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Middle East Eye
08-07-2025
- Business
- Middle East Eye
Greek dock workers will refuse to unload Israel's 'murderous cargo'
Dock workers at the port of Piraeus have said that they will refuse to unload the Ever Golden, a container ship carrying military-grade steel to Israel, when it arrives in Greece. 'We will not unload a single inch of this murderous cargo,' Enedep, the union of dock workers at Athens's port city, said on Tuesday. 'The dock workers of Piraeus will not be complicit. We will not unload military steel from the Ever Golden - no to Greece's involvement - freedom for Palestine,' the workers said. According to the ship and container tracking site Vessel Finder, the Ever Golden, which is Japanese-owned and sails under the flag of Panama, was sailing off the coast of West Africa on Tuesday morning. It is expected to reach Piraeus on 14 July. Once it arrives there, its cargo is intended to be moved to another container ship, the Folk Dammam, and taken on to Israel. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters The Ever Golden, which was built in 2018 and is carrying 75 bundles of military-grade steel originating in India, stopped into a port in Singapore for six hours between 12 and 13 June. Last week, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) anti-Israeli occupation movement posted on social media that the vessel, 'carrying steel to Israel in the middle of its ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians', was on its way to Greece. 'The port of Piraeus is not an advanced outpost of the US, Nato, the EU or the war profiteers' - Dock workers at the port of Piraeus 'There, the cargo is set to be transferred to the Folk Dammam, which flies the flag of Saudi Arabia.' The Folk Dammam is then scheduled to take the steel to the port of Haifa in Israel. A container ship, the Folk Dammam, was bought by Saudi Arabian operator Folk Maritime, which is owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), on 14 May. According to BDS, the transshipment of military-grade steel was arranged when the vessel was called Vega Coligny and was sailing under the flag of the Marshall Islands. On Tuesday, shipping tracker Marine Traffic placed the Folk Dammam at the port of Mundra on the west coast of India. 'We call on activists and people in Greece and Saudi Arabia - as well as Japan, Panama, Taiwan and all coastal states - to pressure their authorities not to aid this (or any) illegal military transfers to genocidal Israel - and, instead, to stop it,' the BDS movement said. The Ever Golden's manager, Shoei Kisen Kaisha Ltd, which is part of Imabari Shipbuilding, is based in Japan. It flies under the Panamanian flag and its operator, Evergreen Marine Corporation, is based in Taiwan. Middle East Eye has asked Evergreen Marine Corporation and Folk Maritime for comment. 'United against imperialist involvement' Piraeus dock workers said the Ever Golden was expected to arrive at docks two and three on 12 July carrying military-grade steel. 'This is a war cargo that, if unloaded and transferred, will end up being used to strike children, civilians, hospitals, and schools in the massacre carried out by the murderous state of Israel against the Palestinian people,' the Enedep union said. Watermelon Index names and shames companies complicit in Israel's war on Gaza Read More » 'The port of Piraeus is not an advanced outpost of the US, Nato, the EU or the war profiteers. It is not a transshipment station for deadly cargo. It is a place of work and struggle for the working class. As we have done in the past, we will not unload a single inch of this murderous cargo.' Enedep called on all dock workers to 'refuse any assignment related to this vessel. Let us stand united against imperialist involvement'. 'We refuse to be tools of the US, Nato, the EU, Israel, or China, who use our country's infrastructure to reshape the world redrawing borders with the blood of nations of the Palestinian people,' the union said. 'We stand on the right side of history and refuse to become targets of retaliation ourselves.' Dock workers against Israel The declared action at Piraeus follows in the wake of a series of similar acts of organised resistance at European ports. On 4 June, French dockers in the CGT union discovered that 19 pallets of submachine gun spare parts were to be loaded at the port of Marseille-Fos onto a Liberian-flagged container ship bound for Haifa. The dockers located the container, set it aside and refused to load it onto the ship, saying they would "not participate in the ongoing genocide orchestrated by the Israeli government". Following their lead, the port workers of Genoa, through their union USB, coordinated a garrison at the Port of Genoa, with the aim of preventing the docking of the same ship, the CONTSHIP ERA. The Italian dock workers said that they, too, did not want to "be complicit in the genocide that continues in Gaza".
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Happy Fourth Anniversary Of Big Boat Stuck To Those Who Celebrate
On March 23, 2021, the world awoke to an unfolding drama that would captivate and unite it as few things in history ever had: Big Boat Stuck. MV Ever Given, a 400 meter long Golden-class container ship owned by Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen Marine Corporation, had run aground in the Suez Canal and blocked a non-insignificant percentage of world trade. What followed was a solid few months of memes, laughs, natsec think pieces, and wall-to-wall big boat coverage here on Jalopnik. Today, we're gonna look back on that time, a better time, when smart alecks from around the world came together to laugh at a big boat stuck. The fifth ship in a northbound convoy, Ever Given set sail early on the morning of the 23rd with no tug escort to transit the Suez Canal — the link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea — on her way to Rotterdam, NL. At around 07:42 local time, Ever Given was engulfed in a nasty sandstorm near the village of Manshiyet Rugola. With winds exceeding 40 knots (46 miles per hour) and no tug to keep her on track, the massive vessel was immediately blown off course. Her bow ran into the canal's eastern shore at a speed of 13 knots (roughly 15 miles per hour), her stern swung around and wedged into the western shore while still under power, and all of a sudden she was stuck tight. That, as they say, is when hilarity ensued. Read more: All Aboard South Korea's New $100 Billion Baby-Making Trains At the spot where Ever Given ran aground, the Suez Canal is around 200 meters across, so a fully loaded, 400-meter-long container ship wedged hard diagonally across the canal immediately presented some navigation issues. She was completely blocking the canal, as 300 ships at both ends were attempting to transit. To call the situation a nightmare (as well as an all-hands emergency) was an understatement. The Suez Canal Authority closed the canal to shipping on March 25 as salvage and recovery teams descended on the stuck vessel in an attempt to get her free. Over the course of about a week, a crack team of experts, 18 tugs, and the dredger Mashhour worked feverishly to pull Ever Green out of the mud while international shipping slowly ground to a halt on either side of the canal. A huge traffic jam of more than 400 ships slowly formed in the Med, the Red Sea, and the Bitter Lakes as Ever Given was painstakingly salvaged. On March 29 at around 04:30 local time, Ever Given's stern was floated. Her bow was floated soon after, and she was finally free. This wasn't the end of Ever Given's ordeal, however. She was towed to the Great Bitter Lake to be inspected for damage while the canal was open, then immediately impounded and her crew interrogated. Accusations were made, blame was thrown freely around, and on April 13, 2021, she was seized by a court at the urging of the SCA pending payment of more than $900 million American dollars. That price included, among other things, the cost of the salvage effort and around $300 million for SCA for "loss of reputation". The week that Ever Given spent gumming up international shipping revealed some serious worldwide economic issues. The ongoing Covid pandemic had already highlighted problems with supply chain resilience, and the Ever Given debacle really shined a light on both that and the weaknesses of just-in-time manufacturing. Lloyd's List estimated that the cost of the goods delayed by the blockage was a staggering $400 million per hour as bulk freighters, tankers, and container ships waited at anchor for Ever Given to be refloated. The knock-on effects of the blockage were even worse, and prices of everything from oil and food to kids toys and computer chips rose significantly and stayed there for months afterwards. It wasn't all bad, though. There were, of course, the memes. Internet wags immediately got to work plastering pithy messages over images of Ever Given and her various rescuers. One particularly popular one was a photo of a seemingly tiny excavator pushing Ever Given with its boom arm (that one was my favorite, in fact). There were also Google doodles, a marine tracker built specifically to track Ever Given's adventures around the world, and Microsoft Flight Simulator mods. The event even got a shout out in an episode of "What We Do in the Shadows" when it was revealed that Nandor was delayed because he was stuck in a container aboard Ever Given. Since then, while we've had many good boats stuck here and there, nothing has really captured the world's imagination like Ever Given's plight. Despite the very real economic, legal, and political ramifications of the incident, it was also extremely funny, and we all needed a laugh at the time. At the time of this writing, Ever Given is in port at Port Klang, Malaysia and seems to be healthy and happy with a well-founded crew. So, today, let's raise a glass to Ever Given and her crew and wish them fair winds and following seas. Oh, and captain, watch out for those sandstorms. Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox... Read the original article on Jalopnik.
