Missiles against nappies: The real reason why Israel halted the aid flotilla to Gaza
If you say that this is merely a symbolic act — true, it is a symbolic act, like many acts of resistance. Like standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, like a raised fist at the Olympic medal awards ceremony, like holding pictures of dead children outside military bases.
By Yoana Gonen • Translated by Sol Salbe
What an audacious operation! Our heroic fighters managed, against all odds, to take control of a boat carrying a handful of European pacifists and a few bags of flour. “I commend the IDF for the swift and safe takeover,” wrote the Defence Minister and human cringe fountain Israel Katz yesterday, as if this were at least an Entebbe raid.
Amidst the flow of patriotic slogans and stale jokes that poured forth yesterday on the subject, it was hard to find a logical explanation for the decision to stop the aid boat. What would actually have happened if the Madleen had been allowed to reach Gaza? After all, it was merely carrying a small amount of baby food, flour, rice, and nappies (“less than one aid truck,” mocked the Foreign Ministry, as if Greta Thunberg and her associates were responsible for starving the Gaza Strip). Israel knew very well what was on the ship, and precisely for that reason it prevented the ship from reaching Gaza.
What the military was sent to thwart far out in the Mediterranean was not a logistical incursion but rather a cognitive one: the shocking possibility that someone, somewhere, will see the Palestinians as suffering human beings rather than mythological monsters. The government defined the Gaza flotilla as a “media provocation,” and it was indeed a desperate, doomed attempt to draw global attention to the slaughter happening in Gaza. And if you say that this is merely a symbolic act — true, it is a symbolic act, like many acts of resistance. Like standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, like a raised fist at the Olympic medal awards ceremony, like holding pictures of dead children outside military bases.
In light of the strategic threat of sending nappies to Palestinian toddlers, the State of Israel has pulled out all its propaganda guns. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs labelled the aid flotilla “the selfie yacht,” in a pathetic effort to portray the determined activists sailing on it as a group of pampered influencers craving attention. Minister Katz, on the other hand, decided to adopt the proven educational approach of A Clockwork Orange, and ordered the IDF to show the activists the “horror video” from October 7. Fortunately for him, no one is forcing him to watch the videos of the horrors that Israel is wreaking in Gaza, but perhaps the time has really come.
Katz’s Calamity Cinematheque is based on the illusion that the activists, who risked their lives in the Gaza flotilla, are not sufficiently aware of Hamas’ crimes, and that if we just inject them with a little snuff into their veins, they will turn into upright Zionists. But these people saw October 7. And also the 8th, and the 244th, and the 612nd of October. They saw bombed bodies flying in the air, people burning in tents in displaced persons camps, entire cities reduced to rubble, and children dying of hunger and disease. Contrary to the distorted perception that prevails our way, they simply do not think that the slaughter of hundreds of civilians gives us an open cheque for ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and unrestrained extermination.
Israel blocked the boat for the same reason that it refuses to allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza: because it knows what it is doing there, and it prefers that the world would not talk about it. This small boat became a danger to public safety not because of the meagre crates it carried on board, but because of the lofty values it represented in its spirit: compassion, humanity, solidarity, refusal to close one’s eyes to evil. In a country that is wallowing in a quagmire of self-righteousness and self-victimisation, such ideas are a real existential threat.
