Paul Hosford: Greta’s Gaza aid trip drew scorn — but the real story is the online backlash

The outrage over Greta Thunberg’s Gaza aid mission says more about us than it does about her or the boat

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg talks to journalists as she arrives at Stockholm Arlanda Airport outside Stockholm, Sweden, following her deportation from Israel. Picture: Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency via AP

Earlier this week, I had a feeling of dread that I would wake up to news of the death of Greta Thunberg, a feeling others have echoed.

When I went to sleep on Sunday night, the British-flagged yacht Madleen was sailing headlong towards Gaza carrying just a drop of the flood of aid required to ease the humanitarian disaster in the enclave.

Twelve people on a yacht carrying baby formula, food, and medical supplies, including the 22-year-old climate activist, and there was legitimate concern that the Israeli administration would show no restraint — as it did in May 2010 when nine floatilla passengers were killed during a raid on a group of ships aiming to bring aid to Gaza.

In the end, Israeli forces boarded the yacht and made a show of how humane the whole thing was, perhaps aware that killing innocents would be treated differently if their number included a French MEP. 

The captured dozen was given sandwiches and forced to turn over their phones as the yacht was escorted to Ashdod port.

From there, the Israeli government began its mocking of the group. It published a picture of Ms Thunberg on social media and, before initiating deportation proceedings, was slamming the operation as a PR stunt — calling it a “selfie ship” full of “celebrities”.

“This wasn’t humanitarian aid. It’s Instagram activism,” said Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer, who extolled the virtues of his government, saying that it had delivered over 1,200 truckloads of aid in the last two weeks.

This is despite the latest assessment from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) which says that people in Gaza are starving and that this demands the urgent opening of all crossings and on impeded access for humanitarian organisations to deliver aid at scale, through multiple routes.

There is no question that aid to Gaza is being choked off by the Israeli government and that what is getting through is just a drop in an ocean growing every single day.

Ongoing incidents

Meanwhile, hospitals in Gaza City said 25 people were killed overnight on Wednesday into Thursday, near a convoy transporting flour and at a food distribution site run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has been criticised as the wrong vehicle to deliver aid.

Staff of the GHF died in an ambush on Thursday after a bus transporting them was raked with gunfire, an attack the Israeli government has blamed on Hamas.

While the Israeli government mocked those who put their hands up and volunteered for the aid mission, it was joined online by an unlikely ally — the “reasonable” adult. 

In any news story or Instagram post, or whatever tweets are called these days, you will have found a cohort of people delighting in the failure of the Madleen to deliver baby formula to starving children.

These people will call themselves reasonable, they will call themselves centrists, they will call themselves good, and at the same time they will delight in the failure of a small amount of medical supplies reaching what has been described as hell on earth because they don’t like the 22-year-old autistic woman from the internet.

They are Christians with the best intentions, calling for a stranger’s head. Ms Thunberg has long attracted this kind of commentary, particularly angering men with her activism and general refusal to just be quiet. They will have the same reaction to Paul Murphy’s arrest as part of a march to the Rafah Crossing.

The rationale appears to be that they genuinely believe that this was a personal mission from the Swedish woman — little more than an image-raising exercise.

To what end someone who has spent most of her life engaged in the kind of full-throated activism that comes at more personal cost than benefit would do this is never really explained, but these commenters are sure that she is some kind of “silly little girl” or some variation thereof.

It couldn’t be that Ms Thunberg was simply doing what she believed was right and using her immense global platform to highlight the continued suffering of Gazans; there must be an ulterior motive, one for personal benefit.

Protesters took part in a demonstration outside the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in Whitehall, London, calling for the UK government to protect the crew of Madleen, which carried Ms Thunberg and other activists. Picture: James Manning/PA

Those comments betray much about those who make them, those who throw “virtue signalling” or “do-gooder” as slurs.

They cannot imagine virtue, or good or empathy, that is genuinely selfless because they lack the capacity for all three. 

They cannot, at the same time, understand why the residents of Los Angeles would take to the streets as their friends and neighbours are extrajudicially arrested. 

They cheer online as rubber bullets, which killed 14 people during The Troubles, are fired indiscriminately into crowds or with terrifying accuracy at members of the media, or women walking home, because they do not see those people as on their side.

These are the same people who will say they are afraid of Dublin’s O’Connell St in the daytime, mocking those who stand up to oppression or genocide.

PR exercise

Of course the Madleen was a PR exercise. Of course it was a publicity stunt. Nobody on board expected the aid they were carrying to fix everything.

In fact, I’m sure the whole exercise finished the way most on board would have imagined. They are not ignorant to the reality of what Israel will and will not allow reach Gaza. 

However, great injustices require action, and if that means making social media users look at a group of people on a quixotic boat journey, then so be it. This is not about your personal feelings towards the messenger and, if your first reaction was to look at method rather than message, then that is on you.

In Gaza over the last few days, the internet has collapsed, the OCHA said on Thursday, due to damage to the last fibre cable route serving central and southern Gaza — likely caused during heavy military activity.

They warn that this is not a routine outage, but a total failure of Gaza’s digital infrastructure. Lifelines to emergency services, humanitarian coordination, and critical information for civilians have all been cut. There is a full Internet blackout, and mobile networks are barely functioning.

So if any Gazans had had worries about the online discourse surrounding attempts to bring them aid — in between trying to stay alive, of course — they would not have had the capacity by week’s end to check in on the comments section.

The reaction to a group of people — including a very high-profile young woman, yes — trying to do the right thing speaks volumes for where social media has driven us: To a place where a sentence can contain the words “I’m not happy that aid was blocked from reaching Gaza” and be followed by a “but”.

Perhaps not every thought needs to be shared, not every issue opined upon. Maybe, just maybe, it is time to read and listen and understand more than we post, and talk and think.

It is a time to act and support the bravery of those who act in ways we cannot ourselves. Anything else will lead to what folk singer Tyler Childers calls “the start of a long, violent history, of tucking our tails as we try to abide”.