Abstract
How does Palestine solidarity alter thinking from the sea? How does the anticolonial insurgency in Palestine connect to and enhance international solidarity movements and other struggles against neocolonial formations at sea? Can we think of a solidarity-induced insurgency in saltwater, and can this insurgency take us beyond a focus on dry land, its material resources, and its cosmological meanings? Drawing on years of active involvement in and research on sea-centered movements of solidarity in the Mediterranean, including efforts to challenge the embargo in Gaza and to support border-crossing refugees, this essay argues that contemporary solidarity practices that crisscross the Mediterranean Sea relate directly to the politics of radical social change and, more generally, the question of anticolonialism today.
Introduction: A Tale of Two Ships (and Two Sieges)
On August 30, 1982, fifteen thousand Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas—along with chair Yasser Arafat—bid farewell to their Lebanese allies and the Palestinian civilians in the camps.1 At the port of Beirut, they boarded passenger ships flying the Greek flag.2 The Atlantis, one of these vessels, previously deployed for tourists to the Aegean islands, brought chair Arafat and the PLO leadership to Piraeus.3 That year, for two and a half months starting on July 3, Israel had laid siege to the Lebanese capital,4 where the Palestinian fighters had retreated after being pushed out from South Lebanon. The Atlantis was part of an evacuation fleet made possible by Greek ships, a multinational force composed of 2,500 French, US, and Italian soldiers; US mediation by Ronald Reagan's emissary Philip Habib;5 and an Israeli promise not to enter West Beirut after the ships’ departure.
In June, an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador in London, allegedly by a Palestinian breakaway faction, had served as pretext for Israel to attack the PLO in Beirut.6 Israeli shelling of West Beirut started immediately after the failed assassination attempt; the shelling targeted houses, shops, and even hospitals and health facilities. During the siege, all basic services—water, electricity, food, and medical care—were cut.7 Israel banned surgical supplies from entering Lebanese ports, even those controlled by their allies, the Phalangists, a group of Lebanese Christian far-right militias.8 At the same time, the United States vetoed all resolutions for a ceasefire brought before the UN Security Council. Today, in Gaza and in Beirut, this colonial history of extermination repeats itself—with more destructive weapons and more imperial complicity.
In the power vacuum left after the Syrian Army and the PLO retreated, Palestinian refugees were left without armed protection in the camps. As retaliation for the assassination of the Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel, for three consecutive days starting on September 16, 1,500 Phalangists moved toward the Sabra and Shatila camps in IDF-supplied jeeps and with guns provided by Israel.9 Following Israeli guidance on how to enter the area, they attacked the Palestinian civilians in the camps, killing mainly women and children. This was one of the most atrocious crimes of the Lebanese Civil War: the mass murder of between 2,000 and 3,500 civilians.10
For the Palestinians, their Lebanese allies, and their comrades in the world, the Atlantis was a ship of humiliation, a ship of defeat, and eventually a ship of exile, as in Le bateau de l'exil (1982), the title of a short film by Jocelyne Saab, a filmmaker aboard the Atlantis. For the Greek social-democratic government of Andreas Papandreou, however, the Atlantis offered an opportunity to embolden its putatively anti-imperialist agenda.
His recently elected government made a show of the evacuation fleet. Arafat was given a head of state's welcome, all pomp and circumstance. This was the era of Greece's geopolitical and economic alignment with the Arab world, during which Greek shipowners were distributing Arab oil throughout the world and Greek engineering experts were engaged in public works across the region. Moreover, Greece could use Arab votes to diplomatically isolate Turkey over North Cyprus. As a cover up for its tacit agreement to keep the US bases in the country and remain a NATO member—despite preelection promises—he government of PASOK11, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, instrumentalized tropes of anti-imperialism.12 Regarding the Palestinians, the Greek government moved to recast anticolonial solidarity in terms of paternalistic salvation. Eleftherotypia, a leading government-friendly newspaper, announced, “Our fleet is saving Palestinians.”13 On board the Atlantis, Palestine solidarity and its insurgent potentialities were captured by state rituals and geopolitical priorities. The Atlantis was turned into a vehicle for redressing Greek nationalism—and its aggressive assimilationist dimensions, as manifested in postcolonial Cyprus—as part of the global struggle against imperialism.
Twenty-eight years later, on May 30, 2010, another vessel flying the Greek flag, the Free Mediterranean, sailed in the opposite direction, crossing the Mediterranean eastwards heading toward the coast of Gaza with more than one hundred tons of humanitarian aid in its hold and two dozen civil society members, activists, and journalists on its decks. The Free Mediterranean, cochartered by the activist campaigns Ship to Gaza Greece and Ship to Gaza Sweden, was bound to join a fleet assembled in the sea south of Cyprus by the international coalition Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The coalition consisted of the European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza (Palestinian Diaspora), the Free Gaza Movement (US), the NGO IHH (Turkey), and the Irish Ship to Gaza, among others. The flotilla sought to challenge the embargo, raise global awareness, and deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza by sea. The 2010 flotilla represented the ninth attempt to sail toward Gaza and by far the largest, though smaller efforts occurred almost annually between 2008 and 2018.
In September 2007, a few weeks after Hamas won in the Palestinian elections, Israel had declared the 365-square-kilometer territory a “hostile entity.” It moved to impose a land-air-sea embargo, with the declared aims of limiting the movement of goods into the strip, reducing the supply of fuel and electricity and blocking the movement of persons. Ever since, Gaza’s people have been trapped from fence to fence, making it the largest open-air prison by the sea, walled off as it is on the east and the north by Israel's borders, but just as much in the south by Egypt. The sea is blockaded by naval ships limiting movement to three to six nautical miles (five to eleven kilometers), in clear violation of the Oslo Accords. In Gaza, even before the ongoing genocide, the arbitrary maritime “no-go zone” kept lethally expanding, causing death and injury to fishermen and beachgoers.
Responding to this situation, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) called on a broad coalition to reach Gaza by sea, giving birth to the Free Gaza Movement. The ISM is “a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the long-entrenched and systematic oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian population, using nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles.”14 On August 23, 2008, two fishing boats with more than 40 activists from the International Solidarity Movement to Palestine onboard broke the embargo and arrived in Gaza. They were the first international vessels since 1967 to reach Gaza by sea. Since Israel's capture of the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War, Gaza had been blocked from the outside world, denied its status as an international port. The ships were the first to break this lasting embargo.
After these fishing boats broke the siege, ISM activists set up a regular connection between the Greek-Cypriot port of Limassol and Gaza. They purchased a sixty-six-foot, all-weather yacht with two 750-horsepower engines and named it the Dignity. Between September and December 2008, the Dignity made the Limassol–Gaza trip five times, bringing to Gaza much-needed doctors and journalists as well as activists, including Mairead Maguire (the Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner), an “Italian tenor and a Pakistani lord” (according to Fanis, a ship technician from Piraeus), and European MPs and MEPs.
Taking only fourteen hours to reach Gaza from Cyprus, the Dignity was a sad reminder of the old maritime connections between the East Mediterranean port cities. Alas, this open ferry line would not run for long. On December 27, 2008, a few days before its sixth trip, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead. During the assault, the Israeli Navy destroyed the Gaza port. This led the activists to organize a bigger fleet, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
On the afternoon of May 29, 2010, I was steering the Free Mediterranean as one of the two stable hands the captain had assigned during his resting hours. My eyes were fixed on the endless horizon—a vast calm sea and deep bright blue sky. Gradually, I began to discern the rest of the ships: two other cargo vessels (Dafhne and Gazzeh), two former tourist vessels (Challenger I and Sfendoni), and the imposing cruise ship Mavi Marmara. These ships were carrying more than seven hundred passengers in total.
As I witnessed this unarmed armada, perhaps one of the greatest civilian fleets ever to navigate these waters, I was filled with a profound sense of solidarity, which I understood as a gift and a learning process at the same time. I was thrilled and terrified. I was thrilled that I could offer this participation as a token of gratitude for all the things that the Palestinians and Lebanese had been teaching me throughout my fieldwork in Lebanon—an ethnography of peace and crisis experts.15 I was, of course, also terrified by the fact that I was about to face the army that had displaced, tortured, and assassinated Palestinians for decades.
Intense questions arose in my mind about the place of the sea in the century-old struggle for self-determination and justice in Palestine. How might this movement of global solidarity to Palestine transform the sea beyond the land? What does it mean to imagine and experience the Mediterranean as a sea of Palestine solidarity? Similar questions expanded despite, or because of, the waves of shock that came on the heels of a military assault in international waters. Early on the morning of May 30, the Israeli Navy attacked the ships seventy miles from the coast, violently boarding all ships, killing nine (another died from his wounds later on) and injuring hundreds, before moving to arrest seven hundred passengers, brutalize many, and interrogate every single person at shore. Few hours later, they moved us in handcuffs to the Be'er Sheeva prison until our release under international outcry three days later.
In sharp contrast to the state-captured solidarity of 1982, the solidarity ships to Gaza point to an emergent movement in the contemporary Mediterranean that challenges hegemonic projects and projections at sea. First, by making the sea into a space for solidarity politics, the Palestinian-led ships once again moved the boundaries of anticolonial insurgency beyond the terrestrial boundaries of Palestine thus further globalizing its insurgent emergence. Second, moving beyond state borders and beneath state orders, this insurgent solidarity movement carved out a novel political space that resisted state capture—even if only figuratively. Third, by carving out a new political space through practices and alliances that were hitherto largely unexplored, the maritime path of Palestine solidarity activated a deterritorialized horizon of insurgent praxis, undoing the work of oppression that Saidiya Hartman beautifully describes as “policing the imagination.”16
Transinsurgent Solidarities at Sea
Drawing on years of active involvement in and research on sea-centered movements of solidarity in the Mediterranean,17 including efforts to challenge the embargo in Gaza and to support border-crossing refugees, I argue in this brief essay that contemporary solidarity practices that crisscross the Mediterranean Sea relate directly to the politics of radical social change and, more generally, the question of anticolonialism today. In other words, to analyze these practices solely within liberal-moralist frameworks is to miss their insurgent spirit. Denying Indigenous agency and insurgent agendas, liberal presentism treats the West as both operational center and moral horizon. It also subsumes solidarity praxis into conventional understandings of geopolitics and humanitarianism, while disconnecting it from a long history of struggles against empire.
The questions that emerge in this essay are: How does Palestine solidarity alter thinking from and acting in the sea? How does αλληλλɛγύη (allelegyi; i.e., the “pledge to the other,” the etymological meaning of solidarity in Greek), affect those who pledge solidarity to Palestine? How does the anticolonial insurgency in Palestine connect and enhance international solidarity movements and other struggles against neocolonial formations at sea? Can we think of a solidarity-induced insurgency in saltwater—beyond the focus on dry land, its material resources, and its cosmological meanings?
My analysis of contemporary insurgent solidarities at sea is inspired by and expands on historical accounts of maritime radicalism18 and maritime circuits of insurgent communication19 into the current moment. Geographer David Featherstone clarifies the spatiality of solidarity,20 as it is perceived and practiced through networked political struggles and in a range of connected sociopolitical movements, including striking workers in the United Kingdom, Black Panthers in the United States, Maoist peasants in China, and anticolonial struggles in Vietnam, Algeria, Angola, and elsewhere. Solidarity among anticolonial movements, feminist collectives, and workers’ struggles forged what Featherstone calls “insurgent geographies of connection,” a term that can be readily applied to theorize the current maritime phenomenon of solidarity. Palestinian scholar Linda Tabar chronicles movements’ ways of “sharing tactics and joining together to advance their differentiated struggles as well as their shared global struggle.” Thinking geographically, Tabar contends that this type of solidarity “opened up spaces and insurgent terrains across struggles in which movements shared knowledge and tactics, and their revolutionary world views and radical traditions were woven together.”21 Floating these insights to the maritime field, this essay argues that the Ships to Gaza, in practicing solidarity, mobilizing civil societies, and reviving political activism at sea, brought the sea “back in” (to paraphrase a 1990s academic debate about the state) as a transinsurgent terrain. Through them, the sea emerged as a space for insurgent politics and “transversal solidarity,”22 challenging both terrestrial borders and terracentric analyses.
I define as “transinsurgent solidarity” situations of—often unintended—politicization, radicalization, and insurgent transformation of spaces and populations related to those providing support and solidarity to revolutionary causes and insurgents elsewhere. The prefix trans- here seeks to convey the movement of radicalization that engulfs those that enter in a relationship of solidarity with the struggles in question. It urges us to focus on how solidarity is infusing its agents, channels, and structures with insurgent potentialities. In what follows, I explore the transinsurgent potential of Palestine solidarity in the maritime context of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, and particularly the sea between Greece and Gaza.
Beyond the Square: Insurgent Ports
In April 2010, I arrived in Athens to assume my role as ship ethnographer aboard the Free Mediterranean.23 My time in the city was divided between the Polytechnic School of Athens, where the meetings of the organizing committee took place, and the industrial port of Perama, in western Piraeus, where volunteers and workers repaired and prepared the ship. In Athens, I took on other tasks, contributing to campaign events, ship preparation (cleaning, painting, loading, night guarding), and working on the translation of necessary documents.
One of the most challenging tasks, however, was accompanying the international activists who had arrived in Athens in order to board the ships to Gaza as they wandered in an increasingly turbulent city in a country in crisis and popular unrest. Daily protests, demonstrations, sit-ins, occupations, public gatherings, and heated discussions about the economic crisis and the structural adjustment measures that the Troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund) introduced were filling up our already busy schedules. Eventually a memorandum between the Greek government and the Troika bailed out the Greek banks in exchange for extensive cuts in public spending; the privatization of state assets, such as transportation, energy, and land; the rollback of social and economic rights; the cut-down of pensions; and the reduction of the public employee sector, among others. These measures were announced a few weeks before the ships’ planned departure, thus engulfing the ships and their international activist crew in the explosions of popular rage that followed suit. Nationwide strikes, massive rallies, occupations of buildings and urban spaces, and clashes with riot police took place in Athens, in Piraeus, and in other cities across the country.
Famously, the takeover of public spaces, especially city squares, emerges as one of the main protest tactics in uprisings and protest movements spanning the continents: the Arab world, New York (Occupy Wall Street), and southern Europe (Greece, Spain, Turkey). In Athens, the so-called Movement of the Squares (to Kinima ton Plateion) met the Ship to Gaza (To Ploio Gia tin Gaza) on an emerging terrain of transinsurgent politics. On the one hand, Palestine solidarity activists, port workers, and the international crew of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla split their time and energy between preparing the ships and participating in the insurgent squares. On the other hand, the insurgent squares were hospitable spaces where the activists of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla could advocate their cause, collect donations, and build alliances. However, they follow contrasting spatial logics: although urban insurgent politics seeks to hold the terrain and claim it, maritime insurgent solidarity emerges through constantly flowing through it.
Beyond Boycott: Insurgent Flows
With the formation of an international Gaza Freedom Flotilla drawing from national campaigns in Sweden, Turkey, Greece, the United States, and elsewhere, the activists in Greece decided to acquire a 64.30-meter-long, five-hundred-ton, fifty-year-old cargo vessel and fill it with humanitarian aid. Fittingly, the vessel was renamed Eleftheri Mesogeios (Free Mediterranean). Upgrading to a cargo vessel called for massive adjustments in terms of preparatory sites, maritime expertise, and physical labor. It dictated the move to the busy international industrial port of Piraeus. In Piraeus, the organizers were fortunate to receive and rely on the solidarity of a specialized and unionized workforce. Dockworkers, longshoremen, and metal workers embraced the initiative. Their unions supervised the workflow, the security teams, and the cargo loading. When problems with customs procedures emerged, they mobilized their “acquaintances in the harbor”24 to resolve them promptly. The port authority also supported the ships, providing a dock location and cranes to load the cargo. They also intervened to resolve any legal or administrative issues that could prevent departure, as with the issue of Gaza's status as unrecognized “international port.” The authority found a way around this, too.
At the headquarters of the dockworkers’ union in Piraeus, posters of the International Dockworkers Council reflected pride in unionized political activism. Dockworkers have a long tradition of solidarity with struggles against apartheid in South Africa and occupied Palestine. Expressions of the “occupational culture”25 include strikes, boycotts, and the blocking of implicated cargo companies, such as the Israeli ZIM, from loading and offloading at ports. Currently, in India, Norway and other global ports, port workers continue this tradition to protest Israeli war crimes in Gaza.26
In the case of the solidarity ships, however, dockworkers’ solidarity took a radically different form. Instead of blocking the movement of goods and services, it sought to facilitate the flow of activists and aid. This kind of solidarity made sure that the ship could sail, overcoming all obstacles—legal, bureaucratic, practical. Insurgent solidarity, in this case, moved beyond the boycott, the traditional way in which dockworkers would organize in defense of Palestinian rights. Rather, labor solidarity with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla involved facilitating flow.
Beyond the Ban: Insurgent Rescue
Insurgent contagiousness is, however, apparent not only in the form and the function but also in the field of solidarity. Arguably, the ships to Gaza made waves for seaborne solidarity elsewhere—namely, in the civilian ships that take to the sea to rescue refugees and provide crucial life support to migrants crossing the water, while countering the order of (post)colonial displacement and state abandonment at sea. Two years after the last ship to Gaza embarked for Palestine, the first civilian refugee rescue ship sailed farther west.
There is a genealogical link between these ships. In particular, when faced with criminalization and state depression, the refugee rescue ships draw inspiration from the legacy of the ships to Gaza. When the Italian government and the xenophobic minister Matteo Salvini decided to criminalize activist rescue and ban rescue ships from leaving Italian ports, activists drew on the precedent of ships against the Israeli embargo on Gaza. They thus moved to break the Italian embargo on rescue ships. In the words of Iasonas, an activist on refugee rescue civilian ships, the connection is unequivocal: “All other NGOs stopped during Salvini's era. When he imposed the rescue ban and the closure of ports to rescue ships, they all decided to stop operating. Then our ship was born, Mare Ionio of the Mediterranean Saving Humans. We had decided to break the embargo, challenge Salvini's laws. At this moment, the ships to Gaza were a clear inspiration.”27 The maritime solidarity of the ships to Gaza and the state violence to which they were subjected anticipate the responses to migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea and their wider implications for maritime governance. The military machine that intercepted the ships must be situated within the biopolitical “space of death”28 that is the contemporary Mediterranean Sea. In the face of this aggression, Palestinian-led solidarity politics at sea have reinvented international solidarity as a form of political struggle aligned with anticolonial movements rather than merely providing humanitarian succor.
The ships to Gaza exposed a new horizon of mobilization and theorization of the contemporary ship. The novelty lies in a conception of maritime solidarity politics akin to “an invention, a labor of fabrication, of experimentation with the unrepeatable and the singular, that links it more to intuition, to artistic production and aesthetic discernment than to planning, policy, or the extrapolation of existing relations.”29 Here, the potential lies in the apparent experimentation with the form that is complemented by the inherent fluidity of the function. The solidarity ship is always a repurposed vessel, transformative in form and format. Ships sailing to break the siege and boats that challenge the border were never built to do so. They were made in order to fish, to carry cargo, to move passengers from one official port to another.
Beyond Europe: Decolonizing Refugee Solidarity at Sea
A burgeoning bibliography on sea-going migration identifies refugees as the principal actors reanimating the sea in humanitarian terms.30 By moving through the sea, refugees defy the European border regime and reassert their “agency, their wishes and hopes, political and social identities.”31 Eugenio Cusumano considers this a “new epitome of humanitarian space,”32 looking at the sea from the perspective of the rescuers; Maurice Stierl describes a border zone in which activist practices fall within a wide humanitarian spectrum.33 At the same time, the sea creates an opportunity for civil society to tighten human rights protections while thwarting state enforcement procedures. Rescuers can effectively transform extraterritorial sites from a state of lawlessness into sites of opposition and resistance.
Curiously, the ships to Gaza are often excluded from the expanding scholarship on sea-centered solidarity and civil activism in the Mediterranean Sea. This disconnect may be related to Eurocentric biases in efforts to explore the emerging politicization of the sea as a space of solidarity and civil society mobilization. Indeed, the literature on refugee rescue seems to have ignored this significant history of maritime solidarity with Gaza. This solidarity has the potential to shift both academic and social debates on the rise of maritime solidarity and states’ present efforts to curb, control, and criminalize it. The ships to Gaza and the maritime campaigns against the embargo remind us that Indigenous struggles against colonial dispossession, state oppression, and border regimes are relevant and central to civil activism and its criminalization by the state at sea. The ships showed that this was true beyond the contested land in Israel/Palestine, in the sea. Considering maritime solidarity and its close relationship to the anticolonial struggle in Palestine takes the analysis beyond Europe. Centering Palestine as a potential destination and possible point of origin for maritime solidarity prompts us to historicize present-day settler colonialism and its relationship to the control of the sea. This approach identifies those struggling against colonialism in Palestine as the principal agents leading the movement and facilitating a return to their indigenous lands, including by sea.
The ships’ solidarity and the state violence to which they were subjected also shed light on migrant solidarity and the expanding deathscape in the Mediterranean. The military machine that intercepted the ships is related to the emerging regime of surveillance, neglect, and abandonment deployed in the same sea against refugees. For example, drones by the Israeli company Elbit are used against border-crossing migrants on the northern shores of the sea.
Connections such as these lead us to an expanded concept of solidarity that reimagines the sea not as a space of humanitarian sentiments but as one of internationalist and intersectional struggles. This point becomes even more striking when one considers that scholars have increasingly been arguing that European states, in response to refugee crossings, depict the Mediterranean as an “empty” sea, erasing the historical connections of colonialism, empire, trade, and exchange as well as the contemporary legal geographies that govern the space. It is imperative to push back against social constructions of the sea that contribute to the suppression of non-European histories, struggles, and political imaginations and the systematic exclusion of racialized others from narratives of “Europe” and “Europeanness.” If we are to follow Nicholas De Genova's invitation to “take stock of the multiple, inherently inconsistent and contradictory ways in which ‘European’-ness itself is (re-)articulated precisely as a racial formation of postcolonial whiteness,”34 then we have to decenter, displace, and provincialize Europe as the current political and moral placeholder for sea-based solidarity politics.
Foregrounding solidarity-based transinsurgent movements at sea recasts the latter as an insurgent terrain, formed through anticolonial struggles, and the histories of resistance, decolonization, and return. The waves made by the ships help us challenge Eurocentric bias in analyses of insurgent politics that tend to ignore Palestine-centered maritime movements and Palestine-led solidarity forces that chart the sea as a vital insurgent terrain. Undoing these blind spots, navigating this novel territory, mapping older and current iterations of insurgent politics at sea—these are promising paths for future research on justice: social, racial, epistemic.
Conclusion
In this essay, I suggest three interconnected points: first, that in treating the sea as a space for insurgent solidarity, the solidarity ships to Gaza inadvertently created an understudied template for maritime insurgency. This insurgent maritime solidarity deserves to be addressed and theorized in its own right and not within conventional geopolitical frameworks or as the mere expansion of the terrestrial plane. The emergence of this kind of ship-based solidarity points to a moment of rupture in contemporary politics at sea: opening the sea to insurgent movements and theorizations.
Second, what is salient about this insurgent solidarity is that the “terrain” upon which it unfolds is neither the mountain—the beloved bulwark of the Third Worldist guerrilla foco—nor the city—the hotbed of working-class insurrections since the Paris Commune. Rather, the sea emerges in its Deleuzian guise as a smooth space par excellence. Correspondingly, the aim of this solidarity-based transinsurgency is not to hold territory or to seize the state power's center. Its targets are the tools of striation: upending infrastructures and (neo)colonial formations and functions—the siege, the border, and the commercial ships that enable genocidal practices35 targeting the infrastructures of colonial genocide, immobility, and capital circulation, sea-based solidarity praxis channels the anticolonial impulse36 into an oceanic force.
Third, the ship embodies both the potential and the limit of sea-based insurgent solidarity's encounter with a qualitatively different type of territory. The limit is that an insurgent ship is always at risk of being captured, immobilized, made sedentary. Capture can be physical, as in the case of the PLO driven to exile, the ships to Gaza raided by the Israeli Navy, refugee boats pushed back by the Greek coast guard, or refugee solidarity boats criminalized by EU authorities. In these cases, by acknowledging the potential of these ships, states and suprastate formations strive to absorb these initiatives into hegemonic formations. Yet capture can also be figurative, ideological or discursive, as when liberal stenographers apply moralist labels to insurgent movements against sieges, borders, and extractive forms of colonization of the sea.37 Capture lurks at every spot, especially at those where the land meets the sea.
As I write these lines, a renewed fleet of solidarity ships that had gathered in Istanbul was recently prevented from sailing toward a tormented Gaza. Under alleged Israeli pressure, Guinea Bissau—a flag of convenience country—has withdrawn its flags from two of the ships. Now solidarity activists are calling upon South Africa or Ireland—two countries that have stood up against Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza—to reflag the ships so that they can deliver much-needed humanitarian aid to the devastated Palestinians there. This type of capture—unflagging—must be added to the list of the myriad methods that Israel has deployed to immobilize and destroy transinsurgent solidarity at sea. The list includes violent assault in international waters from 2010 onward but also bombing, murder, and sabotage in previous iterations of insurgent Palestine solidarity and insurgent Palestinian return by sea.38 Nonetheless, each of these ships—and the other ships they inspired—helps create a floating canvas of transinsurgency that carries the seeds of decolonization through the sea. Current solidarity at sea leaves distinct an emancipatory mark on the floating terrain. This legacy of transinsurgency—plowing the sea for Palestine solidarity while emancipating oneself—is still emerging, prompting us to think and act on the seas that Palestine assembles as a contemporary anticolonial “archipelago.”39
A note of caution on capture is in order here. This essay began with the Atlantis, “the ship of defeat” of 1982, whose fate, I argued, manifested an appropriation of Palestine solidarity for the broader project of capturing anticolonial ideology by a government of a NATO/EU member-state. I further argued that the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla constituted a formidable case of resisting state capture. It built bridges between nations, religions, and continents, bringing together a broad alliance of grassroots forces to support Palestine solidarity. In this sense, it constituted a watershed moment in the history of transinsurgent solidarity at sea. Finally, the current fleet of solidarity to Palestine that gathered in Istanbul seems to have fallen prey to (allegations of) capture. Thus, the Ship to Gaza Greece decided to withdraw from the solidarity fleet in Istanbul, citing concerns over the organizers’ connections with states, and with the Turkish government in particular. Such struggles over capture highlight the recurrent return of state-centric forces that bear upon the transinsurgent solidarity unleashed upon the maritime field. The return of the state, however, can be also traced to the accusers. Thus, the Greek Ship to Gaza demanded that the Istanbul-based organizers condemn “all occupations,” lumping together Palestine, Northern Cyprus, Northern Syria, and Libya in an obvious attempt to point to the Turkish foreign policy in the wider region. Arguably, this demand involves an equivocation, a conflation of regimes of expropriation and repression, thus denying both the uniqueness of settler colonialism in Palestine and the urgent call for solidarity coming out of Gaza. In this case, Palestine solidarity risks being appropriated at sea by the lurking Leviathans and thus transformed into a reactionary vehicle for agendas that have little to do with the unfolding genocide in Palestine. Rather, in light of blatant failures of the international justice system to stop or to account for war crimes, the hope to restore humanity lies almost entirely in the success of the anticolonial resistance in Western Asia and the transinsurgent solidarities it generates around the world.
Acknowledgments
This essay introduces preliminary thoughts of a book-length project on transinsurgent solidarities in the East Mediterranean Sea and more generally the relationship between sea and anticolonialism today. Initially I wanted to develop these thoughts further prior to publication, but Israel's ongoing genocidal campaign on Gaza/West Bank/South Lebanon forces all of us to speak up in all ways and on all platforms possible. These horrific war crimes—but also the heroic resistance they are faced with—set new priorities and urgencies before our eyes and the world's conscience.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the workshop “Relations beyond Colonial Borders: Indigeneity, Racialization, Hospitality,” University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, April 2023. I thank the workshop organizers Natalia Brizuela and Samera Esmeir from the International Consortium for Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP), our hosts Alyosha Goldstein and Rebecca Schreiber from the University of New Mexico, and all workshop participants from around the world. This essay would not have been published without the encouragement and camaraderie of Ramsey McGlazer and Robin Celikates. I am further indebted to three anonymous reviewers for sharp comments on earlier versions, the amazing team at Duke University Press for their patience and eloquent work as well as Georges Philip Al Achkar at American University of Beirut for assisting with archival research material.
Notes
Known by its Greek acronym PASOK, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement was a left-wing social democratic party founded in 1974 by economics professor Andreas Papandreou. Founded at the end of the US-backed military dictatorship (1967–74) during which its predecessor PAK engaged in (often violent) resistance action against the military regime, PASOK rose to power in 1981, forming the first social-democratic government in modern Greek history. In domestic politics, it introduced progressive legal and constitutional reforms, strengthening public education and the national health system. In foreign affairs, PASOK championed an agenda of national independence, popular sovereignty, Third-Worldism but also aggressive anti-Turkish nationalism. PASOK dominated Greek politics during the 1980s. Since the 1990s, however—and in line with other European social-democratic parties—PASOK moved toward the neoliberal/center-right, further consolidating a strong nationalist rhetoric.
Eleftherotypia, “O stólos mas sózi tous Palaistiníous.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
Kosmatopoulos, “Gaza Freedom Flotilla”; Kosmatopoulos, “On the Shores of Politics”; Kosmatopoulos, “People's Sea.”
This account draws heavily on Kosmatopoulos, “On the Shores.”
Representative of Ένωση µονίµων και δοκιµών λιµɛνɛργατων ΟΛΠ (Union of Permanent and Temporary Dock Workers in Piraeus Port Organization), interview by author, Greece, August 2010.
Iasonas (refugee rescue activist), interview with author, Greece, summer 2022.
This part draws substantially on Kosmatopoulos, “People’s Sea.”
Yemen's Ansar Allah movement have announced that in solidarity with Palestine it will seize cargo ships sailing in the Red Sea toward or from Israel. Since the beginning of the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza in October, they have been mobilizing at sea in solidarity with Palestine.
In February 1988, the PLO-chartered ferry Sol Phyrene, or “Ship of Return,” was blown up by a bomb in the port of Limassol, Cyprus. A few days before that, a car bomb in Limassol had killed the three Palestinians who had been dealing with the shipping company. See Glass, “Ship of Return.”
The “archipelago” is a creation of Buchra Khalili, a French Moroccan artist, a depiction of revolutionary Algiers in the 1960s.
