Greta Thunberg’s moral siege of Israel

Why isn’t Greta Thunberg sailing an aid ship to Sudan? Things are dire there. Two years of war have given rise to ‘catastrophic hunger levels’. The horrors dwarf ‘those in Ukraine, Gaza and Somalia combined’, reports Deutsche Welle. And yet the benighted Sudanese have failed to win the favour of the world’s best known eco-brat. Her boat is destined not for Africa but for the only strip of land that matters to the virtuous of the West: Gaza.

Sweden’s prophetess of doom is back in the news. She’s making waves with her plan to sail to Gaza. She and others from the turbo-smug keffiyeh classes had planned to sail on a boat called – wait for it – Conscience. Rumour has it they called it that because ‘Aren’t We Fucking Wonderful?’ was too long for the hull. But their moral expedition has been put on hold after a drone fired on their boat in waters off Malta, causing damage but no casualties.

Information is sparse. The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) that’s organising this virtue-fest in the Med says 30 people were onboard at the time – the Maltese government says 16 were. Greta says Israel fired the drone, yet another ‘crystal-clear example’ that it doesn’t give a toss about ‘international law and human rights’; Israel is staying schtum.

Of course, no one wants to see Greta or her activist pals come to any harm. I’m glad that they haven’t. Yet it would be wholly wrong to describe this expedition as merely about delivering aid, as simply humanitarian. The aim of these seafaring Israelophobes is less to ‘help Gaza’ than to weaken Israel’s hold over the enemy territory it has seized in its bloody war with Hamas.

The FFC is open about its desire to interfere with Israel’s war effort. It says it wants to ‘break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza’. So this isn’t just about handing food boxes to hungry Gazans – it’s about frustrating Israel’s encircling of Gaza as it hunts down the army of anti-Semites that butchered more than a thousand people on 7 October 2023.

The flotilla openly fashions itself as a manifestation of ‘international law’. We have every right to ‘break the siege of Gaza’, the organisers say, because ‘recent International Court of Justice orders’ have made it clear that ‘states must not obstruct humanitarian aid delivery’. So they’re less aid bringers than mercenary bailiffs, come to enforce the ‘orders’ of a globalist court against what they view as a wicked nation. These aren’t peace campaigners – they’re the activist wing of the new elites. There isn’t a keffiyeh big enough to disguise that these faux radicals are actually doing the bidding of unaccountable courts that have damned Israel’s war as potentially genocidal.

People talk about the siege of Gaza but few are prepared to reckon with the siege of Israel. For years, the Jewish State has been subjected to a double siege. There’s the physical siege by the armies of anti-Semites that surround it and which dream of its obliteration. And there’s the moral siege by the intellectuals of the West. By our credentialed classes, our activist set, our literary elites, all of whom increasingly derive their fantasy of virtue from their hostility to the Jewish nation. And some of whom also dream of its destruction. ‘From the river to sea’, they cry, to let the world know that their utopia is a Middle East with no Jewish homeland.

It’s a pincer movement of bigotry, a hippy-Islamist nexus of contempt for the world’s only Jewish state. Both the military siege of Israel by Iran’s deranged proxies and the moral siege of it by the West’s post-civilisational left speaks to this century’s crisis of Enlightenment. It should horrify everyone who believes in reason that neo-fascist regressives like Hamas don’t only still exist but also win the sympathy of many of the educated of the West. What the Greta flotilla threatened to do was make the activist class’s moral siege of Israel into something more physical. They wouldn’t be breaking a siege but intensifying one.

Blockades have been a tactic of every war in history. They’re a key means of depriving the enemy of the ability to rearm and refortify. Greta and her chums couldn’t break a big stick far less a military siege, I know. But that they desire to weaken Israel’s siege of a piece of land ruled by a fascist militia that murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis is chilling. There’s a war between the democratic Jewish State and a medieval militia that was founded to kill Jews, and the West’s activist class continually says and does things that benefit the latter more than the former. Never forget how unusual that is, how horrendous.

Greta has jumped from the green bandwagon to the anti-Israel bandwagon, her critics say. I think she’s been consistent. For climate-change alarmism and Israelophobia share something important in common – a haughty weariness with modernity. A doom-mongering built more on bigotry than truth in which either industrious mankind or evil Israel is always on the cusp of destroying humanity. That the West’s youthful End is Nigh hysterics have now taken the wrong side in an existential clash between a modern state and a barbarous militia should not surprise us. It should worry us, though – enormously.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy