Gaza’s Flotilla and the Fault Lines of Empire
As a new flotilla sets sail to challenge the siege of Gaza, let us examine the racial and imperial fault lines behind this violence, drawing on Pankaj Mishra, Benjamin Moser, and William Dalrymple.
As the Madleen, named after Gaza’s first and only fisherwoman, departed from Sicily on June 1 carrying twelve selfless people from different countries, different lives, and different struggles to break the siege of Gaza, a newly founded and dubious US organisation calling itself the Gaza Humanitarian Fund was busy lining up Palestinians. These were people starved for more than two months, herded behind wired fences, and once again degraded in their humanity.
While the flotilla began to sail, Israeli tanks opened fire on Palestinians waiting for food at two distribution points and killed thirty-two people. Gaza is now designated by the UN as the hungriest place on earth.
By the time the flotilla reached Greek maritime borders on June 4, it was met with a drone reportedly monitoring its movement from Greek territory. In that same time span, Israeli forces had killed ninety-five people, injured over four hundred, and halted aid operations that were already failing in both efficiency and basic decency.
One of the leaders of this flotilla is Yasemin Acar, a human rights activist born to Kurdish parents in Turkey. She has previously delivered aid to Ukraine and protested both atrocities. In return, she faced police raids in her Berlin home.
She is joined by Brazilian activist Thiago Ávila. He has supported the Palestinian cause for nineteen years through grassroots mobilisation, educational work, and international solidarity missions. Since October 2023, he has been helping to organise humanitarian corridors to Gaza and has participated in missions across Egypt, Turkey, and other neighbouring states.
Among the crew are environmental activist Greta Thunberg and actor Liam Cunningham. Their presence surely helped bring global visibility to the flotilla. Thunberg, who has long endured vile attacks for her work on climate justice, was once again smeared and mocked—this time for standing with Palestinians.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham posted on X alongside a news report about the flotilla, writing, “Hope Greta and her friends can swim.”
The source of this blend of arrogance and cruelty demands investigation. Not because Lindsey Graham’s personal vileness is of interest, but because he is a symptom. His performance mirrors a larger class of American and European officials. Many of them are older, many are comfortable, and many have lined up behind the systematic annihilation of Gaza.
I have been trying to understand this alignment for some time now. It is not only about individual hypocrisy. It is a deeper question of Western complicity, of how liberal democracies have remained silent in the face of a live-streamed genocide. My most recent effort to answer this came through reflections on the Gaza Tribunal, held in Sarajevo at the end of May.
Another recent source for thinking through this is Pankaj Mishra’s new book The World After Gaza. Mishra had long been interested in both the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust) and the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948). He realised that even in the 1970s, in countries like India, there was little understanding of how Israel was founded or how Palestinians were dispossessed.
He grew up in a Hindu nationalist household and remembered how Hindu nationalists admired Israeli oppression over Muslims. They saw it as something they had lacked. Israelis were not timid. They were fierce and unapologetic. This fascination, rooted in shared fantasies of vengeance, pushed Mishra to study Zionism and Palestine obsessively.
‘Atrocity hucksterism has come to flourish more widely today. One testament to the power and prestige of victimhood is that even the powerful demagogues of political and intellectual life in the West scramble to present themselves as besieged by the exponents of critical race theory and decolonisation. The politics of several authoritarian states also show more clearly how memories of sufferings are being weaponised in struggles for material power and intellectual privilege. Hindu nationalists and Turkish Islamists brazenly use narratives of hereditary victimhood to dress up authoritarian and exclusionary politics as emancipatory, and to forge a hyper-masculine new national identity out of their narratives of humiliation, helplessness and insecurity.’1
More than a year ago, Mishra was scheduled to deliver a lecture on Gaza with the London Review of Books (LRB), the magazine to which he is a contributor, at the Barbican Centre. The event was cancelled without explanation.
Together with the LRB, he contacted more than fifty venues. Unbelievably none agreed to host him. We are talking about a formidable intellectual, backed by one of the most esteemed intellectual journals. Together, they are rejected! 50 times! In London! Let that sink in.
This speaks volumes that the truth about Palestinians remains trapped even in places celebrated as birthplaces of democracy, liberal thought, justice, and free expression.
In the end, Mishra found a small Anglican church where he spoke about Palestinian suffering and the settler colonial architecture that has been imposed on them.That episode partly propelled him to write and publish this book.
In it, Mishra traces the roots of the Gaza genocide through a racial lens. He argues that the foundations of the modern world were laid in white supremacy and racial imperialism. These structures created a strict global hierarchy. Rights were extended to those who were white or who aligned with white ruling classes. They were denied to others, especially those deemed non-white and weak. That hierarchy is not a relic. It is present and fully operational in Gaza.
‘Scholarship over the last two decades has also clarified that Germany was no exception; all Western powers worked together to uphold a global racial order, in which it was entirely normal for Asians and Africans to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned and ostracised.’2
Mishra reconnects the founding of Israel to the larger global struggle against racial domination. That struggle includes the Jewish experience of European racism, but also the often-overlooked solidarity extended to Jews by people across Asia and Africa.
He writes about how early anti-colonial leaders supported the idea of a Jewish homeland. They viewed European Jews as fellow victims of racial oppression. Gandhi, for instance, was sympathetic to Zionism. He was well informed about the movement and had Jewish friends in South Africa. But 1948 changed everything. The creation of the Israeli state and the dispossession of Palestinians marked a turning point.
For Mishra, this is not something new but the continuation of a long history of violence and expropriation. The settler colonialism over Palestine has become the most visible fracture of that history. It is the same fracture that once separated those who seized the rewards of modernity, capitalism, and empire from those they left behind. That fracture is deepening today.
‘The charge of racism and colonialism effortlessly gains credence from Israel’s relentless expansion of settlements in the occupied territories, its pitiless collective punishment of the Palestinian population, and systemic degradation of the country’s own sizeable Arab minority. Israeli leaders proclaim without the slightest trace of political correctness that they inhabit a villa in a tropical jungle, periodically obliged to mow the grass. The evidence from the past too is overwhelming. The political elite of Zionism openly appealed to the interests of Western empires from the early twentieth century onwards. Many Jews in Western Europe also identified themselves with a triumphant Western modernity by denouncing as backward and effeminate the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Eastern Europe.’3
This brings us back to Graham’s mockery of Thunberg. He is not simply an ageing reactionary. He is part of a much larger formation. A transatlantic alliance of white supremacist parties, ruling elites, and far-right movements that have openly aligned themselves with the Israeli government.
The issue is that even though people are out on the streets—especially the young—their struggle has not yet been translated into the wider framework that Mishra puts forward. We do not yet see black civil rights movements fully pushing back.
As Palestinian activist and international law scholar Noura Erakat stated on Makdisi Street, a podcast co-hosted by Ussama, Karim, and Saree Makdisi, ‘The genocide of Palestinians makes Black people unsafe. It makes women unsafe. It makes the poor unsafe. But many civil rights leaders do not recognise this yet.’
Palestine: a microcosm of imperialism and apartheid
Pankaj Mishra and linguist Benjamin Moser, whose has a forthcoming book on anti-Zionism, joined historian William Dalrymple at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival on 31 May 2025. Dalrymple, who has quietly supported several voices silenced for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza, hosted a thrilling conversation between two thinkers who have refused to capitulate.
I had known Moser as the Pulitzer-winning author of a book on Susan Sontag, but I hadn’t encountered his views on Palestine before. My ignorance.
His clarity, courage, and moral depth are striking. In this climate of cancellation and smear, the principled opposition of Jewish intellectuals to the Israeli regime deserves open recognition.
Moser describes what he saw when he visited Ramallah during the Palestine Literary Festival years ago:
‘In the United States and Jim Crow, in certain states in the South you had the bathrooms for the black people in the bathroom for the white people. Or in South Africa, there they have entire cities that are only for one race. They have entire roads. The nice roads are for the ‘white people’. And the bad road that goes around and it has roadblocks, and had holes, and that is closed half the time, and it goes right through somebody's house or somebody's field. And feeling of colonial imposition, the feeling of what is a settler colony, is something that, mercifully, we've lost. Because Algeria was liberated. South Africa was liberated. But Palestine is a microcosm of what imperialism is, of what racism is, of what apartheid is. And it can be in a very small little area. It can be one road. You just look there, and you see, oh, that's the road for the people from, you know, San Diego or and a lot of the settlers, of course, have different English accents, whether British American, quite a lot of Australians, and they're walking around with these massive guns. They're utterly absent from any sort of moral or ethical or legal restraints and how they treat the native people is something that you can't really believe still happens.’
Moser’s words cut through the usual equivocations, reminding us that what persists in Palestine is the most unvarnished expression of a colonial order the world prefers to forget. His substack is here, if you want to subscribe.
That other infamous flotilla incident
“We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying,” Thunberg said, her voice breaking into tears before setting sail with the flotilla.
The odds are indeed against them.
To protect the crew and ensure transparency, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition equipped the Madleen with a high-tech tracking system that records its movements and any hostile encounters. Just one month ago, Israeli drones struck Conscience, another FFC aid ship, off the coast of Malta. As the Madleen sails toward Gaza to challenge the blockade, the tracker (available here) becomes more than a navigation device. It is a shield against interception and violence.
One such mission ended in bloodshed in 2010, when Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara in international waters, killing nine Turkish activists. The raid ruptured Turkish-Israeli relations for six years. President Erdoğan, then visibly enraged and reportedly feeling “personally betrayed,” condemned the assault as a violation of Turkish sovereignty and presented himself as a defender of the Palestinian cause. But by 2016, following a rapprochement that included a deal paving the way for potentially profitable Israeli gas exports to Turkey, his tone had changed significantly.In a striking reversal, Erdoğan criticized the İHH—the Islamist aid group behind the flotilla—for acting without his approval, asking rhetorically, “Did you ask me before going to Gaza?”
I just wanted to remind you of this incident not only as a hallmark of Israeli brutality, but also as a stark example of political hypocrisy. As we all know by now, condemnation is fierce until interests intervene.
Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza (London: Fern Press, 2025), 243.
Ibid, 236.
Ibid, 245.
Beautifully told Ezgi Hanım. Thank you.
Thanks a lot for this post and for the book recommendations!