David Adler
We always knew, looking back across the past fifteen years of the Freedom Flotilla initiative, that there coexisted in constant tension these twin but incompatible narratives about flotillas. On one side, you have the claim that these were vessels harboring terror, that they were linked to networks of organized terror, that they were hiding beneath this veneer of humanitarianism with some hidden agenda that was a threat to the national security of Israel.
On the other side, you had a more nascent narrative emerging just this year, with the deployment of the Madleen and later the Handala boats: that these boats were nothing but an indulgence for celebrity activists. We always knew that this was going to be a choice that the state of Israel would have to make between one of these two narratives.
The claim that something is ‘Hamas’ is so exhausted that people are now starting to push past that propaganda to interrogate these questions for themselves.
Now you have the unprecedented scale of this operation, bringing together so many delegations from different parts of the world, many of them deemed — precisely because of their long-standing solidarity with Palestine — hostile to Israel, like the participants from Algeria, Tunisia, and Turkey. It became clear that this would cleave away from the “these are just little sailboats enjoying their sunshine” narrative, and the narrative would become that these are somehow a menace to the state of Israel.
The deployment of that narrative, trying to smear the really courageous and ordinary people on this flotilla with this absurd claim of a “violent course of action,” has induced in the participants a double, polarized reaction. On one side, it’s so absurd and so tired as a narrative, that it’s clear it’s not landing among the target populations that Israel wants to reach in the…
Auteur: David Adler
