“APPROXIMATELY 175 ACTIVISTS from more than 20 boats… are now making their way peacefully to Israel.”
So announced the Israeli authorities this morning, determined as ever to position itself as a standard functioning democracy interested only in defending the rule of law.
The statement was accompanied by a video of the activists aboard an Israeli navy ship, their fate likely to be no different to that of those arrested on the previous effort last October.
Global Sumud Flotilla / YouTube
Whether Israel’s odious security minister, Itmar Ben-Gvir, will pay this group a visit to mock them remains to be seen.
What we know is that no matter how grim the conditions they might face, they will be as nothing to that of the more than 9,000 Palestinians still being held by Israel, more than 3,000 of whom are detained without charge.
Israel’s interception of the latest flotilla this morning is just another day of what is, for many, its emergence as a pariah state. Benjamin Netanyahu and his Zionist cronies have, since the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2023, presided over sustained genocide and crimes against humanity in Palestine.
They’re consistently accused of operating in breach of international law and have faced minimal sanctions from what can only be described as a weak and fragmented global political landscape.
Concern is growing, too, as Israel seeks to extend its reach across the region, from military action in Lebanon to tensions with Iran, in pursuit of broader hegemony, amid continued support from a chaotic US Administration and a lack of effective international accountability.
Israel, Lebanon and Iran
We are weeks into a war initiated by this extremist Israeli government and a United States that’s more compromised by the Zionist ambition than any other. Given how tied the US has been to Israel since its foundation, that, of itself, is quite something.
Most of the West is compromised; only the extent of our abandonment of concern for human rights and the protection of the most vulnerable is surprising. We are continuing our slow, soulless sleepwalk of solidarity with evil, even as the evidence of the incalculable damage being done to civilisations, no more flawed than our own, is increasingly obvious.
In my book on Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Catastrophe Nakba II, published a year ago, I wrote that Israel would continue its onslaught in Gaza, take more and more of the West Bank and push further north into Lebanon in part by playing the West with what I termed ‘the Iran card’.
It wasn’t a new idea: numerous Zionist figures have laid out just such an ambition for decades. In recent years, Benjamin Netanyahu has, more than once, addressed the UN General Assembly using maps of a Middle East economic area that excluded any reference to Palestine.
Greater Israel for him and his acolytes has always been about taking land that is not theirs – not just Palestine but as much of Lebanon and Syria as possible. Trump likes to claim that the war in Lebanon is over even as Israel warned, earlier this week, the residents of southern Lebanon to leave the region.
I did not anticipate that it would be so easy for it to progress its annexation, but the West has supported Zionism’s colonial ambition since the start, and it is not about to abandon Israel now. As the distinguished historian, Rashid Khalidi, told an audience in Maynooth University last week, ‘Israel’s settler colonialism is rooted in a belief that success can only be realised through the elimination – by the death or the removal – of the indigenous population.’ That is what is afoot in Palestine right now; it’s happening on our watch, and we are doing little or nothing to prevent it.
Distracting from Gaza
In the midst of Netanyahu’s Iran card trick, Palestine has fallen from the news focus. It was strategic; the United States is as much Israel’s proxy as Hezbollah is Iran’s, so when Netanyahu told Trump to jump, it was only a matter of how high. The 47th President of the US may have misread the strategic military capacity of Iran, but, more seriously, in taking it on, he offered unfettered support to Israel’s full colonial ambition.
The greatest casualty is not the global economy; Palestine and its people – already savaged by Israel and abandoned by the rest – will suffer even greater humiliation and hardship the longer Iran holds the West’s focus.
This war never had anything to do with concerns about a nuclear event; Iran doesn’t possess that capability, and as Israel is the most self-consumed nation on earth, it was never going to deploy any of its own considerable arsenal. Ever since, Western attention has been on the economic consequences.
Hour after hour, page after page, tweet after tweet, mainstream media competed to present the latest indicators on the oil price yo-yo and the wider economic implications.
Iran’s awful human rights record received constant attention, while that of Israel, the aggressor, received little or none. All the while, since the first attack on Iran, Israel has shifted Gaza and the West Bank away from the Western institutional mindset. It has done this before, though, perhaps, never with such calculated menace. A seminal independent report, published earlier this month, did not receive the media attention it warranted.
‘The Peace Plan’
Six months ago, Donald Trump announced a 20-point Gaza plan that he described as ‘comprehensive’. It was anything but; it is to peace-building what Truth Social is to news accuracy. Its first clause established its intent and for whom it was drafted: ‘Gaza will be a deradicalised zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours’.
Remarkably, in spite of it being a deliberate move to stymie serious efforts by France and Saudi Arabia to progress a peace effort and that it was manifestly Israel-centric, Trump’s plan was endorsed by the UN Security Council. The UN, consistently ridiculed by Team Trump, chose to support a plan that undermines Palestine’s right to self-determination, the most fundamental of its needs.
The report published in early March by a group of respected NGOs analysed the effectiveness of the plan, six months on; its findings are grim if unsurprising. Save the Children, Oxfam, Refugees International, and both the Danish and Norwegian Refugee Councils commissioned the report. They chose to evaluate it using benchmarks set by the originators of Trump’s plan, concluding that the consequences for Gaza’s civilians have been stark.
The report notes that restrictions on commercial access (important) have ‘improved’, but that humanitarian access (critical) remains ‘severely constrained’.
It goes on to say: ‘most of the population is unable to access affordable, nutritious food and remains without sufficient water, sanitation, shelter or healthcare. At least 1.7 million people remain in displacement [refugee] sites, with many sheltering in deteriorating tents, lacking sanitation and repeatedly subject to flooding.’ In short, well over 80 per cent of Gazans who somehow survived two years of bombardment face a continuing fight to stay alive.
When we look at the stats presented in this report, it bears repeating that the matrix used to examine the effectiveness of Trump’s UN-endorsed plan is the one set out within the plan itself. Those responsible simply applied the approach recommended in Trump’s plan as the means of determining its effectiveness. This involves breaking the 20 points into four separate sections:
- Ceasefire and Civilian Protection
- Humanitarian Aid Access
- Reconstruction and Economic Development
- Freedom of Movement and Return
In only one category, Ceasefire and Civilian Protection, is there any sign of progress. The other three are all rated as ‘failing’, with, most alarmingly, Humanitarian Aid Access receiving a score of zero out of ten. It is this critical need, above all others, that the latest flotilla is trying to address.
The anecdotal evidence is no less alarming than any quantitative analysis. We know that approaching 800 civilians, including 180 children, have been killed by Israel since the ‘ceasefire’ (four Israeli soldiers were killed over the same period) and that Israel continues to hold more than 300 healthcare workers among the thousands of those it detains without charge.
We know, too, that the annexation of land east of the Yellow Line (the agriculturally rich zone that, under the agreement, was to remain Palestinian controlled) has been extensive. Israel has built a network of IDF outposts that are linked by new roads which, as the report says, ‘could lead to de facto annexation’.
The aid situation remains critical. The Rafah and Jordan border crossings remain closed for aid, and most NGOs report that they are being prevented from getting aid into Gaza. In a direct reference to the value of the Iran conflict to Israel’s ambitions in Palestine, the American Civil Military Coordination Centre reported that the number of trucks entering Gaza fell by 80 per cent in the first two weeks of March. While the West is exercised by the economic impact of the war in Iran on our own wellbeing, it is worth noting that Palestinians in Gaza experienced a doubling in the cost-of-living compared to before the US did Israel’s bidding by attacking Iran on 28 February.
The report ‘Humanitarian Scorecard – Six months In, Gaza Ceasefire is Failing’ is available online. It is depressing, but for anyone interested in understanding how even a much-vaunted peace initiative can be, in fact, a corrupt act of collusion between the US and Israel, it is worth attention.
Fintan Drury is a former RTÉ journalist, broadcaster and businessman. His book, Catastrophe – Nakba II (Merrion Press) was shortlisted for the 2025 non-fiction book of the year. In June, Merrion will publish his new book, Genocide – Sponsoring the Destruction of Palestine.