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Despite at least 62,000 deaths and countless more people killed, injured, bereaved and displaced over the last two years in Gaza, it fell to one small boat to attempt to break Israel’s blockade.
The international community has allowed a genocide to unfold in plain sight. And the poison of impunity is spreading. A month ago the aid ship Conscience was bombed off the Maltese shoreline, over a thousand miles from Gaza.
Subsequent Maltese obstruction of the Conscience’s requests for aid mirrored Europe’s routine frustration of attempts to rescue people in distress at sea. Tens of thousands – Palestinians fleeing occupation among them – have drowned in the central Mediterranean on the world’s deadliest migration route.
En route to Gaza, the Madleen crew rescued four Sudanese refugees, fleeing genocidal forces backed by the West’s Gulf allies. They were unable to prevent the others on board being returned to Libya by an EU-backed militia, where people seeking safety routinely face slavery, incarceration, and death.
Meanwhile the same Israeli Heron drones that surveil and target Palestinians in Gaza also police the Mediterranean for EU’s border agency Frontex. Across the Mediterranean, European states funnel money, weapons and political support to authoritarians and militias whilst claiming to uphold human rights.
The outcome is a sea where humanitarian ships and refugees are blocked whilst deadly arms and ecosystem-destroying fossil fuels move freely. And the sea itself is suffering. Amid successive years of record heat, the Mediterranean that is now warming a fifth faster than the world’s other oceans and much of the plant and animal life on its shores is dying out.
The climate campaigners on the Madleen sailed to a Gaza where ecocide has compounded genocide, through a Mediterranean where more storms, fires and floods than ever before drive people from their homes and destroy their livelihoods. Those who protest the confluence of state violence and environmental destruction are targeted.
From Italy to Egypt, harsh civil liberties restrictions have recently targeted climate activists, human rights activists and migrants first. Governments that claim to be protecting their people from the crises we are living through are in fact exacerbating them. This is as true in Europe as it is in Trump’s America, despite the growing schism between them.
Israel’s new so-called “aid” distribution system in Gaza: a labyrinth of surveillance drones and biometric gates operated amid a lethal blockade by troops and private security companies, is a terrifying model of modern repression. And the technologies it uses are both imported and exported globally. Against this system, we must build a different future while we can.
In place of war and genocide, we demand a free Palestine.
In place of racialised and deadly borders and blockades we demand free movement.
In place of destructive and polluting rearmament programmes and aid budgets being torn apart, we demand wages and housing and humanity.
In place of tech billionaires’ dreams of mass surveillance and control, we demand that humanity’s technological capabilities are harnessed towards increasing, not restricting our freedom.
In place of climate and environmental destruction and extraction we demand a just transition, the restoration of our natural world, and cheap clean energy for all.
In place of death and despair, we demand life and hope.
