The Gaza flotilla: the Woke Man’s Burden

I’m old enough to remember when being a peacenik meant you wanted less Western meddling overseas, not more. Seems things have changed. Exhibit A: the Gaza flotilla. These smug sea-farers pose as peace activists, like Mother Teresa in a keffiyeh. Yet behind the humanitarian pantomime there lurks a brutish neo-colonial urge to rally the mighty nations of the West against the uppity little state of Israel. Some on the flotilla are openly calling on powerful states to send their warships to help ‘break’ Israel’s blockade of Gaza. You can call that ‘aid’ if you like – I call it warmongering.

The war-lust of these oceangoing narcissists was spelt out in a column in the Guardian last week. It was written by David Adler, head of the Progressive International think-tank and sailor on one of the boats headed for Gaza. It is not enough for states to ‘offer protection to our civilian fleet’, he said, referencing Spain and Italy’s decision to send frigates to guide the flotilla through the Med. No, you must ‘join us’. You should be ‘deploying vessels’, he said, and ‘at the scale that corresponds to the severity of Gaza’s present suffering’. He ended with a battle cry that will have had the bourgeois Israelophobes who lap up the Guardian cheering over their granola: ‘It is not too late for states to step up and join our mission.’

There is no vacillation here. Mr Adler did not mince his words. This is an invitation to nations with warships to sail upon a sovereign state and compel it to change its policies. We used to call that imperialism. As if his Guardian call to arms were not clear enough, Mr Adler followed it up with a video missive from his boat. We are not satisfied with ‘states sending frigates to protect the flotilla’, he said. No, you must ‘JOIN the mission, sail alongside us, break the siege’. It is time, he said, to ‘amp up the pressure’. He signed off his imperious cry with the fire emoji. Nearly 10,000 people on X have given a thumbs-up to this plea for the powerful to send their ships to rebuke the Jewish State.

Look, I don’t want anything to happen to the people on these boats. It is not a crime to be an incalculably vain white saviour so high on your own sanctimony that you have convinced yourself you can stop a war. And yet if Israel views this flotilla as a problem, can we blame it? Spokespeople for the flotilla are petitioning for naval intervention against it. They want foreign ships to ‘smash’ Israel’s war aims. ‘We’re just bringing baby food’, they say in one breath, and then ‘It’s time to amp up the pressure’ in the next. There isn’t a nation on Earth that would not be profoundly unsettled by the sailing of 52 boats towards its waters, especially when those boats are praying for foreign armies to join them. It is a rancid double standard so typical of Israelophobia to expect Israel and Israel alone to be chill about such a conceited incursion into its sovereign territory.

Mr Adler is not the only flotilla bloviator who dreams of navies joining their crusade. Witness the glee with which the boat people and their cheerleaders in the bourgeois press greeted the news that Spain and Italy had deployed frigates to guide the flotilla following reported drone attacks and communications interference. The flotilla’s official X account posted video footage of Italy’s navy ship to the delight of followers. ‘Viva Italia!’, tweeters cried. ‘Una bella nave!’ (‘a beautiful ship’), said one. Peace activists calling a warship ‘beautiful’? I don’t recall anything like that from my activist days.

In leftish circles there’s a palpable relish over the sailing of Western warships in the direction of Israel. ‘Wow’, cried Owen Jones. ‘Spain is offering direct military protection to the flotilla…. So what now, Israel?’ He sounds like those white-haired war hawks who said ‘Checkmate, Saddam’ when US frigates besieged the Persian Gulf in 1990. Novara Media could barely contain its excitement when Turkey joined the ‘protection’ of the flotilla. ‘Civilian boats now flanked by four warships from three different countries’, it crowed. And that’s a good thing? Warships in the Med? Next time a Blair-like leader puffs himself up as a ‘humanitarian’ as he engages in militaristic manoeuvres against a state that he’s branded evil, I don’t want to hear a word from the left – for that’s what they’re doing right now.

Of course, it is highly unlikely that Spanish, Italian or Turkish warships will cross into the 12 nautical miles off Israel that count as Israeli waters – however much the flotilla’s faux-hippies might desire such a disastrous ‘amping up’ of pressure. And yet even their accompaniment of the flotilla through the Med could cause a flare-up in diplomatic affairs. As the Middle East Forum points out, that literal ‘NATO warships’ are ‘escorting a flotilla’ that is on a ‘collision course… with the Israeli navy’ is a big problem. Imagine if the Armada de México, the second largest navy in Latin America, were to escort to the edge of American waters 52 boats packed with people who think America is the scummiest nation on Earth. The US would be pissed. Well, Israel has a right to be pissed, too.

The flotilla looks less like ‘a protest’ and more like a ‘provocation’, says the Middle East Forum – and one which, courtesy of those frigates and the activists’ call for more navies to join in, could have ‘military consequences’. It’s hard to disagree with this assessment. If the flotilla’s aim were merely to drop off aid to Palestinians, why would it so noisily savour the arrival of warships and dream of their sailing all the way to the shores of Israel-Gaza? We need cool heads. These Israelophobic sailors might want to ‘amp up the pressure’ but Israel should refuse to do so. It should calmly intercept their boats and send the passengers home.

The flotilla and its fevered war dreams expose the ugly truth about Israelophobia. This fashionable rage of the activist class dresses itself up as ‘anti-war’ but it positively pulsates with a warlike loathing for one tiny nation. They imperiously damn Israel as a ‘rogue state’, sounding more George W Bush than Mahatma Gandhi. Some even dream of its erasure. ‘From the river to the sea!’, they cry. Or even ‘We don’t want two states, we want ’48!’ – a call for a return to that apparently blissful era of 1948 before the modern State of Israel was founded. This isn’t peace activism – it’s a moralistic crusade fuelled by a rank Western chauvinism that views Israel as an uncivilised blot on our planet, as the savages of the modern era. A nation supposedly in the grip of ‘genocidal mania’ that only ‘external intervention’ can fix.

The unhinged language, the sheer animus, is indistinguishable from the ‘humanitarian’ calamities of the 2000s, when imperious forces in the West likewise branded states in the Middle East as vectors of human evil that our civilised armies had a duty to encroach on and defeat. Israelophobia is the Woke Man’s Burden, neo-colonial arrogance in the drag of pacifism. The truly progressive cry today is ‘Hands off Israel’. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and every wanker in the West – back off and leave the Jewish State alone.

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 latest 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