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palestinian rights
The Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza—A Cry at Sea to the World's Dormant Conscience
Activists, representing the best of humanity, have come from all seven continents because history is being written beneath the stars and across the cobalt waters. They stand apart in a world that has chosen to look away.
Apr 30, 2026
While the world’s attention has been hijacked by the new American, made-for-Israel war against Iran, a quieter act of resistance is gathering on the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. An act of defiance determined to remind the international community that there is no pause in Gaza’s genocide, and there will be none for those fighting to end it.
The Global Sumud Flotilla, (sumud means "steadfast" in Arabic), is now on its 2026 spring mission. International activists boarding close to 100 boats, with Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise providing technical and operational support, are sailing to Gaza under the slogan: We sail until Palestine is free.
The goal is clear, and against all odds, to establish a direct maritime corridor to Gaza's shores, delivering what Israel's blockade has long denied the more than 2.2 million human beings. The 1,000 multinational seafarers carry something harder to quantify: the accumulated moral weight of a world that has grown tired of watching governments perform concern while doing nothing.
Before speaking of what the flotilla is sailing toward, the world must first reckon with what it has chosen to normalize: Israeli occupation of 53% of Gaza. Its suffocating blockade controls every calorie that enters the strip, so precisely, so deliberately engineered, that humanitarian organizations have documented an official daily intake for Gaza's children, a number calculated not to sustain life but to regulate its slow erosion. A supposed ceasefire that never ceased using food as a weapon in a war of starvation.
For all its firepower, Israel has not found a weapon capable of extinguishing people’s determination to stand up against injustice.
Since the October 10, 2025 ceasefire announcement, the headlines moved on, but Israel kept killing. Six months later, United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that at least 738 Palestinians had been murdered since that ceasefire took effect, with airstrikes, gunfire, and shelling continuing daily across the strip. “Palestinians have no blueprint for survival… Whatever they do or don't do, wherever they go or don't go, there is no safety or protection afforded to them. It is hard to square this with a ceasefire,” he said.
It cannot be squared, because it is a one-sided ceasefire. More than six months on, Israel continues to cordon 2.2 million Palestinians into 47% of their own land, an open-air prison shrinking by the day, its walls drawn not in concrete but by the calculated silence of the international community. Homes, or what had remained of them at the time of the ceasefire, have since been systematically razed to the ground. More than 1 million human beings are not permitted to return, not even to pitch a tent over the rubble of what was once their home.
They are separated from their homes and farms by the so-called yellow line. In reality, it’s a red bloodline, demarcated not by markings, but by the corpses of murdered Palestinians. A moving death trap that follows Gazans into their streets, their neighborhoods, their tents. A father walking his child to what remains of a school. A woman carrying water back to a tent. A man standing outside because his home no longer has walls. Any of them, at any moment, can fall within the “bloodline” death coordinates, and be shot.
To hide the story, Israel kills the witnesses attempting to document the murder. On April 8, the Israeli military murdered another journalist, Mohammed Wishah. Wishah, the 294th Palestinian journalist targeted by Israel in Gaza since October 2023. According to Brown University, Watson School, as of April 2025, Israel “killed more journalists in Gaza than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.”
Israel has exported the same tactic to Lebanon, where the targeting of journalists and media workers has brought the total number of murdered Lebanese journalists to more than 20. It is a regional Israeli strategy of silencing witnesses, not an isolated pattern of collateral damage. The number of murdered journalists in Palestine and Lebanon are not just a statistic. It is an Israeli methodology. Where the blue helmet and the press vest have become Israeli military priorities, not because journalists carry weapons, but because Israel fears the camera more than it fears the gun.
This is why Gaza remains sealed to a complicit international press. A blackout designed to conceal what Israel's killing machine is doing on the ground. When it cannot stop the truth from existing, it kills the locals who expose it. When it cannot stop the world from eventually seeing, it ensures the world sees as little as possible, as late as possible, and filtered through its own hasbara outlets. The camera is the enemy because the camera does not lie, does not accept military briefings as fact, and does not look away from a child pulled from under the rubble in Gaza, or a screeching cat rescuing its kitten from under concrete wreckage in Lebanon. Evidence is the one thing that cannot be bombed into rubble, or starved into submission, so it murders the bearers of the truth.
The Global Sumud Flotilla understands this. Among those sailing are journalists, documentarians, and human rights monitors. People of conscience who have chosen to place their bodies between Gaza and the world's forgetting. Israel has intercepted previous attempts in international waters many times before, jamming their signals, seizing their vessels, humiliating activists, and dragging them into custody. It’ll certainly try again. But the calculus of the world’s public opinion has shifted. Every interception is new proof, and every crew member taken in the dark Mediterranean night is a witness who will tell a story.
Israel has the most sophisticated military hardware American taxpayers’ money can buy. Its drones hunt journalists by name, and a diplomatic shield is held in place by Washington's veto. What it neither has nor can manufacture is the power to kill an idea whose time has come. The flotilla sails, again, because Gazans have not surrendered. It sails because the blue helmet and the press vest, though stained with the blood of nearly 300 journalists, still mean something to the people who wear them. Activists, representing the best of humanity, have come from all seven continents because history is being written beneath the stars and across the cobalt waters. They stand apart in a world that has chosen to look away.
Yet, and for all its firepower, Israel has not found a weapon capable of extinguishing people’s determination to stand up against injustice. Gaza will be free. The only question is, how many flotillas must sail, and how many witnesses must be murdered, before the world’s conscience awakens.
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The Army That Photographs Its Own Contempt
An Israeli soldier brings a hammer to the face of Christ in a Lebanese Christian village after spending long enough in a world where the sacred things of subjugated people are available for whatever use he finds amusing.
Apr 28, 2026
On April 19, 2026, an image circulated of an Israeli soldier standing before a statue of Jesus Christ in Debel, a Maronite Christian village in southern Lebanon, bringing a hammer down upon the sacred face while another soldier recorded him. The image spread within hours because it seemed to compress a moral education into one gesture.
Tucker Carlson was furious. So was a segment of the American right that has, for years, supplied the political and theological conditions that produced this soldier. That is the story the image tells, if you are willing to read it past the shock.
Since October 7, 2023, Israeli soldiers have assembled one of the most extensive self-incriminating records in the history of modern warfare. They posted thousands of videos to Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook under their own names—soldiers posing with Palestinian women's underwear in the ruins of their homes, filming the humiliation of detainees, torching food supplies, demolishing houses while comrades cheered. The Israel Defense Forces chief of staff eventually issued a communiqué instructing troops to stop filming what he called "revenge videos." That such an instruction had to be issued is the revelation.
A soldier films his contempt after the contempt has been sanctioned. He brings a hammer to the face of Christ in a Lebanese Christian village after spending long enough in a world where the sacred things of subjugated people are available for whatever use he finds amusing. The camera reveals how comfortable the contempt has already become.
Here is Islamophobia in one of its oldest disguises: Muslim injury must first pass through a Christian icon before Christian power agrees to see a wound.
That comfort has been built over decades, through laws and habits that operate below the threshold of outrage. Palestinian life under Israeli rule is managed through permits withheld without explanation, military courts where the accused often faces a sealed file in place of evidence, and detention orders renewed in six-month increments until time joins the punishment. At Sde Teiman, a desert detention facility established after October 7, five soldiers were charged in February 2025 with beating a Palestinian prisoner, breaking his ribs, puncturing a lung, and causing a perforated rectum. When the soldiers were arrested, far-right members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition stormed military facilities in protest. The defense minister called the prosecution a blood libel. In March 2026, Israel's top military lawyer dropped all charges. Netanyahu declared that Israel must spare its "heroic fighters."
The United Nations special rapporteur found in March 2026 that torture had become a structural feature of the ongoing genocide, extending from prisons into bombardment, starvation, forced displacement, and the terror of soldiers and settlers. B'Tselem has described Israel's prison system as a network of torture camps for Palestinians.
The same contempt moves through sacred space. Gaza's only Catholic church was struck by Israeli fire in July 2025, killing three people. In February 2026, during Ramadan, Israeli settlers vandalized and set fire to a mosque near Nablus, spray-painting insults against the Prophet Muhammad. The Palestinian Ministry of Religious Affairs said settlers had attacked 45 mosques in the West Bank in the previous year. Israeli authorities condemned the incident and promised a search—which is how impunity often speaks when it wishes to sound like law.
The deeper scandal lies in the moral conditioning of recognition. A violated Muslim sanctity can be treated as a security matter, a disputed incident, another complication in a place supposedly fated to brutality. Then a soldier raises a hammer against Christ, and men who had tolerated the pulverizing of Gaza discover that their theology has been disturbed. Here is Islamophobia in one of its oldest disguises: Muslim injury must first pass through a Christian icon before Christian power agrees to see a wound.
Tucker Carlson weeps for the statue in a world his own political allies helped construct. Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, told a television audience in February 2026 that it would be "fine" if Israel took over the entire Middle East. He had already stated that there is "really no such thing as a Palestinian." He is a Christian who calls on the Bible. The president he serves stood beside Netanyahu in February 2025 and announced that the United States would "take over" Gaza and that its 2 million inhabitants should "go to other countries." The United Nations said this constituted ethnic cleansing.
The United States has been a co-author of this order—replenishing the arsenal, shielding Israel at the Security Council, resisting the jurisdiction of international courts, treating Palestinian death as a cost to be managed after the weapons have done their work. In March 2026, the administration bypassed congressional review to approve a $650 million bomb sale to Israel, invoking emergency authority while Palestinians were still living under ruins made by earlier emergencies.
Christian Zionist theology has blessed this map from the beginning: a map in which Palestinian land, Lebanese land, and Syrian land can be folded into sacred entitlement. That theology sanctifies the conditions, the army carries them out, and supremacist politics rewards the result. The soldier with the hammer grew inside that order. He filmed himself because he believed the record would survive as proof of victory.
What struck the statue was already striking everything else. The violence became visible to a new audience. A conscience that required the face of Christ as its activation point had been choosing all along.
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Three Winners at the Latest DNC Meeting: Israel, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? Because, of course, the sidelining worked.
Apr 16, 2026
In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the US-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.
Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.
Last Friday, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article this way: “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well—as a charade for delay and obfuscation.
The day before the derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning US weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”
Given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time.
That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”
Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”
The falsehood that the task force had met “once a month,” when actually it had scarcely met, was enough reason for me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that (mis)information. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”
The basic problem with the working group is not only that it hasn’t done much of anything in the nearly eight months since DNC Chair Ken Martin announced it with great fanfare. The underlying hoax is that it was set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.
Polling is clear. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and a large majority are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. But only a minority of the Middle East Working Group’s eight members has a record of supporting Palestinian rights, while several are firm supporters of Israel. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or mere platitudes. But stalemate and platitudes appear to be just fine from here to the horizon for DNC leadership.
Such stalling mechanisms and scant real representation are as old as the political hills. In this case, an unfortunate boost has come from James Zogby, who for decades bravely worked inside the Democratic Party and elsewhere to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to US foreign policy.
As the most prominent person in the Middle East Working Group, Zogby has hailed it as an important step forward. Aligning himself with Martin’s approach from the outset, he said that the new chair’s move to set it up was “politically thoughtful.”
Zogby can remember when, in the 1980s, party leaders did not want to hear the “p-word”—Palestinians. He has portrayed the current sparse intra-party discussion related to Israel as major progress. “Don’t count me among those who left New Orleans complaining of defeat,” Zogby wrote in an April 14 piece for The Nation.
After that article appeared, I spoke with Zogby, and he summarized his approach this way: “I have a tendency to feel like sometimes there are little victories, and I latch onto them. Moving to catch up to where Democrats are.”
Compare that approach to this assessment days ago from Mike Merryman-Lotze, the American Friends Service Committee’s director of Just Peace Global Policy: “The failure of the DNC to take even minimal action in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is shameful.”
When my RootsAction colleague India Walton loudly interrupted the DNC’s business as usual during its general session a week ago, she was challenging a political culture of conformity that has ongoing deadly consequences. The context involves a simple and crucial choice—between excessive patience or urgency that’s grounded in life-and-death human realities. Those realities exist very far away from the transactional atmosphere of entrenched political institutions.
All this matters for at least two profound reasons: One is that, on the merits, silent or euphemistic complicity with Israel’s methodical policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide is abhorrent.
And given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time (as polls have shown was the case with Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign for president). “Eight-in-10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents currently have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69 percent last year and 53 percent in 2022,” the Pew Research Center reported last week.
In these exceedingly dystopian times, when realism is more important than ever, it’s a grave mistake to let rose-colored glasses distort vision and substitute undue patience for vital urgency.
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