For those who have been involved with the Free Palestine Movement for decades you are well aware that this movement has grown by leaps and bounds the last five years. Here is one more example of the movement growing. Keep pushing folks. Keep pushing, protesting, lobbying, calling, emailing congress etc.

"Update from Oakland: Victory!

by Henry Norr on June 21, 2010 · 15 comments Like 3 4 Retweet
Send to a Friend del.icio.us Digg Furl

Quick follow-up on today’s action at the Oakland docks: we won! Something like 400 or 500 people – many who had also been there at 5:30 in the morning, plus others who hadn’t made the first shift – turned up to resume the picket line at 4 p.m. I was surprised there weren’t more: I had assumed there would be far more people in the afternoon, with the BART running, but I guess even in the Internet age it’s hard to get people out with only a a couple of hours notice.

Still, there were more than enough people to re-create strong picket lines at all three gates to the berth where the Israeli ship was coming in. Faced with the prospect of workers again refusing to cross the picket line and the arbitrator again ruling in their favor, the company that runs the dock (SSA, or Stevedoring Services of America, which has also run the port of Basra, Iraq, since the American invasion in 2003) elected to cancel the evening shift. The ship docked while we picketed, and presumably it will be unloaded tomorrow – right now we don’t have the strength to keep up the picket line indefinitely, and even if we did, we can’t really ask the longshore workers to stay off the job forever. But we succeeded in delaying it for a full day, which was exactly what we’d hoped to achieve."

Links and clip over at Mondoweiss