Sailing to Stop a Genocide: When People Act After Governments Fail

The Global Sumud Flotilla is the rather grand name of a ragtag bunch of boats that are now sailing near Crete. They will soon be joined by ships from the navies of Italy and Spain after coming under attack by Israel or their proxies. They are trying to bring relief supplies to Gaza, to break the 17-year Israeli siege of Gaza, and open a humanitarian corridor to end the famine, and what a United Nations commission recently confirmed is a genocide. They are not quite up to the task. Most of them know it, but they’re going anyway.

The Flotilla’s last major stop was in Bizerte, Tunisia, most boats tied to a sea wall at the far end of the harbor. Several times a day local Tunisian people would bring small donations of food and water to the end of the dirt road and Flotilla volunteers would meet them and carry the supplies across a rocky field to the boats.

From one of those small trucks an old woman, somebody’s grandmother, handed me a box she had filled with baby formula. The cans were different brands, some shopworn. She had collected them, and when she pressed her precious box into my hands she said to me, “For the babies. For the babies.”

Down at the boats there was chaos: beautiful, inspiring, all too human madness. People swarmed everywhere making hasty repairs and makeshift alterations, while others stripped anything useful from boats too damaged during the sail from Barcelona to ever leave port again. It seemed half the people had a sort of field commission, suddenly in charge of procurement, estimating food and water, and fuel requirements for undetermined days of travel, doing electrical repairs and installations or servicing engines. I had vetoed a dangerously jerry-rigged propane connection to a galley stove and was sent to the open-air market to find a camp stove. My companion was the medic on the boat—she has a doctorate in journalism. She is an amazing woman—she’d led a group to Everest base camp—and with her Arabic and local savvy we actually found the camp stove.

They were all desperate for a spot on some of the most decrepit boats in the Mediterranean, vying to cross a pitiless sea to most likely end up in Israeli prisons.

Everyone was pushed beyond their competency, past all their own red lines, by their commitment and the needs of the mission. They were getting the job done that their governments refuse to do. Because a thousand miles across the sea the people of Gaza are dying.

All nations are obligated to take steps to stop genocide when it is occurring. That duty does not require perfect evidence. It does not require the final ruling of a court that says events constitute genocide. Such rulings only occur years later, after the monstrous deed is already done, and of course the perpetrators will deny it to the end, as Israel has. Yet all the governments of the world seem to be waiting for a completed arson investigation before they put out the fire.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry has released an 80-page report detailing their finding of genocide in Gaza. On a smaller scale, more human than the legalese, doctors who volunteer in Gaza report that when Israel found out that they were bringing infant formula in their bags, Israel started searching their bags and seizing the infant formula. There is no way to spin that fact. These were doctors who would be giving that formula to babies. You can’t make a bomb out of infant formula. It constitutes no conceivable threat, yet Israel is intentionally preventing small amounts of food to get to starving babies.

We’ve all seen their skeletal little bodies, the pleading looks in their eyes, their traumatized mothers. Israel recently incarcerated an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s in a camp for “terrorists,” so perhaps these babies are “terrorists.” Perhaps the frozen embryos, eggs, and sperm in Gaza’s only IVF clinic destroyed by Israel were also “terrorists.” Or, more likely, killing the future and hope of the Palestinian people is the clearest, most heartbreaking evidence of Israel’s intent to commit genocide.

Every day we see video of the bombing and aerial images of the wasteland. Israel has long since destroyed the hospitals, the schools and universities, the farmland and the infrastructure that makes life possible. Not satisfied with the Cold War cliché of bouncing the rubble, Israel has threatened to reduce Gaza to dust, unless a peace deal is negotiated. Then they bombed the negotiators in Doha.

And still the United States, Germany, and Great Britain send arms—our tax dollars paying for every bomb.

Hundreds of former ambassadors to the European Union have urged that organization to sanction Israel, but the EU dithers while they enrich and support Israel with 35% of Israel’s foreign trade. A few nations, with all due solemnity, have recognized the Palestinian state, but as yet do nothing to protect the people of that state.

And so the volunteers of the Global Sumud Flotilla flung themselves upon the sea. They are doctors, lawyers, journalists, and very ordinary people, all with worried families back home. Almost none have experience on the sea, but all have a deep knowledge of the tragic history of Palestine.

Do they sail under a banner that is always at the edge of splintering into catastrophe? Absolutely. It couldn’t be otherwise. Imagine your local PTA suddenly expanded to hundreds of passionate, contentious members. Imagine all meetings conducted in three languages. Imagine that PTA isn’t organizing a silent auction, but a thousand-mile voyage into a war zone. Of course it’s nuts.

But hundreds of people went to Tunisia anyway. They were all desperate for a spot on some of the most decrepit boats in the Mediterranean, vying to cross a pitiless sea to most likely end up in Israeli prisons.

They came because their governments refuse to act.

They sail to stop a genocide.