Let More Ships Set Sail

Early Monday morning, Israeli forces intercepted and boarded the humanitarian aid ship Madleen in international waters. The vessel, part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, was carrying medical supplies, baby formula, children’s prosthetics, and other desperately needed items for Gaza.

Onboard were twelve passengers: Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, French-Palestinian Member of the European Parliament Rima Hassan, and volunteers from France, Turkey, Brazil, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. They came as human beings to deliver life-saving aid to a besieged population whose very right to survive is under relentless assault.

Shortly before connection was lost, the Madleen’s Telegram account shared footage of passengers with their hands raised. Images and videos began circulating across X (formerly Twitter), showing the ship’s deck coated in a white chemical substance—sprayed from drones—as Israeli forces jammed radio signals and closed in.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry mocked the flotilla as a “selfie yacht,” while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant labeled it a “hate flotilla” and gave the military full authorization to use “any measures necessary” to stop it. And they did. The Israeli regime seized the ship, detained the passengers, and stole its cargo. All of it, wrapped in the language of “security.”

It’s worth noting that this was an act of aggression and a crime. Under international law, seizing a civilian vessel in international waters is piracy while blocking humanitarian aid to a starved civilian population is a war crime. The Madleen posed no threat, as its mission was declared, its passengers were peaceful,  and its cargo holding nothing but medical and essential supplies. 

Israel’s actions show yet again that it does not see Gaza as worthy of aid. It sees Palestinians in the besieged strip as enemies to be starved where infants as threats, prosthetics are weapons and diapers as contraband. This is the logic of genocide—and every government that remains silent is complicit.

Monday’s events are not about one ship, rather it is about the unbearable accumulation of violence. The normalization of atrocity. The daily, hourly, routinized annihilation of Palestinian life.

There’s so much anger, so much grief, so much hatred filled by those who watched the Madleen, towards the criminal, genocidal state that is Israel. In watching the lengths Israel was willing to go to enforce the inhumane siege (calls by state officials to assassinate Thunberg were tabled), it was a reminder to where we are today, and how routinized and normalized violence towards Palestinians is. 

We wake up to violence and we sleep to it. Our phones buzz by the hour with news alerts, group chats, images of yet another massacre. Another child, another neighborhood, another name added to a list that never ends.

How much violence can one be exposed to before they lose themselves? How much blood can someone see through a screen before the body stops reacting? Before the soul forgets how to feel pain?

It’s worth asking this because I think many of us have forgotten otherwise. Many of us have become so accustomed to death, to mutilation, to grief, to a point that it barely stirs anything. Some invoke God’s name, send a blessing, whisper a prayer for the martyr or the injured — and move on. No second thought. No pause.

They talk about the banality of evil, but they never speak of the banality of witnessing pain, of feeling pain. What about the quiet corrosion of the soul? The daily decay of our emotional range?

Freud once wrote that mourning is when we grieve something we know is lost. But melancholia - that’s when the loss becomes part of us. When the grief doesn’t end, because the thing we lost never truly left, it stays lodged inside. That’s what this feels like. A stuckness. A looping sadness. A wound that insists on reopening every single day.

Camus spoke of absurdity - the tension between our need for meaning and a world that refuses to give it. But what happens when meaning is replaced with repetition? When suffering is so constant it becomes background noise?

Benjamin said history is written by the victors, but I think it’s absorbed by the mourners. We carry it in our bodies. In the twitch of our eyes. In the instinct to check our phones and brace for more horror.

But here’s the truth no one wants to speak aloud: the mourners are also shackled. Shackled to the burden of breaking the cycle. Of ending it. Of somehow transforming history’s endless violence into something livable, something just.

And yet... what does it mean to end that cycle? Violence begets violence - that’s the law of history. And to shatter that law, some believe, is to meet it head on. To absorb the story and answer it, not with surrender, but with force. With resistance. Even with blood. Because for some, there is no peace without reckoning. No future without rupture.

This is the weight we carry as mourners: not just the grief, but the impossible question of what comes after. So many questions. So few answers. No resolution. Just a quiet, relentless ache we’ve learned to call normal.

But maybe the real tragedy isn’t just in the mourning. Maybe it’s in the restraint we’re told to uphold. In the tightrope we walk between being human and being obedient. Between loss and law.

Let me tell you a story they don’t teach with reverence anymore.

In the early days of Rome (before the marble statues, before the empire) there was a woman named Lucretia. A noblewoman. Raped by a prince of the ruling class. Violated as well in spirit and in honor. She did what no one expected: she told the truth. She gathered the men of the city, exposed the crime and then took her own life. She said, “Although I pardon myself, I make no excuse for what was done to me.”

Her death detonated the scene as her blood began a revolution. The people rose up. They overthrew the monarchy, burned it to the ground, and swore never again to be ruled by kings. From her wound, the republic was born. That was the beginning of Rome. Not through peace. Not through patience. But through a reckoning.

I don’t intend on glorifying violence, and in me retelling this story, I strictly seek to remind you that every system built on domination has told the oppressed to wait, to grieve quietly, to forgive endlessly. I tell it too because there is no empire that ever surrendered out of guilt. They surrendered when they had no choice.

So ask yourself, what does justice actually look like? Not metaphorically. Not in utopias. But here, now. In the blood and dust. Are we not also children of Lucretia’s world? Are we not, too, forced to choose between dying in silence or speaking in fire? So yes, I mourn. But I also dream. And my dream does not end in apology. It ends in rupture. In the moment the mourners rise.

Let that moment begin.

Let more ships set sail, not just one, but dozens. Let every port open its gates, every shoreline raise its fists. Let the Mediterranean become a witness to defiance. Let the people of Gaza know: they are not alone. In the day’s leading up to the Madleen’s hopeful arrival to Gaza, Palestinians were posting videos on the beaches of Deir el-Balah with welcome signs to greet their prospective guests)

And let Israel know: this siege will break. Whether through law or through love, through diplomacy or through direct action—this world has ceased to tolerate a regime that hijacks ships, bombs hospitals, and calls it defense. History has already decided where it stands. The only question now is: where do you?

Let more ships set sail. Organize or join more Madleen’s to Gaza.