Translated version of a statement by GAS, the ISp affiliate in Romania
From October 2023 to today, over 65,400 Palestinians have been killed and 167,160 wounded by Israeli forces. These figures are rising daily due to relentless bombing—one million people in Gaza City are living under total Israeli siege, facing deadly starvation and with nowhere safe to flee. In the last four months alone, Israel has fatally shot over 2,000 Palestinian civilians as they sought humanitarian aid, turning aid distribution into a veritable systematic massacre.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry has officially confirmed that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. Despite this clear evidence and despite the shocking images that reach us daily, the machinery of genocide continues to operate with the military and diplomatic support of the Western imperialist bloc.
In this context, GAS has joined the Elbit Out campaign, an initiative that brings together several militant groups from Romania and abroad with the aim of stopping the activities of the company that produces weapons for genocide on Romanian territory. On 5 October 2025, the initiative will kick off with a public discussion in Bucharest, followed by a protest march. The stated goal of Elbit Out is to call on Romania to completely abandon arms exports to the state of Israel, refusing economic dependence on its military-industrial capital.
The campaign warns that Romania is an active partner in Israel’s genocidal endeavour. The factories in Brașov, Bacău and Măgurele make Romania the third most important location for Elbit’s production, after Israel and the United States. The scale of the Romanian state’s collaboration with Israel is frightening: in the last two years alone, according to the Elbit Out research report, arms exports to the Israeli state have been in the tens of millions of euros, and Romania has a history of purchasing Israeli military technologies tested on the occupied population. The recent contract worth over 2 billion euros won by Rafael for the purchase of an air defence system is part of the same worrying trend.
We are part of Elbit Out because, as mentioned above, we are committed to this struggle and understand the colonization of Palestine by the State of Israel not as an (exclusively) moral or legal issue, but as one that has its roots in the political economy of imperialism. After two years of protests, marches and occupations of university spaces, during which the Romanian state and its institutions naturally listened to the demands of the military-industrial complex rather than the voices of their own citizens, whom they are claiming to represent, the question we all ask ourselves is what we can do, from our own position, to bring an end to this complicity.
The power of organised workers, indispensable to victory
If we look at countries with a strong tradition of militant trade unionism, such as Italy, France, or Spain, we see how organised workers have managed, as a consequence of taking the issue into their own hands – largely through strikes – to put enough pressure on the administrators of the bourgeoisie (more specifically, on politicians and the government) to do something about the bloody armament of the State of Israel, which has been bombing the Gaza Strip non-stop for two years.
If we want to really fight Romania’s complicity in this genocide and get real results, our actions should be focused on uniting the working class, the class which makes society work. When it has an organised framework at its disposal, it can, among other things, cease its activity and stop the production and reproduction of society in order to change it. When workers become aware of their own interests, the natural course of action is to refuse to work to arm or otherwise support capitalist states that wage wars that kill the oppressed and create a more insecure world for all of us—but a more secure one for the ROIs of military companies.
Indeed, organised Palestinian workers used this year’s Labour Day to call on us to stop working to arm the state that takes their lives every day. Through the Elbit Out campaign, their appeal has already reached the Automecanica Moreni factory union in an open letter:
This year, on May 1st, Palestinian trade unions launched an appeal for solidarity to all workers around the world. Palestinian trade union organisations called on trade unions and workers around the world to put pressure on governments, companies and institutions to end their complicity in the genocide committed by Israel.
There are already numerous examples of trade unions responding to this call: IndustriALL Global Union supports the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions; Norwegian trade unions have persuaded the sovereign wealth fund to divest from Israel Bonds; Indian trade unions have rejected the export of workers to Israel and called for a boycott of Israeli products; port workers in Europe, Africa, Asia and the US have blocked or attempted to block ships carrying arms to Israel; and in the Netherlands, the FNV union has launched a historic strike to sever ties with institutions and companies complicit in genocide.
A more recent example is that of Italian workers, who organised a massive mobilisation in support of a ceasefire and the Global Sumud Flotilla, which is attempting to break the illegal Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip by delivering humanitarian aid. Demonstrations in major Italian cities drew tens of thousands of participants, port workers from across Europe gathered in Genoa to plan the blockade of arms shipments, and the CGIL trade union federation threatened a general strike if Israel attacked the Sumud humanitarian flotilla.
It is therefore easy to see that decisions such as those taken by Greece, Spain and Italy to send a military ship to defend the Sumud fleet were by no means taken out of the goodwill or charity of these bourgeois states, but are the result of organised pressure exerted by militant workers on the state apparatus. The latter fear strikes and more incisive actions.
What can we expect from the state?
There is, of course, the legalistic option of asking the Romanian state to apply international law (Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the provisional measures of the ICJ and the obligations of third states, Article 16 of the 2001 Articles on State Responsibility, etc.) and to make use, as required by the Convention, of “all reasonably available means” to stop its contribution to the genocide in Gaza. This would mean, first and foremost, that Elbit Systems and other similar Israeli military-industrial companies would no longer receive export approvals from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—in violation of the aforementioned treaties under pressure from the same capital.
However, Romania has so far prioritized the interests of military capital and its American ally over the will and interests of the Romanian people, a will that has been constantly expressed through street demonstrations involving hundreds of participants, despite the almost total media blackout on the subject and the efforts of the political system to distract attention.
Not only is compliance with legal responsibility subject to the interests of capital and imperialism, but its very definition is as well. In the context of an armistice, however superficial, we may return to a situation where governments and international organizations that denounced genocide will return to accepting the legitimacy of the apartheid regime in Israel. This was in fact the situation until two years ago, when the BDS campaign argued very solidly that Israel and its allies were violating international law, but no government was trying to prove this by appealing to the ICJ.
The request made to the Romanian state is a way of articulating the divide between its actions, which serve the demands of capital, and the interests of workers, which are not and never will be served by war and the military industry. We anticipate that the state will do everything possible to ignore this request, just as it ignores all claims related to its participation in the crimes in Palestine and the wars led by the US. If it finds itself forced to respond, it will try to present the request as an attack on jobs in Elbit factories, which it will present as a source of regional prosperity. As Romania’s dependence on military capital (Israeli, American, European) increases, which will happen in the near future through the SAFE plan and rearmament plans, such arguments about prosperity will be used more and more often.
So, what is to be done? A comprehensive approach
Knowing that we cannot rely on the Romanian bourgeois state to act correctly just because we show it how to do so, and knowing that the only ones who can change the course of society are us, the working majority, we believe that the following forms of action are steps in the necessary direction and must accompany the formulation of the approach we want the state to take:
- dialogue with people employed in the production and transport of weapons – to understand how they relate to the massacre in Gaza and to expose the facts in the region where there is no access to information;
- imagining a re-engineering of factories by workers for a potential reconfiguration of an industry that facilitates destruction into one that benefits workers and society as a whole; with the aim of placing these companies in the hands of society under the control of workers
- encouraging, supporting and facilitating the unionisation of interested individuals as a first step towards building a real and lasting force of employees in the industry;
- connecting with counterparts in the US, Greece, France, Italy, Spain and other countries with a militant tradition, to exemplify forms of union action and synchronise the efforts of organised workers in Europe and around the world against the war that the ruling class wants and maintains.
The interests of workers are antithetical to those of their employers and administrators—not only at the local, sectoral or economic level, in terms of wages, but also at the international level. No matter how much employers and the state try to hide this fact, it comes to the surface, and reminding people of it is a central objective of anti-militarisation activity. The economic struggle of trade unions for higher wages and better working conditions must be unified with the political struggle against imperialism, colonialism and war (of extermination, in this case). The above approach proposes a framework through which employees in the industry can act directly and decide for themselves what needs to be done.
Genocide, which requires the arms industry, enriches the bosses, while workers in Palestine are bombed, starved and killed, and workers in Europe struggle to make ends meet as historic gains such as access to health and education are destroyed to finance militarisation.
No work for the destruction of other workers’ lives. Let us decide our own future!
