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The Sumud Flotilla Has Succeeded in Making Israel a Pariah

By
Branko Marcetic

The Global Sumud Flotilla seemingly breached Israel’s blockade of Gaza while provoking an Israeli response that triggered anger and reprisals from various governments. It’s one of the most successful acts of civil disobedience in recent history.

Israel has taken into custody hundreds of foreign citizens from the Global Sumud Flotilla and scheduled some for deportation. (Eleftherios Elis / AFP via Getty Images)

Yesterday Israeli forces intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) that has spent the past month sailing across the Mediterranean Sea to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, blockading and intercepting the boats just dozens of miles from the territory’s coast and arresting its crew. It’s the latest daring operation for a military force that has spent the last two years bravely fighting unarmed women and children, now moving on to deploying its navy against aid boats armed with baby formula.

By this morning, Israel had seized all but two of the boats, taking into custody hundreds of foreign citizens and scheduling some for deportation. Incredibly, by late last night, one of the boats, the Mekino, made it into Gazan waters, roughly twenty kilometers from the occupied territory’s shore, though organizers have reportedly lost contact with the boat and its position on the GSF’s official tracker has not budged in many hours.

If this geolocation proves correct, it would be a stunning triumph: unarmed boats that even the flotilla crew describe as barely seaworthy managed to break the Israeli blockade. It raises the question, as UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese put it, “why states don’t break the blockade with their navies,” to ease the Israeli-made famine in Gaza that has been condemned by governments the world over.

Confusion reigned as Israeli vessels began encircling and boarding the boats last night, even among the flotilla crew. Divided among more than forty boats spread across miles of water, and suffering communication blackouts as Israeli ships attempted to halt them, the crew themselves were often in the dark about exactly what was happening. Even as accounts filtered in during the evening that the lead ship, the Alma — whose crew included Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, maybe the most high-profile member of the flotilla — was being intercepted, crew members expressed uncertainty on live streamed footage about whether it had been boarded or not, how many Israeli ships there were, whether they were stationary or moving toward the flotilla, and other details.

As news of the Alma’s interception came in, Drop Site News editor Alex Colston, aboard the boat Sirius, reported receiving a warning from the Israeli military that the flotilla would be breaking a “lawful blockade” if it continued its journey and that its crew would be prosecuted under Israeli law. Video footage and reports circulated of Israeli ships ramming, firing water cannons, and using some kind of explosive on the boats as well as deploying drones.

The GSF had an inkling Israel was preparing to intercept them a night earlier, when several Israeli naval ships harassed the fleet in the dead of night. “As I write this, we are preparing ourselves for such an imminent attack,” David Adler, the Progressive International co-general coordinator who sailed aboard the boat Family, wrote in a final message.

Among the preparations, the crew had disposed of their cooking knives and planned to throw their phones into the sea upon being intercepted, while footage from the boats showed crew members clad in life jackets sitting peacefully as they waited to be apprehended, putting their hands up upon being surrounded by Israeli ships. “When they board our boats, we will not resist,” Adler had written.

Israel had spent weeks leading up to the interception physically and verbally threatening the flotilla, attacking and harassing it with US-made drones and lobbing wild claims that it had been organized and directed by Hamas. It was the typically shoddy propaganda that has characterized the genocide as a whole, with the Israeli Foreign Ministry at one point sharing an image of former Scottish politician George Galloway that it claimed was a picture of a Hamas official.

Though Israel has never officially claimed credit for the drone attacks, one official in the Trump administration casually admitted in a recent interview what everyone and their grandmother knew: that Israel was behind the drone attack in Tunisia, meaning it was almost certainly the culprit behind the identical drone harassment of the flotilla in the days that followed.

At the time of writing, with details still coming in, the GSF’s interception seems to have taken place with remarkably little violence, in contrast to previous Israeli interceptions, which have included multiple killings of other aid flotilla members by Israeli naval commandos. This is despite the Israeli government spending weeks building, however lazily, a concerted case that the crew were members of Hamas, and despite the Israeli military having been allowed for the past two years to attack and murder international aid workers with impunity.

It’s likely a result of the massive public attention brought to bear on the flotilla. Public outrage at an impending Israeli attack reached enough of a point to spur three separate US allies — Italy, Spain, and Turkey — to deploy their own naval vessels to accompany the fleet. Protests erupted around the world in solidarity with the flotilla. The GSF’s official live stream of the fleet’s interception alone received more than three million views over twelve hours, the same figure a separate Italian live stream had racked up, as of the time of publication.

Uncharted Waters

It’s worth reflecting on just how abnormal and extreme this all is. The waters Israel is deemed to have control over, including in occupied Gaza, extend twelve miles from the coast; the flotilla was first intercepted roughly seventy nautical miles from it. Even if the Israeli siege of Gaza that this is enforcing wasn’t illegal — which it is — Israel would still have no right, either in international law or in the globally accepted norms of behavior that govern how countries act on the world stage, to intercept these boats and arrest their crew where they did.

Then there’s the fact of who Israel has been attacking and has now intercepted and arrested. The nationalities of the GSF crew span six continents and nearly sixty countries, and its boats sailed under the national flags of countries like Italy, Portugal, Poland, and the United Kingdom, all of whose citizens were on board.

To paraphrase one GSF crew member, this means Israel has effectively declared war on half the world — to the point that three ostensibly friendly states felt the need to deploy their own navies to defend their people against Israel’s military. This is a remarkable development that, if they had not abandoned their citizens at the last minute, would have put those governments in the position of, as Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni put it, “declar[ing] war on Israel.”

But it’s not just half the world. It is also a panoply of US allies and security partners specifically. The list of participating countries doesn’t just include North African and Middle Eastern countries that are traditionally more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, like Algeria, Jordan, and Tunisia. It also includes close US security partners like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and no less than twenty-four US treaty allies — meaning, countries the United States is legally obligated to go to war for if they’re attacked — that span Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), Asia (Philippines, Turkey, and Japan), and more than a dozen European NATO allies, like Spain, France, and Germany.

It also includes the United States itself, whose citizens were represented on the flotilla. Yet the US government refuses to lift a finger to protect them and offered no response to their seizure in international waters. Also represented is Qatar, to which Donald Trump yesterday unilaterally granted NATO-like protection from the US military, hours before its nationals were coming under illegal threat from Israel for the second time in a month. Trump’s order promised to come to Qatar’s aid, militarily if need be, in the case of any attack on merely its “sovereignty” or an act of “foreign aggression” against it.

Only a week ago, Qatar warned that “any violation of international law and human rights of the participants in the flotilla,” which included “illegal detention,” would “lead to accountability,” a call it repeated in the wake of the interception. Qatar almost certainly isn’t going to invoke Trump’s hastily granted security guarantee here, though it could, and the Trump administration should count itself lucky: if it did, it would have to begrudgingly admit the guarantee is meaningless.

In other words, this is the latest incident in as many weeks where Israel’s renegade behavior has dented global faith in the US security umbrella, which increasingly looks to have a huge, Israel-shaped asterisk attached to it.

And it is renegade behavior by Israel. It’s hard to think of any comparable act by a country that is considered a US adversary, or even a rogue state, where it has openly threatened the nationals of dozens of countries engaged in lawful, peaceful behavior in international waters, and deployed its military against them — because there simply isn’t any. If Iran or North Korea did what Israel is currently doing, there would be open calls for war.

This isn’t an exaggeration. Protecting “freedom of navigation” was the exact rationale used by both the Biden and Trump administrations to publicly justify their illegal war on Yemen after its ruling Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Yet here is Israel doing that very thing in the Mediterranean, asserting the right to attack any civilian vessel in international waters it baselessly declares a threat.

The fallout is coming thick and fast. Colombia, governed by leftist Gustavo Petro and two of whose citizens have been detained by Israel, has expelled all the remaining Israeli diplomats in the country and terminated the free trade deal between the two states. In Turkey, from which twenty-four citizens have been detained, the chief prosecutor in Istanbul has opened an investigation into what the country’s foreign ministry has called “an act of terror.”

Spain summoned Israel’s top representative for a dressing down. A host of countries whose citizens were taken have responded with anger, like Malaysia, whose prime minister said that “the injustices perpetrated by the Israeli regime must be stopped immediately,” and vowed to take “all lawful and legally grounded measures to hold Israel accountable.” Maybe most significantly, Italy’s unions, including the country’s largest, have called for a general strike on Friday in solidarity with the GSF.

But maybe beyond everything else, the flotilla’s interception is an extraordinary demonstration of the lengths the Israeli government is willing to go to keep starving Palestinians to death.

The Israeli navy is doing this — deepening its global isolation, inflaming public opinion among friendly countries, risking further alienating the voters of its chief political benefactor — all to preclude any possibility of an iota of outside aid coming in to Gaza, something that has no impact on its military operations against Hamas, and which actually harms its own people who remain captive in the famine-stricken territory. The Israeli government is showing that nothing, not its relationships with other countries or the lives of its own citizens, is more important than its ability to continue gradually exterminating the captive population of Gaza.

Hovering over it all is the question of what possible benefit supporting any of this brings to the United States or its people. The answer is none. And yet this “America First” administration and its allies will, quite bizarrely, continue to back a foreign state that behaves ever more like a global pariah, and which openly insults and defies their country while it does it.