European officials are outraged. Israel intercepted another supposed aid flotilla, taking 430 activists to a detention center in the port of Ashdod to await their deportation. Turkey has dispatched three passenger planes to shuttle the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas activists to Istanbul.
For the activists and the Turks, it is mission accomplished. They succeeded in demonizing Israel.
While the aid flotilla is a misnomer—it does not appear the boats had any significant aid for Gaza onboard—the activists will receive a hero’s welcome in Turkey. For the activists and the Turks, it is mission accomplished. They succeeded in demonizing Israel, and European officials are pearl-clutching over the treatment and harsh words to which Israeli authorities subjected their activists.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, for example, demanded that Israel apologize for “unacceptable” treatment of the activists. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares called Israel’s treatment of the protesters “monstrous, disgraceful and inhumane.” Neither commented on the tens of thousands of political prisoners that fill Turkey’s prisons, nor their own countries’ detention of migrants, although Spain recently gave many illegal immigrants amnesty and legal residency. British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said she was “truly appalled” by a video showing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir mocking protesters as they knelt on the floor with their wrists tied. “We have demanded an explanation from the Israeli authorities and made clear their obligations to protect the rights of our citizens and all those involved.”
Put aside the notion that it is European privilege at its starkest to believe British citizens should enjoy rights when they seek to enter a country illegally and bypass international assistance mechanisms to support terrorists. That the government Cooper represents arrests those who upset transgenders by using grammatically correct pronouns just adds to the irony.
Still, Israel made mistakes in its handling of the issue. First, Ben-Gvir was wrong to visit the detainees. Second, Israel should not work with the flotilla sponsors to return the detainees to them. Instead, Jerusalem should accept at face value the notion that they are self-described human rights activists and deport them and their symbolic aid to a crisis zone where there are far greater human rights crises.
Israel should not work with the flotilla sponsors to return the detainees to them.
The Israelis, for example, might airlift the group to Sudan, currently the world’s bloodiest conflict. The Sudanese Armed Forces has consolidated control over both the capital Khartoum and Port Sudan, the country’s major outlet on the Red Sea. If Israel can set up secret military camps in Iraq, it can also insert the activists in the Sudanese desert with bottles of water and a satellite phone to call their various embassies or foreign ministries. Alternately, Israel can simply transport them via Eilat to a boat that can offload them on dinghies off Port Sudan.
It really would be an elegant solution, by not only evacuating the activists from Israeli custody, but also by forcing the international community to focus attention much more on true atrocities which the Greta Thunbergs of the world and European foreign ministries ignore—perhaps because its victims are black, rather than white, and there is no Jewish angle to seize upon.
Perhaps Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ben Gvir might also quickly realize that after the inevitable outrage of sending human rights activists to Sudan passes, the increasingly frequent flotillas might peter out if the activist-tourists realize they might need to deal with substance rather than cosplay and virtue signal.
