Sarah Clancy: Flotillas show that ordinary people must be the antidote to toxic world powers
Activists Caoimhe Butterly, Tadhg Hickey, Fra Hughes and Sarah Clancy.
Last Monday night, along with Tom McCune and Donna Schwarz , I arrived in Dublin airport to an undeserved but heartwarming hero’s welcome.
At 4.30am that day we had been woken by blinding lights and the sound of a riot shield being slammed against our prison cell door by a group of gun-toting male prison guards who yelled at us that it was time to get up. For five days and nights we had been in Ktzi'ot high-security prison in the Negev desert in the Palestinian lands occupied by Israel and during that day we were deported from there through Eliat Airport to Athens and then finally home to Dublin.
We were the first of the 23 Irish participants in the Global Sumud Flotilla (Sumud is an Arabic word for ‘steadfastness’) to return from our month-long attempt to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza which has denied its people access to their basic human needs since 2007.
The flotilla was a non-violent initiative by ordinary people from more than 47 different countries to deliver aid by sea to Gaza in more than 50 boats of all sizes. Like earlier aid flotillas which had attempted to reach Gaza since the siege was enforced, ours had three key aims:
- To break the siege on Gaza and demonstrate to governments around the world that if they will not act against Israel’s war crimes, the people will.
- To deliver much-needed aid and medical supplies directly to people in Gaza in the hope that it could be even a start for Palestinians to import whatever they need, themselves, through their own land and sea borders.
- To show the people in Gaza that despite the inactions and the complicit actions of governments around the world including our own, the US and EU, that ordinary people like us stand with Palestinians.
Arriving in the airport on Monday night I was experiencing a chaotic range of feelings — from pride to anger to sadness to shame and embarrassment to euphoria and relief and then back to the start again. The reasons for the feelings were quite clear; we were returning safe after a huge international and national effort to free us. We were returning to a hero’s welcome when we had only succeeded in one of the three aims of our movement and had failed in the others. We had not achieved any material change in the lives of the people in Gaza, and it will remain to be seen whether we moved the dial at all on the impunity with which Israel is allowed to act by all our governments.
After being intercepted in international waters in a high drama and completely illegal action by the Israeli ‘Defence’ Forces, we were abducted and brought on a 14 hour journey to Israel. Following that we had spent 5 days and nights in prison, experiencing only temporarily just some of the deprivations, terrorising and abuses that Palestinians themselves have documented and denounced over decades, revealed in B’Tselem’s document ‘Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps’. And yet the world media’s gaze was on us, activists who had a choice about our participation.
These were boats full of people of different faiths, nationalities, politics, genders, opinions and outlooks spread out across the Mediterranean all heading with hope towards Gaza, with Palestinians and their decades-long struggle for human dignity as the north star for a different view of how we could live in this world.
It’s important to be clear that the major work and fundraising elements of this flotilla came from global south countries and organisations, as did most of the participants. And although the names and faces of those of us who sailed are out in public view, in many ways we did way less work than the ground teams. Even here in Ireland people who you’ll never hear about have been flat out working since two months before the first boat sailed and will continue doing so until the last of the detainees from the flotilla are free. They are doing this without pay or recognition, and I am grateful to everyone who worked to send us and who campaigned to ensure we were returned home safely.
On the boat I was on, The Spectre, the majority of our group were Muslims from Turkey, Kuwait, Syria, Germany, Morocco, and Palestine, and their practice of their faith and prayers became part of the rhythm of each day. Their presence was ample proof that people from other places and other cultures are, just like many of us in Ireland, completely outraged at their own government’s failure to act to prevent genocide.
In any small space filled with people you will have arguments, irritations, dealing with your own and other’s egos in tiny spaces and it was no different on the boats. The break downs and bureaucratic delays meant some days were much less inspirational in tone.
There were stressful and dangerous drone attacks on us in Tunis and Crete, in which two boats were set on fire and noxious chemicals were dropped on eleven other boats in an attempt to intimidate us. There were the constant threats against us from Israel, that we’d be bombed, tried as terrorists, that our movement’s known public figures would receive lengthy sentences, that we were working for Hamas, funded by Hamas, were terrorists, and conversely were attention seekers on selfie yachts, the list goes on.
In time this flotilla will be nothing more than a footnote, hopefully on the history of the path to Palestinian freedom and self-determination.
For me the most important moment came when I spoke to a man in Gaza who made contact by phone with me and Senator Chris Andrews when we were three days’ sail from Gaza. I won’t name him, in case doing so creates danger for him.
He wanted to know what he could do to prepare a welcome for us (all 450 of us on board the 50 boats) in Gaza. He got straight into how many places we needed to stay and which families had space or buildings and began apologising that they might not have enough food for the type of welcome they would like to offer us.
We had to stop him, with, for me anyway, the most enormous lump in my throat and tell him what we were beginning to realise, that Israel was determined to attack or intercept our boats and that it was likely that we might not arrive. We both (on speaker phone) apologised to him.
I was filled with sadness and a sense of powerlessness, but he stopped us and said “this is not news to Palestinians, we know this, we hope but we know how they are” and while we tried to apologise he stopped us.
“No, you don’t understand, you have already done it, you have already arrived,” he said. “We tell our children each night that the world hasn’t forgotten them, they are watching your boats coming and we are telling them stories of this, that while this genocide happened people from the world were sailing, because they love Palestinian people”.
Maybe he said that only to reassure us, but for me, if one child can grow up knowing that this was actually the case, it would be worth all the efforts of 1,000 flotillas. Otherwise, what story will they learn of these times?
There are currently more than 145 people including five Irish people from a separate initiative called 1000 Madleens and The Conscience, a larger ship whose activists include medics and journalists again being illegally detained in Israel. We can only hope that this intensity of opposition can be maintained in the face of the grotesque spectacle of world leaders celebrating themselves for considering halting the genocide they are committing.
Ordinary people, ordinary flawed, self-doubting people who battle with their own uncertainty and act in whatever way they can, might have to be the antidote for the violent hubris of toxic performative power that we are facing in the so-called western world. As Rafeef Ziadah the Palestinian poet and scholar said: "We teach life, sir, We, Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life’. We owe them so much.
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