailed on the flotilla, along with the former Mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau, deputies from the European Council and Mandla Mandela, a grandson of Nelson Mandela. 

A productive community of organizers requires a collective consciousness that guides each action. When Israel intercepted the flotilla on October 1 and detained 443 passengers, the global outrage was overwhelming. World leaders from at least 15 countries had condemned a potential interception, and millions of people worldwide participated in demonstrations for Palestine. In Italy, the protests were historic. More than two million workers and students participated in a general strike called by Italy’s largest trade union. Protestors shut down ports, railways, highways, and schools in more than eighty cities. In Rome alone, one million people marched in the streets, chanting “Blocchiamo tutto”—“Let’s block everything.” They were following up on a promise made by Riccardo Rudino, a dockworker with the Autonomous Port Workers’ Collective in Genoa, at Italy’s flotilla send-off a month prior: “If, even for 20 minutes, we lose contact with our comrades on the flotilla, we will block all of Europe: from Genoa’s docks, not a single nail will leave, it will be a global strike.” 

Organizers in Spain responded to the call. “Following the example of Italian workers and students, people got excited here to fight for Palestine again,” said Arnau. Across Spain, students paraded through university buildings “singing chants, going inside the classes, stopping the teachers, inviting all the students to come out, wearing Palestine flags, then meeting in the gardens or whatever to make an assembly,” he said. Students acted in tandem with activists from the anarchist union Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), which called a 24-hour general strike the same day. Together, they demanded that the Spanish government cut financial ties with Israel. 

The protests on October 3 gathered tens of thousands of people, 50 of whom camped out in a city square that night. “The protests were very big,” said Arnau. “We had, for three days straight, protests at night next to the port with a lot of police violence. They would throw pepper [spray], they would throw smoke.” He remembered protestors burning dumpsters, barricading streets, throwing fireworks, and shattering the windows of McDonald’s and Starbucks buildings. “It was some very intense nights,” he said. Two weeks later, the CGT called for another general strike for Palestine. “And this time we did sleep in universities to close the faculties [department buildings] the day after,” said Arnau. “We woke up, we were here all morning, we barricaded the doors and all classes were stopped.”

Though the Global Sumud Flotilla never reached Gaza, strategic organizing made the mission effective. Organizers had hoped the participation of famous activists like Thunberg would both amplify publicity and help protect the passengers. “These very big public figures—really you couldn’t torture, you couldn’t put [them] in prison for more than two days, because that had a very big political cost,” Arnau said. Later, however, Thunberg would detail her extreme mistreatment at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Another passenger, an American named Windfield Beaver, told Reuters that Thunberg was “treated terribly” and “used as propaganda,” suggesting that the IDF had targeted her because of her celebrity. Fame may not have protected Thunberg or her fellow passengers, but Israel’s abuse of a public figure made headlines and brought attention to Israeli violence, further motivating protestors. 

The flotilla organizers also used the internationality of participants to provoke a global political response. With passengers from 44 countries, “you couldn’t find in one same ship two people with the same nationality,” Arnau said. That way, if Israel were to imprison or abuse passengers, each of their respective countries would be obliged to provide consular protection in opposition to Israel. Organizers would win regardless of the outcome—either a government’s lack of response would demonstrate Israel’s shirking of international law, or diplomatic fallout would affect the flow of financial and material support for Israel’s genocide. In Spain, the latter proved true. The month the flotilla set sail, Prime Minister Sánchez announced a total arms embargo on Israel. Around one week after Israel’s interception, lawmakers approved the embargo in a 178 to 169 vote. Though it’s impossible to say with certainty whether the flotilla mission caused the policy change, it’s clear that the resurgence of support for Palestine in Spain has extended beyond the symbolic. 

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Arnau anticipates a similar revival in organizing for Palestine when the latest Global Sumud Flotilla leaves from Barcelona this month. Like the last flotilla, this one aims to break Israel’s illegal blockade and deliver essential supplies like food and medicine. This mission, however, is less symbolic: “They really do want to try to step foot on Palestinian land,” said Arnau. This flotilla will also be much larger, with more than 100 boats and 3,000 participants from over 100 countries. As part of the Gaza Medical Mission, the flotilla will include a dedicated medical fleet carrying essential medical supplies and 1,000 healthcare professionals. The Spanish nonprofit Open Arms, which is dedicated to humanitarian rescue missions at sea, will donate one of their largest ships. The rest of the flotilla’s funding has come from “just people. Not any institution. There's not any government behind it. That's what's so powerful about it,” said Arnau. 

As the U.S. government continually powers Israel’s genocide with material and financial support, Americans cannot forget the power of collective action. Understandably, protests for Palestine dwindled after student movements were brutally suppressed by universities and the federal government. Now, with protests focused on an endless onslaught of American violence—from ICE terror to a senseless war on Iran—it seems Americans have set aside the fight for Palestine, where, despite the ‘ceasefire,’ most border crossings have recently closed, Israeli strikes continue, and millions remain in crisis-level hunger. 

If this flotilla can’t reach Gaza, why shouldn’t Americans swear to “blocchiamo tutto”? Following the examples of Italy and Spain, students and unions in the U.S. should come together under a coalition for Palestine. We should vote on our own political program, join the global days of action, and respond to overseas calls for general strikes from school and work. It’s difficult to maintain hope and energy when one’s government responds to protest by detaining student activists, terrorizing journalists, and shooting protestors in their cars. But protest has historically been a powerful tool, which is why generations of political organizers, students, and workers have put themselves on the line again and again. This is what has worked in the past: fostering relationships between people and groups to exert real influence. For instance, the Student Workers of Columbia have just voted to authorize a strike in which boycotts, divestment, and sanctions are a key demand. Alliances between student unions and organizers for Palestine would amplify both movements’ goals.  

Once the Global Sumud Flotilla docks in Palestine, its organizers aboard plan to stay, helping local communities rebuild their homes, schools, and hospitals. “From what I’ve been told, it’s a plan against Trump and Netanyahu's plan of making a resort,” said Arnau. The organizers “really do want to stay there and try to build a powerful team and community of people who are able to […] rebuild life again there.” When the flotilla embarks on April 12, we will be there to send it off—cheering, singing, and above all, looking with our people toward the horizon.

TALIA REISS (Brown ’27) and CAROLINE NIETO (Columbia College ’27) for a free Palestine.