An estimated Twenty-seven ships to set sail for Gaza from multiple ports to break Israel’s siege on the enclave.
This will be activist Greta Thunberg’s second mission, having been taken captive by Israel earlier this year when her ship and fellow crew members were sprayed with illicit chemicals and boarded unlawfully in international waters. The Handala and her crew also suffered a similar fate earlier this summer.
Dozens of people gathered on Saturday at the port of Barcelona where a flotilla will set sail for Gaza on Sunday. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is hoping to break… the naval blockade imposed by Israel along the coast of the Gaza Strip since 2007… (AP video and production by Hernan Munoz)
Additional information:
The Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza: Everything you need to know
Largest flotilla for Gaza hopes to pressure Israel to end blockade
I strongly disagree.
In a lot of ”very complex” issues, the answers are really simple, and we all know fully well how to solve them.
This is particularly true of the large existential problems we are facing. With climate change, for instance, we have known the solution for a long time: stop burning fossil fuels.
What to do about it has been clear, straightforward and simple all along, but not easy – it would have taken sacrifice to achieve it. We’d have to live more simply, do away with consumerism and have to put things on hold while we find sustainable ways to do them. And we probably would have had to take enormous risks to our own lives, to stop those that wouldn’t aggressively cut down on fossil fuels voluntarily. Without any guarantees of success.
Even transitioning to a solar punk utopia would have been hard, including for those on board from the start.
All while the alternative to the solution is to to have long warm showers at will, enough cheap food that we can get really fat and still throw half of it away, intercontinental air travel that costs less than a bus pass, and so on.
It’s not because we have talked too little or that the discourse hasn’t been good enough that we can’t seem to solve it – our most brilliant minds have talked endlessly for a generation about climate change and how to address it. It’s simply because quitting our fossil fuels addiction is a bitter fucking pill to swallow. And pointless if you do it alone.
The same goes for the ”slow” slide into fascism all over the West, a.k.a. the steady concentration of wealth in the hands of dumber and dumber financial elites. (Not that it’s a separate issue from climate change.)
If you want to beat it, whether peacefully or not, you eventually have to accept that your next meal won’t be guaranteed and that, you might get beaten, arrested or even killed – hungry, tired and cold.
As our American friends have showed us, on this matter, the stakes of disruptive protests are not very appealing – it’s better to continue going to the office, get that paycheck that keeps the lights on, holds off the bank from taking your home and lets the fridge stay full, even if that means paying taxes to and serving those you protest in the weekends and in social media posts.
Tackling these issues does not require exceptional individuals, but a lot of ordinary ones working together, accepting that it’s probably gonna suck really bad. Even so, there is already an abundance of extraordinary people out there, notably Greta Thunberg (of this thread fame).
And yes, it does also take talk to bring those people together, but that talk won’t get you around the hard parts.