The Global Sumud Flotilla has achieved its declared and most important goal, which is to shake the world out of apathy, out of resignation for what is happening in Gaza.
The activists on the boats succeeded in the typical way of every civil disobedience, that is by making visible the nature of the power they opposed.
They made evident the illiberal turn of the Israeli regime, its authoritarian drift which underlies both the genocide of Gaza and the act of piracy carried out at sea to stop the boats departing from Europe to bring aid but above all solidarity to the Palestinians still under siege.
The facts are now well known: this time Israel did not wait for the Flotilla to reach the proximity of Israeli territorial waters. It acted in international waters far from Israel, first attacking the boats near Crete, then off Cyprus.
The activists detained were taken to Israel and from there deported. Nothing, absolutely nothing in this action was legal or justifiable.
The Israeli navy had no legal basis to suppress what the Fatto Quotidiano correspondent Alessandro Mantovani, aboard the Flotilla, had defined as a “peaceful demonstration in the middle of the sea.”
There was no security reason to intervene, just as there was no reason to fire rubber bullets against unarmed sailors. And obviously there was no legitimacy in taking foreign citizens, bringing them to Israel, and expelling them.
The Italian government, like many others, remained motionless in the face of Israel’s first abuses, just a generic request to respect rights on board.
This time, unlike last September with the first expedition, Italy did not send navy ships to escort the expedition at least in international waters. The signal of lack of support was clear and Israel took advantage of it to intervene much earlier before the issue of access to its territorial waters arose.
Twenty-nine Italian citizens, including the Five Star Movement parliamentarian Dario Carotenuto, were effectively kidnapped and deported.
As last time, Israel’s National Security Minister, the far-right extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, turned the act of piracy into a propaganda opportunity and posted on social media videos of the humiliated activists, forced to crouch on the ground in the position of Muslims in prayer, with their hands tied with plastic zip ties, mistreated by masked men.
These are images that demonstrate a blatant violation of every principle of the rule of law: certainly, Israel has done much worse in the West Bank and Gaza, but here its illiberal drift targets citizens of those Western countries that have shown a certain indulgence so far in dealing with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government
