By Marie Kelly
August 4, 2025

The Handala ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza was the latest attempt by the Freedom Flotilla to break Israel’s unlawful siege of Gaza. Well-documented accounts of starvation and famine have not swayed imperialist governments to forcefully condemn Israel through an arms embargo or economic sanctions.

The Freedom Flotilla is not affiliated with any government and consists of volunteers willing to risk their lives to deliver food, medicine and baby formula to Gaza.

Among the 21 volunteers aboard the Handala were seven U.S. citizens, including founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, Chris Smalls. The Handala was illegally intercepted by Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) 42 nautical miles from Gaza in international waters. The IOF kidnapped all 21 Handala crew members and held them against their will in Israeli prisons. Israel seized the ship and all its cargo, including baby formula and toys.

The kidnapping and act of piracy are war crimes. Some of the crew members started a hunger strike immediately following their kidnapping.

The Freedom Flotilla’s legal team was able to secure the release of 19 crew members over the next couple of days. However, Smalls and Tunisian activist Hatem Aouini were still held in an IOF prison. When lawyers met with Chris Smalls on the day after his capture, they noted he had visible signs of injuries due to torture. Smalls was surrounded by six Israeli special police during the meeting.

Unsanitary conditions, solitary confinement and lack of medical attention were reported by all the crew; however, Smalls, the only Black person on board the Handala, was the only activist who the IOF physically assaulted. Smalls and Aouini were finally freed and returned to the U.S. and Tunisia, respectively, on August 1.

The Black Lives Matter Movement and Atlanta-based Stop Cop City correctly made the connection between the IOF’s mistreatment of Smalls to racial profiling and police brutality in the U.S. Stop Cop City stated: “From the streets of Ferguson to the port of Ashdod, the legacy of anti-Blackness and colonialism stretches across borders. … From Gaza to Atlanta, the system is the same. Cop City, built on stolen Muscogee land, trains U.S. police with Israeli forces through Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE). Anti-Blackness is global.” (@stopcopcity, Instagram)

Media deletes attack on Smalls

Smalls was widely covered by the capitalist media in the early days of the Amazon Labor Union and its battle with Jeff Bezos. Time magazine and the New Yorker made him cover stories, and the New York Times highlighted Smalls in multiple news articles. He was interviewed and photographed in meetings with world leaders, including former President Joe Biden in 2022 after the ALU’s union election victory. Yet during the entire voyage of the Handala, the kidnapping of U.S. citizens by the IOF and the brutal treatment of a major labor leader has been ignored by major U.S. media.

This is just another example of the capitalist media’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people. University of New Brunswick (St. John, NB, Canada) Professor Nathan Kalman-Lamb wrote on Bluesky: “A notable public figure in the U.S. (Amazon labor organizer Christian Smalls) is illegally arrested by Israel and subjected to severe physical violence while on a hunger strike … and not one U.S. media outlet of any type has decided that is news.”

Limited labor solidarity with Smalls

What is the reaction of the labor movement to Israel’s abduction in international waters of a major labor leader and his detainment under brutal conditions for participating in a humanitarian mission to feed the starving people of Gaza? Condemnation has been limited.

The Tennessee Drivers Union said: “We stand in solidarity with our union brother, Chris Smalls, who was choked and kicked by seven Zionist soldiers for taking a stand against the holocaust of Palestinians. This was an attack against the working class. As a passenger of the Freedom Flotilla, he was representing organized labor. As a real working-class leader, he is representing the opinion of the majority of working-class people.

“Most working-class people do not want our hard work to pay for these atrocities. This violent overreaction was a sign of weakness. The monopoly capitalists fear a united international working class!” (@tndriversunion, X)

The Labor for Palestine National Network stated: “The attack on Handala and Israel’s racist targeting of Smalls demonstrate once again that the Zionist entity and its U.S. backers will punish anyone who resists their deliberate campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people. Now and always, we must be steadfast in our solidarity with Palestine, which is up against the same enemies as working people across the globe.” (@laborforpalestine, Instagram)

The 29,000-member California Faculty Association called for the immediate release of Smalls and “an immediate end to the engineered famine and deliberate starving of the people in Gaza, labor complicity with genocide and all U.S. military aid to Israel.” (calfac.org)

The National Nurses Union, the largest union of registered nurses in the U.S., condemned the detainment of Smalls and restated that “union nurses call for an end to the war on Gaza.” (nationalnursesunited.org)

Smalls’ own ALU said, “We honor the call from Palestinian labor unions to disrupt the arms trade and support global workers’ actions such as strikes, direct protests and other efforts” and made a broad appeal to labor leaders to call for Smalls’ release. (commondreams.org, July 31)

However, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien hasn’t said a word about Chris Smalls’ kidnapping and detention despite the ALU now being a Teamsters affiliate.

In an interview with RealNews before the IOF attack on the Handala, Smalls stated: “As a labor leader, as you mentioned, as a taxpaying U.S. citizen whose taxpaying dollars are going toward the slaughtering of nearly half a million people in less than two years, I can no longer be complicit. … The one thing I don’t want to happen is my kids being in the world that we live in right now. Every time a Palestinian child dies, a piece of humanity dies with it.”