28.05.2026

Brazen cruelty and shared principles

Global protests over the treatment of Gaza aid flotilla activists will bring some comfort to the Palestinian masses, but the stench of hypocrisy from the bourgeois establishment is hard to stomach, says Carla Roberts

The brutal capture, severe mistreatment and widely broadcast humiliation of hundreds of activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla have caused understandable global protests. Fifty boats were intercepted, which carried 428 activists from all over the world, who wanted to “break Israel’s illegal siege and deliver life-saving humanitarian aid to Gaza”. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has caused severe shortages of food, drinking water, medicine and fuel. More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began in October 2023, according to Gaza health authorities, while more than 800 have died since Israel agreed to a “ceasefire” in October 2025. Many more are predicted to starve to death or die from a lack of basic healthcare.

The flotilla organisers set out to “establish a sustained civilian presence” and start “rebuilding healthcare systems and basic infrastructure destroyed over the past two years”, with “doctors, nurses, eco-builders, war crimes investigators, unarmed civilian protectors and others” on board.

Of course, this was never going to happen - it would have been way too much bad PR for the Israeli government. And indeed the boats were intercepted 600 miles off the coast of Gaza. Footage proudly released by Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, showed him mocking and taunting the kneeling and handcuffed detainees, lined up in rows, with some complaining that they also were sexually assaulted (which we can easily believe). “Welcome to Israel. We’re the landlords,” Ben-Gvir told them, while walking between the detainees like a deranged prison commandant.

Fake outrage

Cue for bourgeois governments across the world to express their “outrage”. Among the more surprising dignitaries protesting was Italian’s far right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who denounced the treatment as “unacceptable” and “a violation of human dignity”, calling on Israel to apologise. Italian authorities have opened investigations into potential violations of international law, including kidnapping and torture. This is no doubt due to public pressure and widespread sympathy in Italy for the Palestinian cause, rather than any real concern on the part of Meloni for the 29 Italians on board - among them Alessandro Mantovani, a journalist writing for the independent leftwing daily newspaper, Il Fatto Quotidiano and, more surprisingly, Dario Carotenuto, a member of parliament for the right populist Five Star Movement.

Israeli ambassadors in various countries were summoned to explain and apologise. France has banned Ben-Gvir from entering its territory, with Poland considering a similar measure. Canada’s government has called the treatment “appalling”. Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, termed the incident “wholly incompatible with our shared democratic principles”.

That formulation of “shared democratic principles” really sums it up: the governments and politicians now feigning outrage are generally entirely on board with Israel’s deeply racist policies towards the Palestinians and have supported it for many decades. They might make mealy-mouthed criticism of this or that particularly outrageous action, but are very much singing from the same hymn sheet, when it comes to labelling Palestine activists as ‘anti-Semites’, for example. A staggering 25 out of 27 EU member states have officially adopted or endorsed the so-called “working definition of anti-Semitism” published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance; globally, it is 47 countries.¹ The IHRA document has become the most successful tool in the weaponry of the pro-Israel lobby - as we have pointed out many times, it does not actually define anti-Semitism (which is discrimination or hatred of Jewish people because they are Jewish people). Instead, it lists 11 examples, where it effectively labels criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, thereby entirely changing the definition of the word.

This is very much part and parcel of a wider, international strategy of intimidation and criminalisation of all those critical of Israel (the key ally of US-led imperialism in the Middle East). In Britain, there is also the banning of Palestine Action, the conviction of Ben Jamal and Chris Nineham for “breaching police conditions” at a Palestine protest² and the attack on jury trials. The latter is being sold to the public as an important tool to deal with the ‘backlog’ in the courts. Part of the reason there even exists such a growing backlog is, of course, the fact that there have been hundreds and hundreds of pointless charges against, amongst others, pensioners, for holding up placards declaring, “I support Palestine Action”. And juries also have that pesky habit of finding protestors ‘not guilty’ - not always, but often enough to be an embarrassing thorn in the government’s side.

Israeli response

Publicly parading western nurses and doctors in humiliating poses has been a (small) step too far, and a number of Israeli officials, including foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, have publicly distanced themselves from Ben-Gvir, stating that he had “caused harm to Israel’s image” and “is not the face of Israel”. Even prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu felt the need to assure the world that Ben-Gvir’s actions were “not in line with Israel’s values and norms”.³

Oh, but they are. This is how the Israeli government has been treating the Palestinians for decades - and then some. In December 2024, pictures emerged of a group of blindfolded male Palestinian prisoners, who were subjected to similar treatment, but in addition had to strip to their underwear, kneeling or sitting hunched over, before they were thrown in “the back of Israeli military trucks like cattle”.⁴ And, of course, they did not have western governments protesting on their behalf - nor were they deported with great fanfare. Most of them will still be languishing in Israeli prisons, without access to lawyers, and many will almost certainly have been tortured. Nearly half of the current political prisoners in Israel (officially about 11,000) are being held without charge or trial under administrative detention, or because they are classed as “unlawful combatants”. The Israeli government has just set up a special military tribunal that will try Palestinians accused of participating in the ‘Gaza prison break’ on October 7 2023 - with the power to impose the death penalty.⁵

Ben-Gvir has defended his conduct as “patriotic”, arguing that the flotilla was a provocation “in service of Hamas” - echoing entirely a press statement by the US department of state, published while the flotilla was on its way to Gaza on April 30. In fact, it is difficult not to see the revolting US statement as an invitation to the Israeli government to do exactly what Ben-Gvir did:

The United States condemns the Global Sumud Flotilla, a pro-Hamas initiative and a baseless, counterproductive effort to undermine President Trump’s peace plan. This pro-Hamas flotilla is organised by an OFAC⁶-sanctioned entity, the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad, which was named as a specially designated global terrorist organisation in January for operating at Hamas’s behest.

Consistent with international law, ports constitute internal waters over which coastal states exercise full territorial sovereignty. The United States expects all our allies, particularly those who have committed to supporting President Trump’s successful 20-Point Plan, to take decisive action against this meaningless political stunt by denying port access, docking, departure and refuelling to vessels participating in the flotilla. Our allies should also take additional actions, consistent with applicable law, including denying berthing to vessels reasonably suspected of enabling terrorism or presenting security concerns.

… The United States will explore using available tools to impose consequences on those who provide support to this pro-Hamas flotilla and supports our allies’ legal actions against it.⁷

US support

Ben-Gvir’s overreach was born out of the understanding that the US government will remain firmly behind the Israeli government, even if the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has made mild criticism on the social media platform, X. Trump remains solid.

Israel is and remains the only reliable ally of US-led imperialism in the Middle East. Especially while negotiations with Iran are ongoing, Netanyahu clearly feels he has been given a free hand. It is no surprise he has felt emboldened enough to order the heaviest air strikes on Lebanon since the US-brokered “ceasefire” was agreed in April. Dozens have been killed in the attack on May 27, including many children.

US financial support for Israel is at a record high. While the “current baseline” of military aid is around $3.8 billion a year, the US has provided at least $21.7 billion in official military aid to Israel since October 7 2023. Both the Biden and Trump administrations have additionally agreed arms and services deals worth tens of billions of dollars, which will be paid for in years to come.⁸

The US government has also imposed sanctions on four activists involved in the flotilla, alleging that they were trying to reach the Palestinian territory “in support of Hamas”. Two are representatives from the advocacy group, Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA), an organisation established in 2017 by Palestinians living outside Gaza and the occupied West Bank, with offices in Beirut and Istanbul. The other two are members of the Palestinian prisoners’ solidarity network, Samidoun.

When the Trump administration took office, it immediately lifted a set of US sanctions imposed on violent Israeli settlers. Shortly after, the administration imposed sanctions on several Palestinian civil society organisations and rights groups for supporting an International Criminal Court investigation into Israeli officials, then the judges themselves were put under sanction - and, after that, most famously, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on occupied Palestinian territory, after she criticised the Israeli government and Washington.

Officially, such sanctions are only supposed to target any assets located in the US (which may be frozen) and that “Americans are broadly prohibited from doing business with them”.⁹ But, seeing as the US treasury has warned that any foreign banks or organisations dealing with sanctioned individuals could themselves face penalties, those individuals will find it extremely hard to access their bank accounts, get a loan or use any of the most common payment services worldwide.

Some on the left believe that these measures show that the ‘Israeli tail is wagging the American dog’; others believe that it is the other way around and that Israel is merely acting as the US attack dog. In reality, both are true - and thereby neither! The interests of both countries are quite specific, but often overlap. Yes, the Zionist lobby in the US is extremely strong, but the US also props up Israel because it acts as an American ‘attack dog’ in the region. And, as Moshé Machover put it recently, there is “a phenomenon which is well-known to dog breeders: if you train a Rottweiler to be an attack dog, it can sometimes be very difficult to control”.¹⁰