The flotilla looks less like ‘a protest’ and more like a ‘provocation’, says the Middle East Forum – and one which, courtesy of those frigates and the activists’ call for more navies to join in, could have ‘military consequences’. It’s hard to disagree with this assessment. If the flotilla’s aim were merely to drop off aid to Palestinians, why would it so noisily savour the arrival of warships and dream of their sailing all the way to the shores of Israel-Gaza? We need cool heads. These Israelophobic sailors might want to ‘amp up the pressure’ but Israel should refuse to do so. It should calmly intercept their boats and send the passengers home.

The flotilla and its fevered war dreams expose the ugly truth about Israelophobia. This fashionable rage of the activist class dresses itself up as ‘anti-war’ but it positively pulsates with a warlike loathing for one tiny nation. They imperiously damn Israel as a ‘rogue state’, sounding more George W Bush than Mahatma Gandhi. Some even dream of its erasure. ‘From the river to the sea!’, they cry. Or even ‘We don’t want two states, we want ’48!’ – a call for a return to that apparently blissful era of 1948 before the modern State of Israel was founded. This isn’t peace activism – it’s a moralistic crusade fuelled by a rank Western chauvinism that views Israel as an uncivilised blot on our planet, as the savages of the modern era. A nation supposedly in the grip of ‘genocidal mania’ that only ‘external intervention’ can fix.

The unhinged language, the sheer animus, is indistinguishable from the ‘humanitarian’ calamities of the 2000s, when imperious forces in the West likewise branded states in the Middle East as vectors of human evil that our civilised armies had a duty to encroach on and defeat. Israelophobia is the Woke Man’s Burden, neo-colonial arrogance in the drag of pacifism. The truly progressive cry today is ‘Hands off Israel’. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and every wanker in the West – back off and leave the Jewish State alone.

Related:

Greta Thunberg was quietly removed from the leadership committee of the global Sumud flotilla.

Several flotilla leaders have ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Islamic Jihad. They all met with representatives of these terrorist organizations.

Some Free Palestine… pic.twitter.com/C9tgBjCfaO

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) September 28, 2025

How dare you!