Attention-seekers at sea

Send the flotilla crews to Gaza

Three New Zealanders – Rana Hamida, Youssef Sammour and Samuel Leason have been detained in Israel after being intercepted on one of the so-called “aid flotillas” bound for Gaza. This, despite our Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade making it crystal clear that New Zealanders should not travel there. They chose to ignore that advice, and now we are all expected to feel outraged on their behalf.

These flotillas are not about aid. They are about theatre. The quantities of food and supplies they carry are a joke. One vessel that was intercepted recently began tossing bottles into the sea – the amount of “aid” on board could barely feed a single family for a day. But the goal isn’t to deliver help, it’s to get caught, to stage a confrontation and to maximise headlines.

This clip shows Egyptians tossing bottles into the sea hoping they reach Gaza, I haven’t been able to track down the one of the flotilla doing it.

Now, of course, we have Greta Thunberg chiming in, moaning about bed bugs in detention cells. Oh, what a shame. How devastating it must be for a professional provocateur to find that her overseas protest tour doesn’t come with hotel standards of comfort.

Israel would actually save itself the trouble and the cost of detaining activists by simply giving them exactly what they came for and send them straight to These Kiwi’s travelled halfway around the world, deliberately ignoring official warnings, and now claim moral high ground because they got intercepted. If they are so determined to “stand with Gaza”, why not let them?

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Let them see firsthand what life there is really like. Let them do the aid work they supposedly care about instead of floating around in a boat hoping for the cameras to roll. At least then their efforts might amount to something more than a cheap stunt.

So yes – send them to Gaza. That’s where they wanted to be all along.