The Electronic Intifada Podcast 11 March 2025
Noted environmental and anti-war activist Greta Thunberg was among the protesters in Copenhagen.
Maersk, for its part, claimed that the cargo at its Copenhagen port did not contain “weapons or ammunition,” but rather “military-related equipment,” adding that it is “derived from US policy under the US-Israeli security cooperation program. The cargo has been screened and complies with applicable laws.”
But as Jeanine Hourani of the Palestinian Youth Movement and the Mask Off Maersk campaign explains to The Electronic Intifada Podcast, the company does “transport rifle cups, they transport bullets, they transport military vehicles, including vehicles that rockets are launched on the back of – so they transport all of this military cargo, but not the live munition. And that’s kind of why they continue to deny the fact that they are complicit in aiding and abetting war crimes.”
Activists are gearing up for an international day of action on 18 March to coincide with the Maersk corporation’s annual general meeting, where executives and shareholders will be voting on two resolutions to end the transport of military cargo to Israel.
“This is a critical moment for us to let Maersk know that their complicity in war crimes will not go unnoticed,” the campaign says. “Now is the time for us to hold them accountable. Now is the time to take action.”
In late December, we had members of the Mask Off Maersk campaign on the livestream to talk about how Israel could not perpetrate its ongoing wars of extermination in Palestine without a global supply chain to import weapons and other materiel.
Jeanine Hourani and Aisha Nizar are steering committee members of the Mask Off Maersk campaign, and we invited them to give us an update on the campaign and its newest research on regular military cargo flights from Spain to Israel.
These flights are in violation of Spain’s own stated policy against the traffic of arms to Israel.
The report was co-authored by the Palestinian Youth Movement, along with Progressive International and the American Friends Service Committee.
From their perspective as activists with the Palestinian Youth Movement, Hourani adds, “when we say arms embargo, we mean a complete and total embargo of all military goods destined for Israel. And we see this as the bare minimum.”
There are “a couple of different strategies for holding corporations and governments accountable for aiding this genocide,” Nizar tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.
“And really what we did was we started looking at the United States, because we knew that the majority of weapons that were going to the Zionist entity was originating in the United States, or was either being composed in the United States.”
The campaign was able to identify these weapons manufacturers, Nizar says, “and then look at specific lines of transportation that were classified by the Department of Defense.”
The Mask Off Maersk campaign also recently submitted a report to the United Nations in response to a call by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, for evidence of complicity by private companies in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Hourani explains that as Palestinians, it was crucial to “expose the fact that the so-called international community has failed our people, and the failure of the world to intervene as tens if not hundreds of thousands of our people have been massacred, have been starved, have been kidnapped, should be a damnation of the liberal world order.”
The report, she adds, was important to submit “not because we think that the UN is going to be the liberator of Palestine, but because it enables us to kind of further expose this hypocrisy and also take the evidence that our people in Gaza have been have been producing to set the record straight – and to show the world what’s been happening over the last 15 months and actually amplify it on a global scale.”
Produced by Tamara Nassar
Photo by Agustín García
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