The attack in international waters off Crete, the violent assault and arrest – including the kidnapping and torture of two participants – of flotilla members indicates Israel’s growing spread of military operations. Kevin Ovenden, a veteran of the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2010, gives an overview of events and the way forward

Israel’s attack this week on the Global Sumud Flotilla bringing aid to Gaza and to break the siege marks a major escalation of attacks on the international solidarity movement. 

On Thursday Israeli forces seized and boarded 20 vessels west of the Greek island of Crete that were en route from Barcelona to join others to form a flotilla of 58 ships headed with aid to Gaza. 

This was in international waters 1,000 kilometres from Israel (occupied Palestine) and in a zone in which the Greek state has responsibility for search and rescue. 

It is nothing short of piracy and kidnapping. Israel seized 180 people, damaged equipment rendering vessels unusable and unsafe in front of an approaching storm, and used violence and intimidation to intern activists on an Israeli navy ship. There they were mistreated, beaten and threatened. 

Of the 180, 178 had been transferred to Crete and released by the weekend. But two – Saif Abukeshek and Thiagio Avila – were taken to Israel where on Sunday a domestic court ruled they could be held for a further two days. 

Thiagio is a Brazilian citizen and his embassy has reported that he has been badly beaten and forcibly  interrogated by Israel’s Shin Bet internal security. Similarly with Saif, a Palestinian with Spanish and Swedish nationality. They likely now face further mistreatment and torture. It is urgent to demand their release and wellbeing now. 

Everyone in the movement for Palestine and beyond should be very clear what has happened here. 

Kidnap

Israel – with the full support of the US and the suspected connivance of the Greek government – has seized 180 foreign nationals from international waters, smashed aid and boats, beaten and mistreated them, kidnapped two of their number to subject them to torture 1,000 kilometres away and threatens to do the same to remaining ships that are gathering elsewhere. 

An already genocidal and apartheid state domestically and in the Middle East is now extending its war crimes further and further westwards to encompass an area where someone you know has probably taken a tourist ferry. 

The Brazilian, Spanish, Italian and some other governments have reacted strongly, demanding the freedom of their nationals. Welcome as that is, especially for our two friends held in Israel, this war crime demands much more. As when Israeli pirate forces killed ten aid volunteers aboard the Mavi Marmara aid ship 16 years ago. 

I was part of the multinational mission. The ten who were murdered were all Turkish citizens. Turkey withdrew its ambassador to Israel. That is the least that ought to happen now. 

Complicity

Some governments and authorities – Britain and the EU, for example – have done far worse than Spain and Brazil. 

They have in effect gone along with the US position that these activists deserve what they get and that Israel is right to project its power into European spaces. 

We should not be surprised, of course. They have enabled the actual genocide in Gaza. And while this is a further extension of Israel’s criminality and sense of impunity when it comes to kidnap and deploying its forces abroad, this is not new. 

In 1986 Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu who had definitively revealed Israel’s nuclear weapons programme to a newspaper in Britain was lured to Italy, drugged and abducted by Israel’s Mossad agency, taken to Israel, jailed and kept for years in solitary confinement. 

Operations have been mounted against other people in many countries. The west’s inaction in response – including when Israel forged British passports to carry out an assassination in Dubai – has built Israel’s sense of entitlement and invulnerability. That has fed into its open contempt for international law when it comes to the Palestinians. The latest being a law that imposes the death penalty on Palestinians but not on Israeli Jews. 

That contempt, naturally, extends to those who stand up with and act for the Palestinian people. 

The sense of impunity has to be brought to an end. However minimal, the position of the Spanish government needs to be built upon across Europe and in Britain (as well as elsewhere) to confront Israel in every sphere. 

We have to work towards the complete isolation of genocidal, apartheid Israel. That operates at every level: from consumer boycotts and divestment campaigns to constantly pressing our governments and public authorities. Mass demonstrations and gatherings are a vital part of developing and expanding the movement. There are advances across the continent at the base of society – though the authorities and governments want to deny them. 

The growth in public understanding and sustained activity can be measured by how governments from Australia to Germany to Keir Starmer’s in Britain are trying to repress and ban the solidarity movement. 

We cannot allow that or to take a single step back. It took decades to imprint on public opinion and on official human rights organisations that Israel is an apartheid state. 

It took months from 2023 onwards for Israel to be firmly associated with genocide, including at the world court that judges such things: the International Court of Justice. And also for its leaders to be indicted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. 

Mobilising

The Global Samud Flotilla and its predecessors – by sea and land – have been instruments in mobilising popular opinion globally. Raising how to organise it into a force that can pressure our own states. Doing so will also encourage the mass, social forces in Palestine and the Middle East who can break the Israeli state’s domination and the local tyrannies without which it could not do its dirty work on behalf of US and British imperialism. 

Key to that is taking our movement in all its aspects deeper into the base of society, into workplaces, unions and civil society organisations, neighbourhoods, communities, universities and schools.

This weekend there is an immediate demand and point of pressure: to release the two kidnapped hostages Israel has seized. Follow the Global Sumud Flotilla page for updates and actions.

In two weeks time there is the national demonstration in London for Palestine, commemorating the Nakba and the Palestinian dispossession, and refusing to allow London to be dominated by the fascist Tommy Robinson. 

There will be similar events elsewhere in Europe and then the gathering of the international antiwar conference with a strong pro-Palestine message in London on 20 June. 

In Greece there is set to be a second summer of actions making clear that Israeli cruise ships and cargo vessels resupplying genocide are not welcome. 

We must, as over the last two years, must find ways to make Palestine register directly on politicians. They need to know that they will not only lose votes, but will face political opposition at every level, including the ballot box, if they do not act. 

Starmer in particular needs to receive a powerful message: you will not get away with your effort to cling on to office for a few more months by scapegoating the Palestine movement and exploiting Jewish people as a political, human shield.  You are going to be hit: at the ballot box, in the streets, and in mass, popular opinion taking organised form.