For nearly a year, activists have documented hundreds of military cargo shipments — including F-35 bomb-release systems bound for Israel — moving through Oakland's publicly owned airport. The city's mayor has backed a campaign to stop them. The Port Commission hasn't voted.

Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport is a city asset, governed by a commission whose members are appointed by the mayor and City Council. That governance structure sits at the heart of a growing debate: if a progressive city controls its own infrastructure, does it have the authority — or the political will — to refuse to serve as a logistics hub for a war its residents have repeatedly protested? Ten months after Oakland's role in the weapons supply chain was first documented, the answer remains unresolved.

From the warehouse floor of the UPS air hub at Oakland International, Talia Rose watches FedEx planes touch down across the tarmac, night after night.

"Every single time a FedEx plane lands and I'm watching them land," Rose told In These Times in March 2026, "I wonder, 'Oh, is that the one?'"

Rose, who works the overnight shift sorting freight, learned about eight months earlier that some of those planes had been carrying military equipment destined for Israel. The revelation came at a weekly organizing meeting at the Oakland Liberation Center, where activists shared new research that had just been published by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM).

The PYM report, released in August 2025, documented more than 280 military cargo shipments to Israel routed through OAK since January of that year — including components for F-35 fighter aircraft and, specifically, the BRU-68, a bomb release unit that allows an F-35 to drop a 2,000-pound bomb. The shipments were handled by FedEx, which operates a major cargo hub at the airport. KQED reviewed the underlying shipping documents and confirmed the findings.

"At the same airport we pick up and send off our loved ones, bomb droppers and surveillance systems for the lethal F-35 jet are being loaded and transported to Israel," said Aisha Nizar of the PYM. "Oakland's central role in the global F-35 supply chain was concealed from its union members, educators, city officials, and residents — and is now indisputable."

OAK's spokesperson, Kaley Skantz, said at the time that the airport does not have information about the specific contents of cargo shipments made by its tenants. "FedEx is the largest cargo carrier that operates at OAK, and accounts for the majority of the 1.1 billion pounds of air cargo that passes through the airport annually," Skantz said. "All of FedEx's flight and loading operations are carried out by FedEx employees directly."

The disclosures sparked the Oakland People's Arms Embargo (OPAE), a coalition of more than 30 organizations calling on the Port of Oakland to halt what they describe as "killer military cargo" from its publicly owned facility. The campaign has attracted significant institutional support. In November 2025, the Alameda Labor Council — representing 135,000 Bay Area workers across healthcare, transportation, education, and construction — voted unanimously to endorse OPAE. The California Nurses Association, with 100,000 members statewide, followed. In February 2026, Mayor Barbara Lee, whose singular congressional vote against the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force made her a national figure on questions of war and peace, publicly backed the campaign.

And yet, as of this spring, the Port of Oakland's Board of Commissioners had not taken a binding vote on the matter.

The stall reflects a genuine legal tension. Some officials and Port attorneys have argued that federal aviation law may preempt local attempts to restrict cargo operations — that even a locally governed airport must comply with federal rules that effectively prohibit discrimination against categories of lawful cargo. Oakland City Councilmembers and some Port Commissioners have expressed sympathy for the campaign while pointing to those federal constraints as the reason they cannot simply order FedEx to stop.

Rose, who has attended Port Commission meetings and heard the arguments, is not moved by the legal deflection.

"There are members that are absolutely on our side," they told In These Times. "But it has been really disappointing" to hear others insist, "'Well actually, it's not our job.'"

OPAE organizers argue that other cities have found ways to pressure commercial logistics companies when political will existed. In Spain, activists successfully alerted port authorities to Maersk shipments tied to Israeli military supply chains, prompting scrutiny and rerouting. In Morocco, dockworkers refused to handle certain cargo. Whether airports face the same latitude as seaports — given federal aviation authority's broader reach — is the crux of the legal debate in Oakland.

What's not in dispute is the broader stakes. The United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion annually in military aid under a longstanding memorandum of understanding, and Congress approved more than $14 billion in additional emergency funding since October 2023. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the U.S. supplied roughly two-thirds of Israel's major conventional arms imports in 2023. That materiel moves by sea and by air, through commercial infrastructure, much of it publicly owned.

Rose put the accountability question simply: "If our city says it supports human rights, but still lets this go through, then what does that actually mean?"

Oakland has spent years cultivating an identity around labor solidarity and resistance to injustice — from the anti-apartheid boycotts of the 1980s to its early ceasefire resolutions on Gaza. The OPAE campaign is, in part, a test of whether that identity has institutional weight, or whether it lives only in resolutions.

"We have to put our foot down now," Rose said.