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If Chris Smalls is still feeling the effects of his tumultuous five day stint in Israel’s Givon Prison, he’s not outwardly showing it. He strolls through Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts alongside his assistant Julieta, admiring politically charged artwork by artist Estéban Whiteside before reaching a back room in the downtown Brooklyn space. I intentionally chose a private space to meet him, knowing he’s on the frontlines of one of the world’s most contentious issues.
In mid-July, Smalls boarded the Handala, a boat belonging to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a grassroots collective of organizers “working together to end the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza,” as their website notes. He and 18 other activists were onboard (with two Al Jazeera journalists) vying to give aid to Palestinians suffering at the hands of Israel’s continued assault on Gaza. On July 26, after being surveilled by Israeli drones that increased in measure toward the Gaza shore, the passengers were detained by members of the Israel Defense Force (IDF) who stormed the boat. Smalls and Flotilla organizer Huwaida Arraf claim that the IDF physically assaulted him, the lone Black boat passenger.
Smalls tells me he’s planning to sue Israeli authorities in the International Criminal Court for assaulting him and stealing his items. “They stole my Apple headphones, and I have my evidence. I have it on my phone. The location is still there,” he says. “They abused us, and they deserve to be held accountable.” IDF reps didn’t reply to requests for comment.
Despite what he says he went through, he’s open to taking another ride with the Flotilla. But first, he has work to do in other countries (he says he’s already been to “at least 29”). “I’m going to continue shedding light [on] the situation [in Palestine] and building some type of international network where we can connect all these struggles,” he says, with his hands clasped. Today, he’s wearing a dark teal Amazon Labor Union shirt, a bevy of gold rings, a leopard print bucket hat, and several gold chains on his neck. He tells me his distinct fashion sense, an unabashed reflection of hip-hop culture, is an intentional choice to represent Black people in his work.
Domestically, as the co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union, he’s focused on supporting their push against their publicly stated demands for ‘better pay, better benefits, and better working conditions.” He’s also working on “revitalizing” the American Labor Party in time for the ‘28 election, which he knows will be “extremely challenging.”
“It’s one thing to organize a union, but when you’re taking on the government, trying to usher people out of the two-party plantation, that’s when they try to assassinate Black leaders,” he says. “I have to keep that in the back of my mind, that I’m a target.“
Huey P. Newton famously said, “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.” It feels like Smalls has accepted that possibility. Smalls’ outspokenness and willingness to hold power to account have made him a respected figure among other organizers. He began his movement work at Amazon, taking on billionaire Jeff Bezos and creating America’s first Amazon Labor Union. His fight as a labor activist became international news, resulting in him being named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2022. But he says he lost much of his following and establishment support when he began advocating for Palestine.
“That’s when I knew that I needed to go even harder because when you speak truth to power like I did with Amazon, that’s when they try to come after you the most,” he says. He speaks with a notable matter-of-factness on matters big and small. Even as he describes a traumatic incarceration, the allegations from Israel, and silence from would-be allies, he does so calmly, sitting with his hands clasped. Perhaps it’s his natural demeanor, or a consequence of being in the midst of a nonstop flurry of interviews since returning to New York — we take a break toward the end of our talk so he can do another scheduled interview.
Smalls grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, with his mother and younger brother. He recalls his area as “pretty diverse” with “not too much crime,” but notes it was “a little rough” in the nineties. A tri-athlete in high school, he transitioned to music after sustaining an injury during a hit-and-run accident. Rap was his next passion; he once performed at a Meek Mill show, worked with DJ SpinKing of New York radio station Power 105, and built a rapport with a pre-fame A$AP Rocky. (Smalls tells me new music — and a book — about his recent experiences is coming.) He says, “at about 22,” he got married and then had three kids, including twins, which compelled him to pause his rap dreams and apply for a position at an Amazon factory.
It was at Amazon, where, after five years at three different facilities, applying for numerous positions to no avail, he realized “the systemic racism within the company.” In 2020, the then-supervisor led a walkout at Amazon’s Staten Island facility after they were exposed to Covid-19 for two weeks without their knowledge. He was fired the same day and subjected to a smear campaign, with Amazon’s general counsel David Zapolsky deeming him “not smart or articulate,” adding, “and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers.” The episode made national news, inspiring him to start his labor-activist organization The Congress of Essential Workers, which protested outside Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ homes across the country and staged a May Day strike in 2020.
That effort paved the way for him to establish the Amazon Labor Union, which was officially ratified in 2022 and made JFK8 the company’s only unionized warehouse in America. TIME pondered if he was “the future of labor.” During a White House visit, President Joe Biden called him “my kind of trouble.” In December 2023, Smalls said he would not run for re-election at the Amazon Labor Union, though he says he’s “going to continue volunteering in whatever capacity they need me.” (Michelle Valentin Nieves claimed to Business Insider that “The membership has rejected him,” and he “has no support in the building.”)
Smalls says the mainstream fanfare fizzled in late 2023, when he began speaking out against the IDF’s relentless military action in Palestine. He happened to be in Berlin, in a largely Palestinian community, in October 2023, when Israel began their latest offensive after Hamas and other militant groups launched violent attacks on Israel on October 7.
“The headlines [were] more focused on [October 7], and you’re getting one side of the story,” he says. “But the Palestinian people around me were being dragged away by the [German] police. They had the paddy wagon vans and I’m watching kids that might’ve been eight years old being pulled away from their parents, being put in zip ties. I’m like, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” He says seeing the brutality in person put Israel’s and Palestine’s decades-long fracture into perspective.
After he spoke out against Palestine’s oppression, he says he immediately lost “tens of thousands of followers” and all of his planned speaking engagements. “I was sort of canceled talking about Palestine,” he says, adding that the pushback “reminded me of what I went through [with] Amazon. When you’re speaking truth to power, propaganda [tries to] censor what you’re talking about. And that’s what I felt with the Palestinian movement. People don’t want to even hear about it. It’s insane to see. I’m like, there’s something more sinister to it. So I’m going to try to use my platform to amplify that.”
He went to pro-Palestine encampments in America and beyond on a mission to “connect the dots” between his fight against Amazon and what he calls a genocide in Palestine. He informs me that Amazon collaborated with Google to invest 1.2 billion into Project Nimbus, a cloud-computing service for the Israeli military and government. “Amazon Web Services is the military-industrial intelligence for Israel [and] the United States,” Smalls says. In 2021, nearly 400 Google and Amazon employees internally signed a letter condemning Project Nimbus, noting, “we have watched Google and Amazon aggressively pursue contracts with institutions like the U.S. Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE], and state and local police departments. These contracts are part of a disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.”(Spokespeople for Amazon and Google did not respond to requests for comment.)
Those connections are what led him aboard the Handala, an invitation he accepted with 24 hours’ notice. The Flotilla has sponsored 37 missions to Gaza since 2008. In 2010, they experienced a fatal raid at the hands of IDF forces, where nine of the passengers were killed, and 30 were wounded. This June, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg went on the Flotilla’s Madleen with 11 other people. IDF Forces intercepted the boat before it reached Gaza, detaining and eventually deporting the passengers.
Smalls underwent a training session that primed him on the deadly risks on the Flotilla, and implored non-violence in the event of encountering IDF forces. He says roughly 40 people attended the sessions, but only 19 remained after the organizers vetted which people had the proper temperament for the mission.
The international collective of activists set sail from Syracuse, Italy, on July 13, with the initial period spent acclimating to being on the water. Life on the boat was simple at first; they had two meetings a day, then spent the rest of the time cleaning the ship and completing other chores. Overnight, they rotated night watches. Smalls recalls, “As we got closer to Gaza, I was on watch a few times and I would count how many drones would be over us. Sometimes it’d be over 50 in a four-hour window.” On July 24, the Federal Communications Commission announced that communication with the Handala had been “jammed.” And on July 26, the Handala was intercepted by Israeli naval forces while attempting to deviate from their path toward Egypt.
Smalls says that the forces first stormed the boat with cameras, detaining them during a 12-hour ride to Israeli’s port of Rafah, where Smalls slept with “one eye open.” He recalls little interaction with them during that period besides “screaming on” the IDF to get a bed for Norwegian activist Vigdis Bjorvand, which they did. Upon reaching the shore, they escorted each person off the boat one-by-one, saving Smalls for last. Upon his exit from the boat, he says, IDF officers attacked him as he attempted to cover his face from the cadre of cameras filming the detainment.
“They threw me to the ground, put their knee in my back, twisted my arm behind my back, and then three on each side [held me up] while one of them was pulling my hair and using my chains to choke me to the point where I couldn’t breathe,” he says. “They dropped me on the ground once, and then they picked me back up.”
Arraf, the flotilla organizer,says she briefly saw the soldiers attacking Smalls before she was forced into another area. “They had Chris pinned to the ground, and I started yelling, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalls. “And they somehow picked him up and pushed him into the room that they were trying to pull me out of and pushed him up against the wall. And I was yelling and trying to push to get to him, and they dragged me out of the room.”
Smalls says five guards then took him in for processing, where they isolated him. He remembers that the exclusively college-aged soldiers didn’t speak much English to him, but repeatedly told him, “I’m not your brother, I’m the furthest thing from your brother.”
From processing, the group was split and sent to men’s and women’s prisons. He was relocated to Givon Prison, in a cell with six other people, where they struggled to breathe in a small room with few windows and sweltering heat. They were in 24-hour lockdown, isolated from the prison’s other incarcerated people. Smalls tells me about the guards’ inhumane treatment: They twice raided his cell, on one occasion stripping everyone of their clothes. They repeatedly lied to them about the time. Occasionally, the guards would taunt the Flotilla group, leaving food in the cell (they were on a hunger strike), or telling them to get dressed for out-processing, before informing them that they would be staying in the cell. On his last day in the cell, Smalls says he was left alone for 24 hours, deprived of water.
“I’ve never felt the amount of hatred and racism ever in my 37 years in America,” he says. “There’s no way anybody can convince me that Palestinians or people of color can live amongst Israeli people like that. It just resonates off ’em, the hatred. I seen how they were looking at me. It was not by a coincidence that I was one of the last to leave. They wanted to do more damage to me psychologically than anybody else.” Smalls says that most of the incarcerated people he saw while being escorted through the prison appeared to be people of Ethiopian descent.
Smalls and his comrades distracted themselves from the torment by talking among themselves about their favorite foods; he says he also repeatedly thought about getting back home to his family. At some point, he had begun hallucinating. “When you hunger strike, your body changes chemically. I was hallucinating in a good way. It’s more euphoric,” he recalls.
The Flotilla’s lawyers repeatedly called the U.S. embassy for legal assistance for Smalls to no avail. But after five days, with no charges, he was released from the prison, dropped off at the Jordan border. Even then, Smalls says that instead of receiving a deportation flight directly back to New York, his itinerary included a 48-hour layover that he believes was purposely meant to agitate him.
When I ask him how he’s maintaining a week after his incarceration, he says that besides a lingering bout with scabies, he’s doing “fine,” adding, “It’s hard to say that I’m dealing with anything physically, because even though they assaulted me, it still was a fraction of what Palestinian people go through.” Discussing his plan to sue Israel for mistreatment at the International Criminal Court, he notes that the IDF told The Guardian he “violently resisted,” but haven’t released any raid footage like they did on the Madleen. “I challenge them to release any footage that they have of me ever being violent,” he says. “They’re once again reminding me of what Amazon did, trying to paint this narrative of me, [but] I’m going to do what I can in my power to not only fight them on the ground, but legally as well.” Smalls says that upon his return, he’s disappointed, but not surprised, at the lack of support he received from the political establishment.
“I’ve been in every major media publication you could think of,” he says. “Then you think about all the politicians that’s in the New York City area, from the AOCs to [Zohran] Mamdani who went to my union hall a few weeks ago, they’ve all been silent. I met Joe Biden and Kamala when they were in the White House. For me to meet these prominent Democrats and for them to be silent while I’m in prison in a whole other country, it sheds light on who’s your allies or not. And I always say this to people anyway: Politicians are not a savior. It’s up to the community to save ourselves.”
Throughout his detainment, social media users bemoaned that there was a dearth of Black outlets reporting on his plight; Smalls says it’s a reflection of our community having the wrong priorities. “We’d rather praise rappers and celebrities [who] don’t push the culture when it comes to working-class issues,” he says. “I’m not in spaces where my story should be for our community to see. And that’s a shame because it seems like it’s [going to be] one of those situations [where] people are going to recognize me when it’s too late, when I’m already gone or when I’m no longer doing what I’m doing.”
But that doesn’t deter him. When I ask him how he first began navigating the organizing space, he says the ease in which he’s assumed his role is a reflection of him being a natural leader. He tells me that as a musician, he organized his own shows, which would sometimes garner crowds of “a couple thousand” attendees. “I remember those type of organizational skills,” he says. “You can’t be taught. You have to just learn them from experience.”
