Gaza flotilla: The Madleen shows us the world as it could be

Middle East Eye

4 hours ago

In the dead of night, Israeli speedboats encircled the Madleen. Drones loomed above. A strange white substance was sprayed across the deck. Then, in international waters, armed forces stormed the boat.
One by one, the passengers - 12 unarmed civilians, from Brazil to Sweden - were captured and led away.
There were no weapons aboard - only food, medicine and conscience.
The Madleen's mission was simple yet profound: to deliver aid and solidarity to Gaza's starving population. Amid Israel's siege of Gaza, power speaks, morality is silenced, and even the open sea is not safe.
The Madleen was not merely a boat. It was a message carved into waves.
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Its name honoured Madleen Kulab, Gaza's first and only female fisher. At 13, she took her father's place and forged alone into a world of blockade and threat. She later became a small business owner - employing others, offering boat tours under a purple canopy, building a future in a place where hope was scarce.
'I am brave and have good will,' she once said.
Her courage sailed under her name.
'It falls on us'
The Madleen followed a history already soaked in violence. In 2010, Israeli forces boarded the Mavi Marmara, killing nine. Other flotillas have been blocked, detained, humiliated. Yet still, they sailed.
Those on board the Madleen declared, by their very presence, that Palestine is no longer the cause of a region; it has become the conscience of the world.
Among the passengers was Greta Thunberg, once the darling of western progressives, now vilified for refusing to stay silent. From the deck of the Madleen, she declared: 'When our complicit governments fail to step up, it falls on us … to do so.'
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Portrayed as a threat to the establishment, she has been smeared by mainstream media as part of a 'woke elite' for standing with Gaza. Even US Senator Lindsey Graham joined the ugly chorus, sneering: 'Hope Greta and her friends can swim!' - gleefully contemplating the drowning of a young woman and her civilian companions in open waters.
Greta's response was calm, unflinching: 'We can swim very well.'
Nothing illustrates Israel's moral unravelling more than its reaction to this small civilian boat. Not just the threats, but the tone: rabid, delusional, utterly divorced from human reality.
Palestine is no longer the cause of a region; it has become the conscience of the world
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz labelled Thunberg an 'antisemitic Hamas propagandist' and ordered the army to use 'any means necessary' to stop the Madleen - a threat of military force against civilians, against a boat named after a fisherwoman.
In one grotesque video, Israeli children warned Thunberg: 'We're coming to get you!'
Instead of grieving the dead or praying for peace, Israelis were celebrating the pursuit of an unarmed girl with a conscience.
Even Uri Geller - the spoon-bending illusionist - joined the frenzy, claiming he had sent 'psychic' protection to Israeli forces and warning Greta not to underestimate the power of his mind.
At any other time, it would be absurd. Today, it is pathological.
This is not the voice of a confident democracy. This is a settler colony at the edge of its own delusion: armed, enraged and spiralling.
Arab silence
But amid the noise came a voice of moral clarity.
Gabor Mate, a Jewish Holocaust survivor and world-renowned trauma expert, recorded a message to the flotilla from Poland, where he had just visited the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial. With quiet conviction, he said: 'Today you represent those fighters. Today you represent that small group that's willing to stand up against one of the most murderous militaries in the world, supported by all the world's great powers.
'You are carrying all of humanity with you … all human beings whose hearts are open, who believe in justice, who believe in freedom, and who support and are moved by and full of admiration for what you're doing,' Mate added.
Seizure of Madleen is the latest in more than a decade of Israeli attacks on aid flotillas Read More »
The boat set sail not from Tangier, Latakia or Alexandria, but from Italy. A damning silence echoes from the Arab shores of the Mediterranean.
Egypt watches from across the water. Holidaymakers cheer the boat's passing with videos and Eid greetings, but none board. Gaza, it seems, is nearer to a young Swede than to its own neighbours. Egypt has sealed the Rafah crossing, guarding it with soldiers as Palestinians starve metres away.
Palestine is no longer the concern of governments, especially not those ruled by despots. It is the cause of the free, of those with conscience - of those who refuse to bow to silence, dictatorship or despair.
The Madleen is not a miracle, but a model. It is a whisper of what could be done if humanity dared to act.
What if this wasn't the only boat? What if thousands set sail, from every Mediterranean port? What if fishers, sailors, students and parents rose to say: not in our name, not on our watch? What if the sea became a corridor of conscience?
Global inaction
Remember Dunkirk. In 1940, civilian boats crossed the Channel to rescue trapped Allied soldiers. No orders, no permission. Just courage. And history remembers.
What if Gaza had its own Dunkirk? What if people everywhere refused to stand by while a people is starved, slaughtered and erased?
And remember this too: Sunday marked 58 years since Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a US naval intelligence ship in international waters. Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats killed 34 crew members and wounded 171. Though Israel said it was a mistake, some still believe it was deliberate.
Today, the same sea that ran red with American blood now receives the Madleen - a boat of unarmed civilians carrying food. And again, Israel, ever-backed by the US, threatens force.
Israel wages this war emboldened by global inaction. It bulldozes international law, burns refugees in tents, starves children, bombs hospitals, flattens schools, executes medics, shoots children fetching bread. And it shrugs, confident nothing will happen.
It has US bombs, a US veto, a complicit Europe, silent Arab regimes, and a hollowed-out Palestinian elite.
But we, the people, are not powerless. We are not condemned to be spectators. We are not fated to live in a world where the strong devour the weak while the rest scroll by.
Moral direction
What is at stake is not only the survival of a people. It is the moral direction of civilisation.
Do we want a world where law is meaningless, where genocide is rebranded as self-defence, where starvation is a military strategy and truth a liability?
The Madleen is a mirror. It shows us the world as it is - and the world as it could be. Liberation is not a gift from the powerful. It is a project of the powerless.
'We think we are liberating Palestine. But it is Palestine that liberates us'
- French politician Rima Hassan
As French politician Rima Hassan, aboard the Madleen, wrote: 'When they arrest us, I will look at them as Larbi Ben M'Hidi looked at the colonisers of his land - calm, assured of liberation … We think we are liberating Palestine. But it is Palestine that liberates us.'
Hassan continued: 'I accuse western colonial complicity. I accuse Arab cowardice. I accuse the corruption of the Palestinian elite. And I stand with the resisters, the rebels, the dreamers, the undisciplined, those who refuse the disorder of this world.'
She went on to quote Ben M'Hidi, who once said: 'Throw the revolution into the street - the people will pick it up.'
Today, it has been thrown into the sea.
Will we follow?
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