Last year bore witness not only to the horror of the Israeli assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, but also to an unprecedented wave in the US of dissent and direct action in solidarity with Palestinians.

In August 2014, the Bay Area made international headlines when activists launched what was perhaps the most imaginative and immediately fruitful of those actions: the Block the Boat campaign to stop the largest Israeli shipping company, ZIM, from unloading or loading cargo at the Port of Oakland. For four consecutive days, a community picket prevented the ZIM Piraeus from going about its business. Two months later, ZIM preempted the next planned Block the Boat action by announcing its ships would no longer be docking in California.

No group played a bigger role in the Oakland campaign than the San Francisco Bay Area’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), whose members include legal advocates, educators, and other community organizers. Since then, the group has remained at the forefront of local Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) initiatives, becoming one of the leading organizations in the anti-militarist Stop Urban Shield Coalition and a vocal supporter of an ultimately successful divestment resolution in the University of California graduate workers’ union.