KernowDamo: Israel is increasingly being told it is unwelcome in Europe by ordinary people, as yet another nation sends Netanyahu the message!
Right, so it turns out you don’t need a seat in parliament to make foreign policy — sometimes all it takes is a high-vis vest, a union card, and the nerve to tell a national airline to get stuffed. While Belgium’s political class clinks glasses with diplomats and perfects the art of “expressing concern” over Gaza, its baggage handlers and dockers are quietly rewriting the country’s relationship with Israel from the ground up.
They don’t draft communiqués; they draft in volunteers — if they can find any — to work the Tel Aviv runs. They don’t issue sanctions; they issue refusals, one shipment at a time. And when they move, it’s not in the plodding, committee-bound way of ministers, but with the kind of immediacy that strands an El Al jet on the tarmac or leaves a cruise liner idling offshore. In Belgium, the high-vis brigade has become the country’s most effective foreign policy department — and it didn’t even have to stand for election.
Right, so the events that unfolded at Brussels Airport the other day would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and they reveal something fundamental about where the real moral leadership in Belgium — and perhaps Europe more broadly as we see more and more ordinary working class people in more and more countries — now lies. Just yesterday, four separate unions representing ground-handling staff — Alyzia, Pulse, CNE, and ACV-CSC Transcom — declared that they would not be compelled to work on flights to or from Israel or Israeli-occupied territories. The unions made no attempt to cloak their reasoning in bland language. As reported by Press TV, they described the war in Gaza as an ongoing genocide, invoked international law, and insisted that to handle baggage, freight, or passengers for Israeli carriers such as El Al would be to become complicit in war crimes. It was a calculated act of moral refusal.
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