Let’s get this straight, because the confusion is total.
It started with a flotilla. The Global Sumud Flotilla. Around 40 boats, up to 700 activists, sailing from Turkey and Tunisia toward Gaza last week. Officially: a humanitarian mission. In reality: a staged political PR stunt carrying symbolic amounts of aid and an army of cameras.
At the front stood the Western left’s usual cast. Greta Thunberg, 22, Swedish climate activist turned Palestine activist. Rima Hassan, French-Palestinian member of the European Parliament. Ada Colau, former mayor of Barcelona from the far-left. Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson. Pastors, lawyers, NGO staff, MEPs from 57 countries.
The same international choir that always finds its moral calling exactly where Israel can be put on trial.
Never where it costs something to tell the truth about Hamas. About Iran. About sharia. About what Islamism actually does to women, to Christians, to Jews, to gay people.
Make no mistake. This is not a charity procession. It is a political project with a clear agenda: break Israel’s lawful naval blockade, demonize the Jewish state, and feed the global Hamas narrative with fresh martyr footage.
And here it gets interesting.
On May 19, 2026, the same day Israel began boarding the boats, the US Treasury sanctioned four people behind the flotilla.
OFAC stated that the organization behind it, PCPA (Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad), was established with funding from Hamas’ International Relations Bureau.
PCPA functions as Hamas’ foreign arm. A network of Hamas embassies in everything but name.
This is not Israel’s claim. This is the US Treasury. On the record.
Greta Thunberg may not know. It’s possible she genuinely believes she’s sailing for humanity. But she is the face. Others steer.
Israeli naval commandos stopped the boats roughly 270 kilometers off Gaza’s coast. Around 430 activists were detained and deported.
Israel has every right to enforce its lawful naval blockade. Netanyahu says so. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, who called the flotilla ‘a stupid stunt,’ says so. International maritime law says so when you sail toward an active war blockade.
Then Itamar Ben-Gvir entered the scene.
Israel’s National Security Minister filmed himself strutting among the detained activists at Ashdod port. They were bound. Forced to kneel with their foreheads to the ground. He waved an Israeli flag over them. The national anthem played in the background. He shouted: ‘Welcome to Israel, we are the landlords. Look at them now, see how they look now, not heroes and nothing at all.’ To his guards he said: ‘Don’t be bothered by their screams.’
He posted the video himself. Caption: ‘Welcome to Israel.’
And you know what?
If a band of Western left-wing activists came sailing to my country, thinking they should interfere in a war they don’t understand, against a people they have never lived among, funded by a network they never bothered to fact-check… I would have made sure they felt it too.
They sail thousands of kilometers to play hero in someone else’s war. They stand on the side of a terror regime that holds hostages, oppresses women, and murders gay people, and they call it solidarity.
They come to break a blockade that exists because the neighbor sends rockets and suicide bombers.
And when Israel stops them, exactly as any self-respecting nation would, they cry out about human rights.
So yes. Let them feel it. Hard. Detention. Interrogation. Rough cells. Deportation. Entry bans. Fines. Seized boats. The full package. Get out of my territory.
But kneel? No.
I would never ask them to.
Because to kneel is sacred. It is a posture reserved for the Creator. It is what a human being does before God. Not before a flag. Not before a minister. Not before another man. The day you force another into that position to triumph over them, you have stolen something that was never yours to hand out.
Netanyahu said it himself. He called Ben-Gvir’s actions “not in line with Israel’s values and norms.”
Everything else? Yes!