On the Heroic Deeds of Ordinary Humans
No one is allowed to see what is happening in Gaza. Gaza is just a box and no one is allowed to look inside it. It is completely sealed. Whoever dares to approach and try to open this box, or even thinks about opening it, Israel must eliminate them.
The genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has been going on for far longer than we’d care to admit; it is not something that began after October 7, 2023, although that is certainly the date that Israel began its most aggressive terror campaign against the Palestinians. Rather, since the creation of Israel as a state in 1948 at the end of British colonial rule and with the blessing of the United States, Israelis have been displacing Palestinians from their native homeland. Their occupation of the West Bank which began in 1967 resulted in “ruthless policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with rampant discrimination”.
Much like the “manifest destiny” and “westward expansion” that occurred in the United States, which displaced the indigenous population and resulted in a large scale genocide of Native Americans, reducing their population from an estimated 10 million when European settlers first arrived to only 300,000 by 1900, the genocide of the Palestinian people is another catastrophe brought about by settler-colonialism and U.S. imperialism.
Perhaps due to the ability to witness Israel’s war crimes on social media, or simply because their tactics have become so inhumane that they can no longer be justified by propaganda, support for Israel in the United States is at a historic low. According to Pew, 60% of U.S. adults have an “unfavorable view of Israel” and 59% have “little or no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs”.
Last fall, Greta Thunberg joined the Global Sumud Flotilla in sailing to Gaza to bring humanitarian aid and to try and break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza, her fame as a climate activist bringing additional attention to the flotilla. As with previous flotillas, the boats that traveled towards Gaza were intercepted by Israeli military before they ever reached its shores and the activists were detained.
“They dragged little Greta [Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others,” the Turkish activist Ersin Çelik, a participant in the Sumud flotilla, told Anadolu news agency.
The Guardian
Israel denied any claims of abuse. But in April and in May the GSF has traveled to Gaza and been captured in international waters before reaching their destination, and once again claims of torture and abuse have been made against the Israeli captors. It will be difficult for Israel to deny these claims of abuse now that it has been filmed and spread over social media; since the film (shown at the top of this post) has surfaced, public outrage has spread along with it.
Regardless of Israel using the label of “terrorist” to describe those bringing humanitarian aid, saying that it was a “provocation” and that aid is available through official channels (despite video evidence of Israeli soldiers creating “death traps” where “Israeli forces at the site of a new US-backed aid distribution system in Gaza have routinely opened fire on starving Palestinian civilians in acts that amount to serious violations of international law and war crimes” according to the Human Rights Watch) and regardless of the Trump administration imposing sanctions on flotilla activists by also using the label of terrorist (a label they are affixing to “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists” with the threat that “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You”), anyone with critical thinking skills and basic human empathy can see that the true terrorists are the imperialist genocidal megalomaniacs trying to destroy humanity.
This is evil. The acts that they are committing are evil, and the brave and selfless efforts of the activists being tortured now cannot and must not be forgotten. We must do everything in our power to bring them home and to hold Israel accountable for the crimes it has committed.
This is Your Call to Action
Contact government officials by sending an automated email through the GSF.
Find local protests and actions in support of the flotilla and Palestine and attend.
Finally, it should go without saying, but not all Jewish people are Zionists or Israeli. The Jewish community is not a monolith and should not be treated as such. Hateful rhetoric towards any group of people for their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, skin color, etc. is part of the ongoing justification of atrocities committed all over the world, and should never be tolerated. This post is not about Jewish people; this post is about the state of Israel and the human rights violations it is committing, and the distinction is an important one.
Update
Since I originally posted this, the Gaza flotilla activists have been deported from Israel, largely due to the international outrage over their treatment.
This does not mean the fight is over. 9,400 Palestinians are still held hostage in Israeli prisons and Palestine remains under Israeli control. Since October 7, 2023, over ten percent of the population of Gaza has been directly killed or injured in two years of Israel’s war in Gaza (as of October 2025). In addition, writes political scientist Neta Crawford (Co-Founder, Costs of War and Professor, University of Oxford), “the destruction of infrastructure – including energy, water, sanitation, agriculture, housing, and healthcare – [has] rendered the conditions of life so difficult as to cause long term harm for the rest of the population.”
We must continue to voice our outrage until they are free, because “nobody’s free until everybody’s free”. The GSF will continue its missions and we must continue to support them, to join them, to advocate for them.
“The Thousand Year Reich did not last two decades; the Soviet Union lasted three quarters of a century; Idi Amin ruled for eight years; the Confederacy didn’t make it to kindergarten; Argentina’s Dirty War lasted six years; Pinochet dominated Chile for sixteen years; nothing lasts forever, even the worst things. Hitler killed himself; Stalin and Franco lasted too long but ultimately dropped dead and last year Franco’s body was exhumed from its grand prison-labor-built monument and dumped in a municipal cemetery; Pol Pot died in prison; Mugabe had to step down; Putin is not immortal.
―Rebecca Solnit
“Every day under these monstrosities was too long, and part of the horror of life under a corrupt and brutal regime is that it seems never-ending, but nothing lasts forever. And believing that something can end is often instrumental to working toward ending it; how the people in Eastern Europe dared to hope that their efforts might succeed I cannot imagine.”
The Tower is Falling 
Leave a comment