We feared that it would turn out even worse. The latest Gaza aid flotilla set off from Sicily on June 1 after last month’s mission was seemingly bombed by Israeli drones off Malta. Responding to this latest launch, Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted that he “hoped Greta and her friends can swim,” ostensibly cheering for a repeat attack. Many will still remember when, in 2010, Israeli speedboats and helicopters attacked a similar civilian aid convoy to Palestine, murdering nine activists.

Today the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is shattering ever more skulls and deliberately starving ever more Palestinians; Israeli plans to ethnically cleanse and annex occupied territory are increasingly shameful, and unashamed. Western allies grumble at Benjamin Netanyahu’s excesses as if they were his alone but still arm the killing machine. It could still be hoped that the celebrity of some activists aboard this aid flotilla might somehow protect them from being added to the list of victims.

As Israeli forces illegally boarded and captured the Madleen, the civilian vessel at the head of the flotilla, in international waters this morning, Israel’s Foreign Ministry  boasted they were halting a “selfie yacht of celebrities.” The ministry gleefully declared that “the show is over.” Israeli authorities likewise mocked the small volume of aid aboard the flotilla, casting this as a merely symbolic action rather than a solution to supposed mass hunger.

The aid convoy was a symbolic action — and rightly so. Small solidarity initiatives cannot feed millions. This was a call on others to act and break Israel’s total blockade of aid, now into its fourth month. Climate activist Greta Thunberg, the European Parliament member Rima Hassan, and their colleagues aboard the Madleen were making a statement about Israel’s starvation of Gazans, and the rest of the world’s refusal to do anything about it. They were seeking attention — not demanding it for themselves but using their fame to turn a spotlight on the powerful.

Likewise symbolic, therefore, was the chorus of silence from European governments, who remain determined to do nothing about Israel’s crimes. The British government’s response called for aid to Gaza but skirted around comment on the illegal raiding of a British-registered ship. French and Swedish authorities might be expected to represent their own citizens in harm’s — Israel’s — way. They stopped at insisting on the need for consular representation, with Paris also stressing that it had warned against the mission.

It was reported this afternoon that a thousand people had joined a nine-bus convoy from Tunisia to Gaza in another bid to break the siege. We can imagine that Israel will turn it around, if the Egyptian dictatorship doesn’t do so first. But the message of solidarity is clear: every time Israel commits its crimes, every time it guns down people lining up for food, every time its soldiers run onto a boat carrying food or medicine, it’s a call on the rest of us to do more, do better, to stand with Palestinians.

Throughout the last twenty months, public sympathy for Israel has plummeted across Western countries, even in the ones whose politicians are most enthusiastically pro-Zionist. For the tide of public opinion in Europe or America to turn is not enough to stop the IDF’s crimes, and a shift in the rhetoric of leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Friedrich Merz covers an unchanged practical support for Israel. But their position is becoming increasingly untenable.

Exposing their hypocrisy is vital for democracy itself. And if, as Israeli authorities claim, the flotilla was “symbolic” and a “stunt,” it made its point brilliantly. When Thunberg first rose to fame, similar European leaders fawned over her, associating themselves with the moral “vibe” of concern for the climate while ignoring her criticisms. Now that she and her shipmates are confronting Western policy on Gaza, there is not even the attempt to co-opt her message.

In several countries, the call for Palestinian freedom “from the river to the sea” is habitually presented as pro-Hamas hate speech. Faced with recent Israeli attacks on shipping, we might wonder how free the sea itself is.

The IDF could also conceivably have used the flotilla “stunt” to make a propaganda coup of its own: let in some tiny group with its aid in order to pretend that there is no siege. Yet even that proved too much. The Keir Starmers or Macrons or Merzes of this world might have been thankful if Israel had made such a concession, allowing them to portray this recipient of their own military support in a more humane light. Emboldened by decades of impunity, Israel wouldn’t even give them that much.