Europe’s Gaza Solidarity Surges: Flotillas, Marches, and a New Front Against Israel’s Blockade

Since the start of this month, there’s been a palpable change in the air here in Europe. Two grassroots initiatives for Gaza—one essentially symbolic and the other involving an unprecedented mass mobilisation—have opened up a new front in the global struggle for Palestine. The solidarity movement that has developed across Europe over the past 20 months now seems poised to take the next step: non-violent direct action against Israel at the very borders of its Gaza extermination project.

The first initiative is embodied by a small sailing ship, the Madleen, named for a doughty Gazan fisherwoman called Madleen Kullab. Of the 12 individuals aboard the craft when it set sail from Catania, Sicily, on June 1, 11 were Europeans, and six of them were from France. Two names could hardly fail to claim media attention: those of Greta Thunberg—for millions around the world the personification of the struggle for planetary survival—and of Rima Hassan, a feisty Franco-Palestinian MEP (Member of the European Parliament) from La France Insoumise known for her admirable readiness to draw the ire of French Islamophobes and the far Right.

Along with its crew, the yacht carried a cargo of baby formula, flour, rice, nappies, menstrual products, water desalination kits, medical supplies, crutches, and children’s prosthetics. If the quantities were necessarily token, the goals of the endeavour were immense: to break the siege of Gaza, offer hope to its two million starving survivors, puncture Israel’s iron wall of impunity, and provide a spark for bigger, more ambitious people-powered actions around the world.

The same goals power the second initiative, still unfolding as I began work on this column. This is the Global March to Gaza, an ambitious international mobilisation geared at achieving the physical presence of thousands of people at the southern Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip. The first phase began on June 9, with the departure from Tunisia of the Soumoud (Steadfastness) Convoy, a multi-hued column of vehicles in their hundreds snaking across the North African landscape towards Egypt, to a rapturous reception at every town and village along the route.

On June 12, thousands more participants from across the world, many Europeans among them, began arriving in Cairo in preparation for a mass march from El-Arish in Sinai to Rafah, which was scheduled to begin on June 15.

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Attempts to reach besieged Gaza by land and by sea have been made repeatedly since Israel imposed an indefinite blockade on Gaza in 2007. On its website, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a global grassroots solidarity movement set up in 2010 with the core mission to break the siege, provides details of each sea-borne effort. The most successful one took place in August 2008, when two small wooden boats, the Free Gaza and the Liberty, and the 44 people aboard them actually landed on the Gaza coast, to an ecstatic welcome from the tens of thousands of Palestinians lining the shore.

Since then, no flotilla has been able to drop anchor on Gaza’s shores. In May 2010, a flotilla centred around a vessel called the Mavi Marmara was scuppered by Israeli commandos, who boarded the vessel in international waters and killed nine international volunteers, injuring a further fifty (one of whom subsequently died).

Under these conditions, the intensified, increasingly sophisticated efforts of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition over the past 15 years constitute a victory of sorts. They speak to an extraordinary level of commitment: just a month before the Madleen set sail, another flotilla was attacked by Israeli drones off the coast of Malta and forced to abandon its mission. No one taking to the sea for Gaza nurses any illusions about what lies ahead.

Failed attempts

The same can be said of anyone attempting to reach Gaza by land. Here, Egypt’s US-backed dictatorship and its sinister custodian, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, continue to present an obstacle every bit as cruel and unyielding as the Israeli state. Hundreds of those arriving in Cairo by air over the past few days to participate in the march have been snatched from their hotels and summarily deported. For the North African contingent, blocking actions began at an earlier stage of the route, in Libya. As I write, the Soumoud Convoy remains stalled at the Libyan-Egyptian border, while thousands of marchers have been detained in Sinai and had their passports seized.

This comes as a further disappointment following the abortive outcome of the Madleen Flotilla. In the early hours of Monday, June 9, when it was roughly 100 nautical miles off the Gaza coast, the Madleen was stormed by Israeli security forces who seized its passengers and forcibly conveyed them to the Israeli port city of Ashdod. Greta Thunberg was swiftly deported; three other members of the mission were “encouraged” to leave. After days of incarceration in Israel’s notoriously ghoulish prison system, more crew members, Rima Hussein among them, were released and deported. After being held in illegal Israeli detention for a week, the last three crew members—two of them French and the third Dutch—were released and deported to Jordan on June 16.

None of the European governments whose citizens were held has been minded to condemn Israel for piracy, kidnapping, illegal detention, and other crimes against international maritime law.

From a certain perspective, there’s a doomed quality to these marine and terrestrial ventures. The view that they are primed for failure is certainly one encouraged by Western governments and mainstream media, hostile to any expressions of activism by engaged, knowledgeable citizens. But that is to ignore the larger purposes of these initiatives. It is to obscure the contribution they make to building movements, and the role they play in encouraging people to overcome passivity, stand up and act in their own right.

In France, where I live, there’s been an exponential growth in public support for Palestine since the Madleen set to sea. Advanced technology, including a sophisticated tracking system provided by Forensic Architecture (a London-based multidisciplinary research group which uses technology to investigate state violence and human rights abuses), enabled social media users to follow every step of the voyage, including the times when Israeli drones hovered menacingly above the craft at dead of night. This technology, along with the onboard presence of a celebrity commanding huge global support, undoubtedly contributed to Madleen’s safety and the survival of its crew.

Many people here in France take pride in the fact that French nationals made up half the Madleen’s crew. They revel at, and draw inspiration from, the sheer gutsiness of those involved, in particular that of Rima Hassan, who, while held in solitary confinement, seized the chance to daub “Free Palestine!” on her dungeon wall. They love how Hassan and comrades, on reaching Paris following their release, went straight to a tumultuous “welcome back” rally in the Place de la République, still in the clothes they’d worn in prison. Such acts of defiance drill into dense layers of historical memory; they establish connections with France’s own experiences of occupation and resistance.

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There’s excitement to be had in watching the effects of these latest people-powered initiatives ripple out across Europe. Alongside large-scale mobilisations in metropolitan centres and bigger cities, people in small towns and far-flung corners have been out on the streets for Palestine, often for the first time. In the Netherlands, a “red line” rally in The Hague on June 15 drew the support of 1,50,000 people protesting Dutch government inaction on Palestine, all of them wearing red to symbolise the ongoing slaughter. A week earlier, 3,00,000 had marched for Palestine through the streets of Rome.

“I have one word for Israel,” declared Rima Hassan to the tens of thousands gathered in Paris to welcome her home. “The next boat is getting ready to sail. It will be called the Handala. And there will be all the boats we need to break the siege.”

During the Madleen’s six-day voyage, crew members took it in turn to share their thoughts, hopes and personal reflections with the craft’s online followers. This created a space for intimacy; it fostered a sense of common endeavour, of being part of the action and the uncertainty. Despite observing from afar, you somehow found yourself spirited aboard the small craft bobbing and ducking its way across the Mediterranean. You could feel your body responding to the ship’s movement, your

hair tousled by the breeze; you could sense the summer sun on your skin. At your side, a young man with a genial smile and a gentle manner: Thiago Avila from Brazil, the Madleen’s lone non-European crew member. Thiago’s mother tongue is Portuguese, yet his English is eloquent and passionate. “When governments fail, we sail”, he tells you, the spray sparkling in the sun as the ship continues eastwards, headed for Gaza.

Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.