Israel has just kidnapped hundreds of people, including politicians and journalists, on a flotilla of boats which sought to end its illegal starvation of the people of Gaza.
There are 44 boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla, with around 500 people from up to 50 countries. These boats are bringing humanitarian aid - like food and medicine - to a people who have been deliberately starved by Israel. But crucially this flotilla was seeking to open a corridor - and proving that Western nations could end the siege of Gaza at any moment if they so chose.
The Israeli military have raided these boats, with cameras picking up the moment that happened.
Participants on the flotilla include iconic activist Greta Thunberg, politicians from Italy - like Senator Marco Croatti and Benedetta Scuderi; from Catalonia - like former mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau; from Portugal - like Mariana Mortagua; from France - like Emma Fourrea and Rima Hassan - and South Africa - Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela.
There are actors too, like Adele Haenel, the Brazilian activist Thiago Avila, and renowned Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam.
The flotilla members recorded videos in the event of their capture. One of them was David Adler, co-general coordinator of the Progressive International, who I interviewed a few days ago.
The flotilla has been attacked repeatedly by drones. That led the Spanish, Italian and Turkish navy to start escorting the flotilla in international waters.
Participants were risking their lives. In 2010, Israeli soldiers attacked another flotilla seeking to break what is the longest siege of our time, storming one ship and killing 10 people, including a Turkish-American teenager who was shot at close range.
Throughout the flotilla’s journey, Israel kept smearing the flotilla as terrorists, portraying it as a Hamas operation. This was a marked shift from their previous attitude, when they ridiculed participants for taking part in a vanity exercise, a ‘selfie yacht’, as they put it. And that was profoundly disturbing, because we know exactly how Israel treats civilians that it brands as terrorists.
The boats were in international waters. The Turkish foreign minister correctly describes the Israeli attack as an act of terrorism. We should also consider it piracy and kidnapping. In any case, Gaza is under illegal occupation.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations says that “they tried to enter Israeli territory illegally” and were attempting to “violate” Israeli “sovereignty”. But the land of Gaza does not belong to Israel, and the ocean by Gaza does not belong to Israel either. It belongs to the Palestinian people of Gaza who are suffering a genocide at the hands of the Israeli state.
At least one boat, it appears, managed to make it to Palestinian waters for the first time in the history of Israel’s siege of Gaza.
The flotilla has been attacked by its critics as being some sort of ‘stunt’. And what of it? Nobody thinks that this flotilla was going to end the siege of Gaza.
What it does is draw attention to Israel’s deliberate manufactured famine in Gaza - to Israel’s genocidal siege of the essentials of life.
Israeli leaders and officials made clear they were going to besiege Gaza from the very beginning. On 9th October 2023, Yoav Gallant, then defence minister, said:
We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.
The same day, General Ghassan Alian - the Israeli general in charge of the Israeli army’s supposed civilian, humanitarian wing, declared:
Hamas became ISIS and the citizens of Gaza are celebrating instead of being horrified. Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.
The arrest warrants against Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant requested by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in May 2024 - and finally issued in November 2024 - centred on the crime of starvation.
Both the former British Foreign Secretary and the former US Secretary of State themselves wrote detailed letters detailing how Israel was deliberately blocking aid from getting to Palestinian civilians - not that they did anything about it.
A year and a half ago, two US government agencies concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking aid from getting into Gaza, which legally required the US to stop selling arms to Israel.
And that’s the point here. Western countries are gratuitously flouting their own laws and international law. Israel is committing every war crime and crime against humanity there is to commit as it perpetrates genocide. Rather than act to stop this from happening, Western nations have and armed facilitated these crimes.
Crucially, Article 1 of the Genocide Convention of 1948 - which Western states are signatories of - reads as follows:
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to Punish.
There is a legal obligation on the part of Western states to prevent and to punish genocide. It is the consensus of genocide scholars that Israel is committing genocide. That is the verdict of a recent UN Commission, and of NGOs like Amnesty International and indeed Israeli human rights organisations such as B’Tselem.
What a travesty that it has fallen to ordinary citizens of these countries to fill the vacuum left by the complicit Western states. Because these ordinary citizens are trying to honour the legal obligations of the Genocide Convention, and to prevent the commission of war crimes - which are more confessed to and documented than any other crimes as they happened in history.
If they so choose, Western states could end the siege of Gaza immediately. That’s what the flotilla underlines. I mean yes, the EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner - they could threaten to throttle Israel’s economy, and Israel would be forced to let aid into Gaza in minutes. But they could also just send hundreds, thousands of ships to Gaza, full of food, medicines and other essentials of life. What would Israel do - go to war with European nations to stop them providing aid?
For generations to come - the question will be asked. What did people do when Israel committed the world’s first live streamed genocide? They will note how Western states armed and supported that genocide, and they will rightly regard the occasional handwringing with contempt. They will note how Western media outlets played a pivotal role in whitewashing crimes, spreading Israeli lies - and deflecting pressure from Western governments to do something.
But they will remember how citizens in the West stood up for their sisters and brothers in Palestine. And they will remember how the flotilla tried to end the illegal, abominable siege of Gaza.
Notably, the largest trade union in Italy has called for a general strike, and yesterday demonstrators in Milan blocked train stations in solidarity with the Flotilla.
We talk a lot about free Palestine, but maybe Palestine will free us. Because it is lighting a fire in the hearts of so many, who have seen, heard and read what cannot be unseen, unheard and unread - who now see the world in a completely different way, and who are determined to fight with every last breath against injustice.
Here’s to the flotilla - they are the best of us.
Your last two sentences are beautiful. Thank you for your work.
Thank you for keeping us informed Owen. Can’t believe how little attention this is getting on MSM