When more than 500 activists from 44 countries defied an occupying force earlier this year, bodies served as shields, privileges as tools, and humanitarian aid as the only cargo.
One early September day I am sitting in a café in Stockholm with a friend and a hot cup of coffee in hand. Thousands of kilometers away, the Global Sumud Flotilla is sailing across the Mediterranean Sea on its way to Gaza. The live broadcasts are rolling in the background while we try to finish writing our universityessay. More than 40 boats, hundreds of volunteers, a global movement are trying to reach a place where people are starving and humanitarian aid is blocked.
This is not the first time an international convoy has tried to break the blockade. Since 2010, several flotillas have been attacked or boarded by Israeli military in international waters. But something felt different this time. The Global Sumud Flotilla 2025 was the largest in its history. On board were more Western activists, politicians and journalists with door-opening passes.
We said to each other:
– Israel doesn't dare block the aid this time. Not in front of the whole world.
But they did..
A few days later I talk to Rana, who was in charge for one of the flotilla's boats. She is Palestinian, Fisland in Syria and yougrew up between flight and exile. Nowadays is she resident in New Zealand.
There is a twelve-hour time difference between us, but through the screen I can feel her voice. nsleeve than anything else that surrounds me that evening. Already in the first sentence make she something crystal clear: the focus must always be on Palestine and its people - Not on the flotilla, not on the activists.
“We are just bridges,” she says. “It is their voices that carry everything.”
And yet the activists are a crucial part of the story. A story about solidarity that dares take over where the state fails.
Rana tells how the flotilla was organized according to a strategy that testifies to a brutal reality: that some bodies are more politically costly to harm than others. Ombord Placerated vIta and Westerners closest to the railing, and arabs and browns activists furthest in.
EU passport fnot forHungarian Shields for those whom the world suspects with a glance.
– We play the game, Rana explains. Until the day coming when we no longer have to.
She tells of the beating that followed when the flotilla was boarded.SearchBiscay and Muslim activists had to wait the longest in the scorching sun. MMuslim women exposedes, according to Rana, for a particular one offendspirit treatment, when they were forced take off their veils in front of others, on repeated occasions.
Dconsular support was at a minimum level and was offered only to those with Western passports. Even then it was about short conversations with lawyers - procedures that were carried out “because they had to, not because they were willing”Representatives from South Africa, a country that has been a clear critic of Israel's warfare, denied access to the detained activists.
Lotta Eliasson was one of the Swedes on the flotilla. She confirms Rana's picture. On Lotta's boat there was both a Belgian lawyer working at the International Criminal Court and a political influencercst.
– Dare to bomb our boat, she exclaims with hint about what an uproar there would have been if these particular activists were injured.
She continues:
– In the media, the fact that Lotta Eliasson is in prison is more important than Mohamed Abdal. And we knew that. That's why the most privileged were sent - ffor the mission to succeed. We are the voice that the majority people recognize.
The media attention, protests around the world, and uproardstatements from several countries The flotilla was stopped. The boats were illegally boarded and the activists were detained. ÄOnce again, Gaza was left without breast milk substitute.
– But, says Rana, we broke a different kind of blockade.
I ask what she means.
– The one in people's hearts. People who suddenly felt something that had previously been too far away to reach them.
When the conversation ends, I stay seated for a long time. The chair doesn't feel as secure., sThe heart is not as innocent. The silence of the night becomes a room where I have to ask myself what I do, and what I fail to do., fbecause I happen to live in a certain country, with the right documents, in the right side of power.
It becomes clear that the courage to act often begins long before the action. It begins in something much more difficult: ato acknowledge privilege och to Understand that privileges must be used.
As Rana says:
– Every destructive system eventually destroys itself. What we do is help in the process.
This is a chronicle. The author is responsible for analysis and opinions in the text.
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