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GAZA FLOTILLA: THE MADLEEN SHOWS US THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE  
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Soumaya Ghannoushi
June 9, 2025
Middle East Eye
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_ What if thousands set sail, from every Mediterranean port? What if
fishers, sailors, students and parents rose to say: not in our name? _


People take part in a protest in solidarity with the crew of the Gaza
flotilla’s Madleen on 9 June 2025 in central London, Benjamin
Cremel/AFP

 

In the dead of night, Israeli
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the Madleen. Drones loomed above. A strange white substance was
sprayed across the deck. Then, in international waters, armed forces
stormed the boat. 

One by one, the passengers - 12 unarmed civilians
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from Brazil to Sweden - were captured and led away.

There were no weapons aboard - only food, medicine and conscience.

The Madleen’s mission was simple yet profound: to deliver aid and
solidarity to Gaza’s starving population. Amid Israel’s siege of
Gaza, power speaks, morality is silenced, and even the open sea is not
safe.

The Madleen was not merely a boat. It was a message carved into
waves. 

ts name honoured Madleen Kulab
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Gaza’s first and only female fisher. At 13, she took her father’s
place
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and forged alone into a world of blockade and threat. She later became
a small business owner - employing others, offering boat tours under a
purple canopy, building a future in a place where hope was scarce.

“I am brave and have good will,” she once said
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Her courage sailed under her name.

'It falls on us'

The Madleen followed a history already soaked in violence. In 2010,
Israeli forces boarded the Mavi Marmara
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killing nine. Other flotillas
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have been blocked, detained, humiliated. Yet still, they sailed.

Those on board the Madleen declared, by their very presence, that
Palestine [[link removed]] is no
longer the cause of a region; it has become the conscience of the
world.

Among the passengers was Greta Thunberg
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once the darling of western progressives, now vilified for refusing to
stay silent. From the deck of the Madleen, she declared: “When our
complicit governments fail to step up, it falls on us … to do so.”

Portrayed as a threat to the establishment, she has been smeared
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by mainstream media as part of a “woke elite” for standing with
Gaza. Even US [[link removed]] Senator
Lindsey Graham
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joined the ugly chorus, sneering: “Hope Greta and her friends can
swim!” - gleefully contemplating the drowning of a young woman and
her civilian companions in open waters.

Greta’s response was calm, unflinching: “We can swim very well.”
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Nothing illustrates Israel’s moral unravelling more than its
reaction to this small civilian boat. Not just the threats, but the
tone: rabid, delusional, utterly divorced from human reality.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz
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labelled Thunberg an “antisemitic Hamas propagandist” and ordered
the army to use “any means necessary” to stop the Madleen - a
threat of military force against civilians, against a boat named after
a fisherwoman.

In one grotesque video, Israeli children warned
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coming to get you!”

Instead of grieving the dead or praying for peace, Israelis were
celebrating the pursuit of an unarmed girl with a conscience.

Even Uri Geller [[link removed]] - the
spoon-bending illusionist - joined the frenzy, claiming he had sent
“psychic” protection to Israeli forces and warning Greta not to
underestimate the power of his mind.

At any other time, it would be absurd. Today, it is pathological.

This is not the voice of a confident democracy. This is a settler
colony at the edge of its own delusion: armed, enraged and spiralling.

Arab silence

But amid the noise came a voice of moral clarity.

Gabor Mate
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a Jewish Holocaust survivor and world-renowned trauma expert, recorded
a message to the flotilla from Poland, where he had just visited the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial. With quiet conviction, he said:
“Today you represent those fighters. Today you represent that small
group that’s willing to stand up against one of the most murderous
militaries in the world, supported by all the world’s great powers.

“You are carrying all of humanity with you … all human beings
whose hearts are open, who believe in justice, who believe in freedom,
and who support and are moved by and full of admiration for what
you’re doing,” Mate added.

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Seizure of Madleen is the latest in more than a decade of Israeli
attacks on aid flotillas
The boat set sail not from Tangier, Latakia or Alexandria, but from
Italy. A damning silence echoes from the Arab shores of the
Mediterranean. 

Egypt [[link removed]] watches from
across the water. Holidaymakers cheer the boat’s passing with videos
and Eid greetings, but none board. Gaza, it seems, is nearer to a
young Swede than to its own neighbours. Egypt has sealed the Rafah
crossing, guarding it with soldiers as Palestinians starve metres
away.

Palestine is no longer the concern of governments, especially not
those ruled by despots. It is the cause of the free, of those with
conscience - of those who refuse to bow to silence, dictatorship or
despair.

The Madleen is not a miracle, but a model. It is a whisper of what
could be done if humanity dared to act.

What if this wasn’t the only boat? What if thousands set sail, from
every Mediterranean port? What if fishers, sailors, students and
parents rose to say: not in our name, not on our watch? What if the
sea became a corridor of conscience?

Global inaction 

Remember Dunkirk
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civilian boats crossed the Channel to rescue trapped Allied soldiers.
No orders, no permission. Just courage. And history remembers.

What if Gaza had its own Dunkirk? What if people everywhere refused to
stand by while a people is starved, slaughtered and erased?

And remember this too: Sunday marked 58 years since Israel attacked
the USS Liberty
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intelligence ship in international waters. Israeli fighter jets and
torpedo boats killed 34 crew members and wounded 171. Though Israel
said it was a mistake, some still believe it was deliberate
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Today, the same sea that ran red with American blood now receives the
Madleen - a boat of unarmed civilians carrying food. And again,
Israel, ever-backed by the US, threatens force.

Israel wages this war emboldened by global inaction. It bulldozes
international law, burns refugees in tents, starves children, bombs
hospitals, flattens schools, executes medics, shoots children fetching
bread. And it shrugs, confident nothing will happen.

It has US bombs, a US veto, a complicit Europe, silent Arab regimes,
and a hollowed-out Palestinian elite.

But we, the people, are not powerless. We are not condemned to be
spectators. We are not fated to live in a world where the strong
devour the weak while the rest scroll by.

Moral direction

What is at stake is not only the survival of a people. It is the moral
direction of civilisation.

Do we want a world where law is meaningless, where genocide is
rebranded as self-defence, where starvation is a military strategy and
truth a liability?

The Madleen is a mirror. It shows us the world as it is - and the
world as it could be. Liberation is not a gift from the powerful. It
is a project of the powerless.

As French politician Rima Hassan
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aboard the Madleen, wrote: “When they arrest us, I will look at them
as Larbi Ben M’Hidi looked at the colonisers of his land - calm,
assured of liberation … We think we are liberating Palestine. But it
is Palestine that liberates us.”

Hassan continued: “I accuse western colonial complicity. I accuse
Arab cowardice. I accuse the corruption of the Palestinian elite. And
I stand with the resisters, the rebels, the dreamers, the
undisciplined, those who refuse the disorder of this world.” 

She went on to quote Ben M’Hidi, who once said: “Throw the
revolution into the street - the people will pick it up.”

Today, it has been thrown into the sea. 

Will we follow?

_The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye._

* The Madleen; Aid Flotillas; Aid to Palestine; Genocide; Israel;
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