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human rights
'We Refuse to Remain Silent': 1,000 North African Volunteers Make Their Way to Gaza to Break Israeli Siege
"A tsunami of humanity is rising for Gaza."
Jun 11, 2025
As Israeli forces unlawfully boarded the Madleen, a boat carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, and detained the volunteers on the vessel on Monday, approximately 1,000 pro-Palestinian advocates from across Northwest Africa were boarding a convoy of buses and cars in Tunisia—planning to travel for days to the Rafah crossing, where they aim to break Israel's blockade that's starving people across the war-torn enclave.
The Sumud Convoy, whose name means "steadfastness" or "resilience" in Arabic, is carrying aid and being led by the Coordination of Joint Action for Palestine in Tunisia, and has ties to the Global March for Gaza, which includes rights advocates from about 50 countries across the world who were en route to Cairo on Wednesday.
"This is a civil and popular initiative in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza," Wael Naouar, a member of the organizing team, toldThe New Arab. "We refuse to remain silent."
The convoy crossed into Libya on Tuesday and has been resting after a full day of travel as organizers wait for permission to cross the eastern part of the divided country.
In Tripoli in the western region, the volunteers have been welcomed by hundreds of locals, and fuel station owners have reportedly said they will provide free gas to all cars, buses, and trucks that join the convoy.
"This visit brings us joy," architect Alaa Abdel Razzaq toldAgence France-Presse.
Along with the current delay in receiving approval from eastern Libyan authorities to cross the region, the convoy and the Global March for Gaza could face resistance from the Egyptian government as organizers plan to march for three days from El Arish in the Sinai Peninsula to the Rafah crossing.
Egypt classifies the area between El Arish and Rafah as a military zone and has not released a statement on whether it will allow the march.
If the volunteers make it to the Rafah crossing, they will have to contend with the Israel Defense Forces. In addition to abducting international activists including Swedish climate leader Greta Thunberg and Palestinian-French member of European Parliament Rima Hassan this week, Israeli forces killed 10 activists carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza on a Turkish flotilla in 2010.
Ghaya Ben Mbarek, an independent journalist from Tunis, toldAl Jazeera that people in the convoy "are feeling courage and anger" as they head toward the Gaza border.
"The message people here want to send to the world is that even if you stop us by sea, or air, then we will come, by the thousands, by land," Ben Mbarek told Al Jazeera. "We will literally cross deserts... to stop people from dying from hunger."
Fadi Quran of the U.S.-based advocacy group Avaaz said the journey of the convoy—which has been growing as more people have joined since leaving Tunisia—is "one of the most beautiful things humanity has to offer in 2025."
"A tsunami of humanity is rising for Gaza," said Quran. "Amplify it."
The Sumud Convoy is supported by the Tunisian General Labor Union, the National Bar Association, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, and the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, while groups including the Palestinian Youth Movement and CodePink are affiliated with the Global March for Gaza.
Advocates from countries including the Netherlands, Canada, and Ireland plan to arrive in Cairo on Thursday, when they hope to begin the three-day march to Rafah.
Canadian Sen. Yuen Pau Woo wrote to the Egyptian government on Tuesday, asking for support for the march.
"I believe that Egypt's support for this humanitarian action would send a powerful message to the international community," said Woo.
Kellie McConnell, a member of Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine, also expressed hope that the international action will force governments around the world, including those that have backed Israel's bombardment and blockade of Gaza, to "pay attention and do everything in their power" to end the attacks that have killed more than 55,000 Palestinians.
"We can turn the tables in this genocide," said McConnell. "We can stop the absolutely appalling brutalization and desperate treatment of people in Palestine."
If the advocates are blocked at the border like the Madleen was intercepted on Monday, one activist in the Sumud Convoy toldThe New Arab, "even that will send a message."
"People over power," they said. "If they stop dozens, thousands will rise."
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Gaza Freedom Flotilla Sailboat Madleen Intercepted by Israeli Commandos
“Every hour without consequences emboldens Israel to escalate its attacks on civilians, aid workers, and the very foundations of international law.”
Jun 09, 2025
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s (FFC) sailboat, named the Madleen, was intercepted in international waters by the Israeli military at 3:02 am CEST earlier today at 31.95236° N, 32.38880° E.
The ship was unlawfully boarded, its 12 unarmed civilian crew and participants abducted, and its life-saving cargo—including baby formula, food, and medical supplies—confiscated, as well as personal possessions taken.
To our knowledge, no one from the Madleen was injured during the interception.
Immediately after the interception, the crew and participants were moved from the Madleen and taken to an Israeli ship. That is only the second time that crew/participants have been taken off the flotilla ship. The first was in 2011 from the Dignite, which sailed from France.
Prior to the interception, drones flew around Madleen and a white powder substance was dropped on the decks. We do not know what the substance was.
After losing communication with Madleen, the FFC began posting pre-recorded video messages from those onboard. “If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupation forces, or forces that support Israel.” SOS messages from the volunteers have been sent to the world.
In the statement issued by the Gaza Freedom Flotilla coalition, Huwaida Arraf, human rights attorney and Freedom Flotilla organizer, said, “Israel has no legal authority to detain international volunteers aboard the Madleen. This seizure blatantly violates international law and defies the ICJ’s binding orders requiring unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza. These volunteers are not subject to Israeli jurisdiction and cannot be criminalized for delivering aid or challenging an illegal blockade—their detention is arbitrary, unlawful, and must end immediately.”
The statement continued, “Israel is once again acting with total impunity. It has defied the International Court of Justice’s binding orders to allow unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza, disregarded the international laws protecting civilian navigation, and dismissed the demands of millions worldwide calling for an end to the siege and genocide.”
This latest act of Israeli aggression follows the unpunished Israeli drone attack on May 1, 2025 on the flotilla’s vessel, Conscience, which left four civilian volunteers injured and the ship disabled and burning in European waters. That unprovoked attack on the Conscience is a major violation of international law that has not been addressed by the international community.
Now, today, Israel has escalated its violence again by targeting another peaceful civilian vessel.
“The world’s governments remained silent when Conscience was bombed. Now Israel is testing that silence again,” said Tan Safi another Freedom Flotilla organizer. “Every hour without consequences emboldens Israel to escalate its attacks on civilians, aid workers, and the very foundations of international law.”
Flotilla lawyers will meet volunteers while they are in prison and advocate for their release.
Calls to the seven embassies in the respective countries of the volunteers will put pressure for immediate consular visits to the prisons to speak with their citizens. Please call the French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Turkish, Brazilian, and Dutch embassies in your country.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition demands:
- An end to the illegal and deadly siege of Gaza.
- The immediate release of all abducted volunteers;
- The immediate delivery of humanitarian aid directly to Palestinians that is independent of the control of the occupying power
- Full accountability for the military assaults on Madleen and Conscience.
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Palestine And Its Metaphors
Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Jun 06, 2025
Metaphors kill. Not with bullets or bombs, but with confusion. They blur what demands clarity. They sentimentalize what should horrify. They distract.
Susan Sontag wrote that the most honest way to understand illness is to strip it of metaphor. To stop saying cancer is an invasion, or tuberculosis is romantic, or AIDS is punishment. Disease is not a morality play. It is a condition of the body. What burdens the sick is not just the illness itself, but the stories society tells about it.
So too with nations. So too with Palestine.
Palestine is not just a land or a people. It has been made into a metaphor. For resistance. For loss. For stubbornness. For martyrdom. For chaos. For terrorism. For hope. For grief. It is everything except what it is: a place where people live, suffer, starve, and die.
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced.
Turning Palestine into a symbol allows the powerful to avoid the facts. You don’t need to look at checkpoints if you’re talking about “conflict.” You don’t have to name apartheid if you’re debating “disputed territories.” You don’t have to say stolen if you say contested. You don’t have to say killed if you say clash. Metaphor is how power talks about violence without taking responsibility for it.
Palestine becomes intolerable not because of what Palestinians do, but because of what they represent: an open wound that refuses to close, a people who will not disappear. This is why their story must be constantly reframed, misnamed, wrapped in euphemism and myth. Their existence disrupts the fantasy that liberal democracies are just, that settler states are stable, that history is over. And so, the metaphor persists. It buries reality. It protects the liar.
We must refuse to speak in code, refuse to let metaphor do the work of silence. Palestine is not a symbol. It is a real place, under siege. And to see it clearly, we must burn the language that keeps us blind.
Palestine resists. That much is true. But once you say it like that—without detail, without names, without time or place—it becomes a slogan. And slogans consume clarity. The world loves the idea of resistance more than the reality. It loves the photo of the boy with the slingshot. It loves the keffiyeh, the flag, the tear gas. It loves the spectacle of defiance. What it does not love is the cost.
It does not love a broken spine from a checkpoint beating. It does not love a family digging their daughter from rubble. It does not love the dull terror of drones. That kind of resistance is not romantic. It’s not metaphor. It’s not poster-ready.
Palestine is trapped in a paradox. Its resistance is admired as long as it stays symbolic—noble suffering, poetic dignity, children throwing rocks at tanks. But when resistance becomes material—when it demands rights, when it takes up arms, when it names its oppressor—it is immediately recast. Now it is extremism. Now it is terrorism. Now the metaphor turns toxic. This is the trap of metaphor: It flatters, and it criminalizes, depending on what power needs.
The powerful don’t fear Palestine because of its military strength. They fear the idea of it. The persistence of it. The fact that something so small, so wounded, so systematically crushed still refuses to submit. Palestine is proof that domination is never total. That’s what makes it dangerous.
And so, the metaphor must be managed. Contained. You can wear the keffiyeh but not name the Occupation. You can say “Free Palestine” on Instagram but not mention Gaza. You can quote Darwish but not talk about bulldozed olive groves. You can mourn the dead but not accuse the killers. In this way, metaphor becomes a leash. It lets you gesture toward justice without ever touching it.
But Palestine doesn’t need symbols. It needs liberation. Not metaphors, no myths needed, only land, water, safety, and return from exile. These are not poetic demands. They are concrete, measurable, and deliberately denied. To really see Palestinian resistance, you must stop calling it resistance. Call it what it is: survival under siege. Organizing under surveillance. Memory under erasure. It’s not metaphor. It’s real life.
Once you frame a people as pathology, you don’t need to justify what you do to them. You only need to call it medicine. And when treatment fails to sterilize the threat, the language escalates. Now the body must be purged. Now the neighborhood is a target. The entire population becomes suspect.
They say Hamas “hides among the population.” But what does that mean in a fenced in strip of land 40 kilometers long, where there is no army base, no safe zone, no separation between life and resistance? The phrase is not a statement of fact—it is a metaphor. And like most metaphors in war, it serves a purpose: to erase the line between fighter and civilian, to turn every man, woman, and child into a potential target. If you can’t see your enemy, then everyone becomes your enemy. The home is now a military site. The hospital, a command center. The school, a shield. “Among the population” doesn’t describe a tactic, it justifies indiscriminate killing. It is how the language of war collapses into the logic of extermination.
But what if the patient isn’t sick? What if the disease is the system choking him? What if the diagnosis is projection? There is no vaccine for settler colonialism. No cure for apartheid—except dismantling it. But if Palestine is spoken of like a disease, its survival will always be framed as a threat.
Power never calls itself by name. It prefers neutral terms. Clinical. Procedural. Empty terms. Palestinians aren’t starved—they face a humanitarian crisis. Their homes aren’t stolen—they’re part of a property dispute. They’re not imprisoned—they’re under security lockdown. Their lives aren’t ended—they’re neutralized. This is not just bad language. It’s policy disguised as grammar.
Words like conflict, clash, cycle of violence—these are metaphors of balance. They suggest symmetry, as if this is a fair fight, as if both sides are equally armed, equally culpable, equally free. But this is not a clash. It is not a cycle. It is a colonizer and the colonized. An occupier and the occupied. The difference is moral. The difference is material. The metaphor erases both.
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored.
Sontag wrote that when people described cancer as an “invasion,” they were borrowing the language of war to make sense of something terrifying. But when the war is real, and the invasion is actual, language flips. War becomes operation. Invasion becomes security measure. You speak of it like infrastructure. This is how you sanitize occupation.
The wall isn’t a scar across the land—it’s a barrier fence. Settlements aren’t illegal—they’re new neighborhoods. Checkpoints aren’t instruments of control—they’re points of coordination. And Gaza isn’t under siege—it’s self-governed, as if a prison becomes free the moment the guards move outside its walls. Metaphor in this context does not reveal. It anesthetizes.
It allows liberal democracies to wash their hands with language. You don’t need to condemn apartheid if you can call it a complex situation. You don’t have to intervene in ethnic cleansing if you can label it a tragic escalation. You don’t have to listen to the grieving if you describe their pain as incitement. This is not metaphor as poetry. It is metaphor as smokescreen.
The media uses it. Diplomats use it. NGOs use it. Even well-meaning activists get trapped in it, calling for dialogue, for both sides to come together, for peaceful resolution, without ever naming the violence that blocks peace at every turn. But clarity is not extremism and precision is not incitement. To describe things as they are is not radical—it is necessary. There is no symmetry between the boot and the neck. And any language that suggests otherwise is complicity with the boot.
Palestine is not a wound in the Western psyche. It is a mirror of that psyche. And what it reflects is unbearable. The reason the world can’t look at Palestine directly is not because it is too foreign, but because it is too familiar. It shows the West everything it claims to have outgrown: apartheid, racial hierarchy, empire, extermination. Not in the past tense, but right now. Daily. Live-streamed.
Palestine is where the myth of Western moral authority collapses on itself. It’s easy to denounce the crimes of the past: slavery, fascism, genocide, so long as they stay in museums or textbooks. But Palestine breaks the frame. It puts the vocabulary of historical evil in the present tense. It makes Holocaust-committed Europe complicit in a same kind of ethnic cleansing. It makes the U.S., champion of “rules-based order,” the primary funder of impunity. It makes liberalism look like a mask, not a principle.
This is what makes Palestine dangerous—not its resistance, but its clarity.
Palestine exposes the real function of international law: who gets to break it, and who must obey. It exposes journalism’s quiet racism: who gets names and childhood photos, and who becomes “a number.” It exposes the limits of identity politics: how many doors are slammed shut when the oppressed are inconvenient. The metaphor of Palestine-as-problem allows Western institutions to avoid seeing the problem in themselves.
To look clearly at Palestine is to confront questions most people would rather leave buried. What does it mean that the state born from the ashes of the Holocaust has become a jailer? What does it mean that human rights groups whisper what Palestinians scream? What does it mean that the most surveilled, bombed, and besieged population on Earth is asked to behave peacefully, while their occupier is praised for restraint?
Palestine punctures the fantasy of Western innocence. That is why it must be abstracted, medicalized, moralized, silenced. Because if you face it directly—without metaphor, without euphemism—you must admit that the world is not post-colonial. That we live in a global system where some lives are sacred, and others are collateral. Where entire populations can be punished for existing. Where the worst crime is not violence but remembering.
Palestine remembers.
The time for symbols is over. Palestine is not a metaphor. It is not the universal struggle. It is not the world’s conscience. It is not an allegory for Brown resistance, or the dream of return, or the poetry of loss. It is not an Instagram aesthetic. It is not a stand-in for every injustice on Earth. It is a place, with borders and people, a colonial regime, a military occupation, a blockade and a death toll. It is a place where a child drinks from a bomb-cracked pipe. Where a mother sleeps in a school because her house is dust. Where a man counts the names of his dead before checking if his leg is still attached.
To speak of Palestine clearly, we must break the habit of metaphor. We must stop treating it as a narrative arc, a tragedy to be admired from a safe distance. It is not art. It is not history. It is the present, and it is now, as we ourselves live and breathe. We must reject the language of soft avoidance: Say occupation, not “conflict.” Say apartheid, not “dispute.” Say siege, not “border closure.” Say massacre, not “escalation.” Say starvation not “hunger.” Say Palestinian, not “Hamas.”
The demand is not poetic. It is logistical: land back, borders erased, walls down, refugees returned, bombing stopped, sanctions imposed, settlers removed, rights restored. This is not metaphor. This is what justice looks like; anything less is a performance.
Sontag understood that metaphor, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon. It doesn’t soften violence—it smuggles it in. It doesn’t reveal truth—it repackages it in palatable form. She wrote against metaphor to rescue the ill from stigma. We must resist metaphor to stop the disappearance of Palestine.
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