With the Sumud Flotilla, the global struggle for a free Palestine is sailing toward its inevitable, victorious destination
Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
They set sail not with missiles, nor with bullets, nor with armies, but with bread, medicine, and the stubborn conviction that conscience still has a voice in this world.
The first boats were small and few, most campaigns consisting of only a single vessel.
Today, the Global Sumud Flotilla sails on a scale the world has never seen: more than 50 vessels, carrying several hundred activists, lawyers, parliamentarians and journalists from over 44 countries.
From Spain, Italy, Tunisia, and Greece, it rose like a fleet of defiance, bearing on its decks the scattered humanity of the earth – writers, doctors, athletes, artists, and ordinary men and women who refused to let Gaza starve unseen.
Against the arrogance of Israel, a state that deems itself untouchable, against Washington that shields it with vetoes and bombs, these fragile vessels embody the oldest and strongest weapon of all: steadfastness.
The name itself comes from the Arabic sumud – steadfastness. It is the refusal of a people to be erased, the insistence on their right to endure and to be free.
History’s shadow
The idea of sending boats to Gaza was born in 2006, in the shadow of Israel’s war on Lebanon.
Two years later, in 2008, two small vessels from the Free Gaza Movement successfully reached Gaza, breaking the siege for the first time. Between 2008 and 2016, the movement launched 31 boats, five of which reached Gaza despite heavy Israeli restrictions.
What began with two boats has now become more than 50 – a fleet carrying the voices of the world.
History casts its shadow over this voyage.
In 1947, a ship named Exodus 1947 carried Holocaust survivors who attempted to migrate illegally to Palestine but were rejected by the British Mandate authorities.
Zionist leaders turned that moment into a spectacle of suffering, extracting sympathy from a West still raw from the Holocaust, and pressing it into the service of their project. Out of that sympathy came the UN partition resolution of 1947, and with it the catastrophe of 1948.
Today Israel, through its genocide and ethnic cleansing, its arrogance and contempt for the Sumud Flotilla as it seeks to break Gaza’s siege, is creating a mirror image.
It is generating a fiercer sympathy, this time not for the coloniser but for the colonised. It is producing solidarity so vast, so global, that it seeks to correct the injustice of 1947 and 1948.
If Exodus 1947 paved the way for Israel, Exodus 2025 represents the world rising to undo the wrong and restore justice to Palestine after more than a century of dispossession.
The world had already spoken. In every tongue, in every capital, voices demanded an end to the genocide. Even the United Nations, so often paralysed by divisions, expressed the will of nations in near-unison.
Yet, Israel shut its eyes to every plea, while Washington wielded the veto to smother resolutions or gutted them before they ever reached the Security Council.
It was in this void, this moral vacuum, that the conscience of humanity moved.
The banner of humanity
The first boats were seized by Israel in Gaza’s waters and their passengers forced back home. But the attempt was reborn – larger, louder, defiant: dozens of vessels, hundreds of activists, the world itself sailing to Gaza.
Even before they began, Israeli drones struck twice in Tunisia’s port of Sidi Bou Said, violating its sovereignty, exposing – yet again- the impunity with which Tel Aviv tramples borders.
President Kais Saied’s regime at first muttered about an overheated cable before later admitting it was deliberate, though too timid to name the attacker.
The rulers of the world stood by – some paralysed, some complicit, most with blood on their hands. Arab leaders busied themselves with fortifying their thrones, preferring US guarantees to Arab dignity.
Egypt, the neighbour that holds Gaza’s last breath in its hands, revealed itself most shamelessly: refusing to allow the flotilla to dock in its ports, forbidding its citizens from joining, closing its borders tight as famine and death consumed an entire people next door.
Europe, too, showed its duplicity: Spain, Ireland, and Belgium spoke with rare moral clarity, while London, Paris, and Berlin kept the weapons flowing and the cover steady. In Brussels, sanctions were blocked, the killers indulged.
And so it was not governments but peoples who acted. Not presidents or parliaments, but free men and women who carried the banner of humanity.
In Italy, mass protests and strikes forced Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government to dispatch a warship – not only in its own waters but beyond – to shield the Sumud Flotilla. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez went further, promising a naval escort to guard it on its journey.
In these moments, the balance of strength inverted: the powerful appeared brittle, quaking before unarmed civilians at sea, while the weak bore the greater power of moral clarity.
This is what terrifies Benjamin Netanyahu.
The tide is turning
For two years, Israel has waged open genocide: bombing homes, slaughtering families, dismantling every means of life, starving a people into submission. Alongside this carnage it has spun its lies – that it does not kill civilians, that it does not starve Gaza.
But the Sumud Flotilla punctures the facade. It carries journalists live-streaming from the waves, actors, athletes, and artists who cannot be smeared as “terrorists”. It carries a mirror, and Israel fears nothing more than its own reflection.
The Sumud Flotilla is not an isolated event but the crest of a long wave. In 2008, two boats reached Gaza. In 2010, Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara in international waters, shooting ten activists dead.
In 2011, most of Freedom Flotilla II was blocked from leaving Greek ports under diplomatic pressure.
In 2015 and 2016, the Women’s Boat to Gaza and Freedom Flotilla III were seized. In 2018, the “Just Future for Palestine” Flotilla was intercepted.
And now, in 2025, Israel has escalated to piracy from the skies: in May, the Conscience was struck by armed drones; in June, the Madleen was seized; in July, the Handala intercepted; in August, the Global Sumud Flotilla forced back after being attacked by drones in international waters.
Not one boat has broken through in years. And yet not one attempt has been silenced. Solidarity cannot be sunk, and conscience cannot be blockaded.
The idea of sending the first boat was born in 2006. Nearly two decades later, what began with two small vessels has become a fleet of more than 50.
The lesson of these 18 years is clear: the tide of defiance against the Zionist project rises higher with every voyage.
With the Sumud Flotilla, that tide has crossed a threshold: the global struggle for a free Palestine is sailing toward its inevitable, victorious destination.
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