The hostages are freed.
No, not those hostages, unfortunately. Rather, the intrepid seafarers of the “Freedom Flotilla,” the smile-for-the-cameras attempt to deliver some token aid to Gaza. The last of the captured gangplank gang have now been unceremoniously deported.
Unsurprisingly, in a world where sports figures and celebrities are elevated to celestial heights, even though there were ten activists on board the vessel, the media’s attention was largely focused on eternal adolescent Greta Thunberg, the climate activist-turned amateur historian and would-be moral conscience of the world, who was part of the attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
In a video recorded before the boat set sail, the child star (now, at least chronologically, full-grown at 22) declared that anyone watching it should know that she and her credulous comrades had been “kidnapped by Israeli occupational [sic] forces.”
As kidnappings go, it was somewhat unusual. Firstly, being taken into custody was optional; before guiding the vessel to the port of Ashdod, the Israeli navy intercepters of the boat repeatedly offered to offload its cargo and pass the supplies into the Gaza Strip through operational land crossings. But the offers were repeatedly refused.
And when the “kidnapees” were handed over by the navy to terra firma authorities, the newly landed guys and gals were welcomed and offered bottles of water and kosher sandwiches. In a photograph, Ms. Thunberg is all smiles as she eagerly accepts her meal.
The sandwich was reportedly wrapped in non-biodegradable plastic but, hey, the young lady’s job was done; she had had her picture prominently displayed by newspapers and other media worldwide.
The best reaction to the allegation of “kidnapping” may have come from President Trump. He commented that Israel had “enough problems without kidnapping Greta Thunberg.”
The overactivist readily accepted her deportation and seemed entirely at ease on an environment-insulting jet plane. Some of her fellow seafarers refused to sign documents accepting their own deportation, and so had to wait in detention until a judge was able to order them onto planes to their countries of origin: Turkey, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Brazil. They’ll surely have plenty of opportunities to sign autographs back home to their friends and admirers.
When they arrived in Israel, the Freedom Flotillees were shown a 43-minute documentary about the October 7, 2023, atrocities committed by Hamas and Gazan residents. When the members of the special audience realized that they were not being shown a feel-good movie, they refused to watch.
The Israeli “human rights” organization Adalah asserted, without offering any details or evidence, that the deportees-to-be had been “subjected to mistreatment, punitive measures, and aggressive treatment.”
It’s true, they hadn’t been offered a choice of sandwiches (only turkey, according to sources). And movie night had indeed been a disappointment.
Israel seems to have learned a lesson from what happened back in 2010, when an earlier flotilla, the “Mavi Marmara,” attempted a similar trip to Gaza, which, controlled as it was by Hamas, was subject to an Israeli blockade.
According to reports at the time, the Israeli military opened fire, though not at people, before boarding the ship.
And when the commandos were on board the vessel, they were met by attacking passengers who clashed with them, resulting in ten activist deaths and a number of others injured, including several Israeli soldiers.
Although an Israeli commission investigating the affair found both the blockade and the force used by the Israeli soldiers to be entirely legal, and a Polish authority on admiralty law, Professor Andrzej Makowski, upheld those findings in 2013, the onslaught and its optics were less than optimal for Israel’s image.
It’s not likely that the less confrontational approach taken with the most recent waterborne virtue-signaling will yield much good will for Israel these days. That, sadly, seems a hopeless cause.
But it was nevertheless the right approach to take, and left the flotilla-ers open to widespread and well-deserved ridicule on social media and among people who have some sense of right and wrong and the discernment necessary to know well-informed idealism from performative vainglory.
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