Compare the courage of Greta Thunberg's Gaza aid mission with the inaction and complicity of western governments
Imagine this: over the weekend, Britain – shocked by the scale of suffering in Gaza – decided to bypass international norms and institutions, and used its navy to deliver much-needed food, baby formula and medical supplies to the Gaza Strip's ports.
This, of course, did not happen. Instead, it was left to activists on the Madleen, including Greta Thunberg, to make a symbolic attempt to break the blockade of aid and raise awareness of a looming 'starvation crisis'. In the early hours of Monday morning, the ship was boarded by Israeli soldiers, allegedly in international waters, and the crew were taken to Israeli ports in anticipation of being repatriated. Lawyers for the activists have claimed that this is overreach by the Israeli armed forces, but the crew should consider their treatment light-touch. In 2010, the Israeli military stormed another aid flotilla and killed 10 activists in the process.
Since the news broke, Israel's propaganda machine has gone into overdrive, dismissing the Madleen as a 'selfie yacht', a line echoed by western media outlets. 'There are ways to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip – they do not involve Instagram selfies,' declared a shameless Israeli Foreign Ministry. Israel knows all about those ways, because it has systematically blocked them.
It's worth noting that the Freedom Flotilla Coalition – the movement behind the Madleen – was launched in 2010, 13 years before 7 October. The blockade on the movement of goods and people in and out of Gaza has been in place for nearly two decades. As an adviser to the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert put it: 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.'
In 2012, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a leaked official document in which government officials calculated the minimum number of calories required for a human not to starve. The point: to make life miserable for the people of Gaza without incurring global outrage through mass starvation. A year before 7 October, the World Food Programme warned of the 'dire humanitarian situation there', noting that around half of Gaza's caged population was 'severely food insecure'.
In the past 20 months, Israel has ratcheted up the blockade. Even former prime minister Olmert, for decades a member of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, denounced his state for committing grave war crimes as a matter of official policy. On 10 October 2023, for example, Israeli general Ghassan Alian – who headed the Israeli military department supposedly charged with humanitarian aid – declared that the 'citizens of Gaza' had collective guilt, and that 'human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza. No electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell – you will get hell.' This was just one of multiple statements of criminal and genocidal intent that left no doubt about the crime to come.
Western states chose to ignore these warnings. In March 2024, the then foreign secretary David Cameron wrote a damning letter to Alicia Kearns, a fellow Tory who headed the House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee. He detailed multiple ways that Israel was blocking aid from entering Gaza, including deliberately not opening more land routes, not opening them for long enough and imposing excessive screening requirements. 'The main blockers remain arbitrary denials by the government of Israel,' he explained, 'and lengthy clearance procedures, including multiple screenings and narrow opening windows in daylight hours.' British-funded aid languished at the border for nearly three weeks waiting for approval, he stated. Yet the British government imposed no sanctions and continued to arm a state it knew was intentionally starving a civilian population.
According to ProPublica in 2024, it was revealed that the two foremost US authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. Under US legislation, this should have immediately triggered the suspension of weapons shipments – but the Biden administration did not accept the findings. You may not be aware of either of these reports, because they received precious little coverage from a western media that has deceived its audiences about Israel's genocidal intent and behaviour.
One of the definitions of genocide, according to the 1948 UN convention, is 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part'. This is an accurate description of what Israel has been doing in Gaza. It has killed 452 aid workers, systematically killed police officers charged with protecting aid, destroyed infrastructure needed to carry humanitarian aid, blocked fuel and water needed to cook food. More than 95% of agricultural land has been rendered unusable by Israeli attacks, 81% of cropland has been damaged and 83% of plant life has been destroyed. Almost all of its cattle and poultry are dead; milk production is nearly halted.
Israel has criminalised Unrwa, Gaza's main humanitarian agency, and three months ago imposed a total blockade. It then replaced the existing humanitarian structures with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Its purpose, as Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared, was to allow the entry of the 'minimum necessary' so that 'the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes'. Stop what? Well, Smotrich openly declares that Israel will expel all surviving Palestinians from Gaza. Not only does the GHF provide far too little and often unusable aid, but it also set up aid points in the south to deliberately empty Gaza's north. Israeli troops then repeatedly massacred starving Palestinians, replacing the existing humanitarian structures with what Tory MP Kit Malthouse called 'a shooting gallery, an abattoir'.
The Madleen did not make it to Gaza's shores. Yet its crew exposed an obscenity that has repulsed western citizens, who will one day force their governments to cease their complicity – which is why, in the end, Israel will lose.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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