Ilan Preskovsky: Unpacking the May Gaza Flotilla allegations

Key topics:Flotilla activists allege severe abuse by Israeli forces during detentionQuestions raised over credibility; flotillas framed as political PR stuntsBroader info-war claims around Gaza conflict and Israel–Hamas narratives.By Ilan Preskovsky.I so wish I could simply write off the latest Global Sumud Flotilla that attempted, once again, to infiltrate the Israeli naval blockade around Gaza as “another month, another flotilla”, but the allegations made by the activists on board the flotillas – including six South Africans – are exceptionally serious. These allegations include severe physical abuse and rape by Israeli soldiers and police on the 400 or so activists during their detention between the interception of the flotilla and the deportation of all activists some days later via Turkey. Horrifying AllegationsThese are serious claims and should be treated as such. All evidence of such abuses should be presented to both Israeli authorities and legitimate international agencies, where they must be thoroughly investigated, and if there is ample evidence to warrant it, all offending parties should be charged, judged and sentenced to the fullest extent of the law. Such abuses are clearly immoral, illegal and utterly contemptible in any reasonable, lawful society..Read more:.Aid flotillas miss the point - Gaza’s future hinges on Netanyahu’s next move.Further, if there is one thing that did unquestionably happen, it’s that Itamar Ben Gvir, the ultra-far-right politician who somehow continues to hold the position of Minister of National Security, proudly taunted and tormented the flotilla activists on camera for the world to see. His actions were beyond the pale and he has rightly been condemned by pretty much everyone up to and including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself (whose refusal to fire Ben Gvir, though, is one of the biggest reasons why he needs to be voted out of office later this year). Ben Gvir is, as ever, an extremist who represents only the smallest fringe of the smallest fringe of Israeli society, but who brings greater and greater disgrace to the country and the people of Israel (and Jews worldwide) every second he remains in any sort of public office.More than that, if his grotesque speech and his acts of crass, deplorable theatre have ever crossed the line into ordering those under him to commit anything like the sort of acts these activists have alleged, then he should spend every last one of his days in prison.With all this said, with the full understanding of the gravity of these allegations and the absolute, unequivocal condemnation of any and all acts of abuse, especially sexual abuse, against any prisoner or detainee, let’s be perfectly honest here: these allegations are not coming from the most credible sources in the world. There are very strong reasons, indeed, why those who are professional provocateurs by definition would make such claims that has precious little to do with their veracity. Why I Smell a RatObviously, on an emotional level, I don’t want to believe that the country that represents Jews worldwide could possibly have fallen this far. And many will no doubt write off anything I have to say on the matter as blind loyalty to the Jewish State; an ingrained bias that I cannot see past. But emotional reactions or no, the main reason I have so much trouble believing these claims isn’t because of blind loyalty to Israel or because of my own cultural and religious heritage, but because of the flotillas themselves and the mounting evidence that they are, in every sense of the term, bad actors. If they ever began with genuinely noble intentions, it quickly became clear with the launch of more and more of these flotillas that they were little more than performative publicity stunts for narcissistic blow-hards who are more interested in making themselves look righteous than doing anything that actually helps Palestinians. What little aid they brought was a speck in the ocean in comparison to the tonnes of aid that entered Gaza on a daily basis throughout the war (let alone now) and their “brave” attempts to break a perfectly legal naval blockade in the middle of a war was never anything more than inane virtue signalling, where they would be stopped before they got anywhere close to Gaza, detained for hours or days by Israeli authorities, and then given a free plane ride home. Rinse and repeat.When people started to notice the cynical emptiness of these performances, though, a change of strategy was clearly implemented and the flotillas started to take on an increasingly central role in the campaign of disinformation and delegitimization against Israel that has been in full force since Hamas’ atrocities on 7 October 2023, but has been quietly working in the background ever since Israel’s enemies realised that it couldn’t be beaten, let alone destroyed, through conventional military means.What ChangedThe earlier flotillas were marked by being extensively catalogued through videos and photos, and every bit of evidence of them being detained or questioned by Israeli authorities were counteracted with images of, say, Greta Thunberg happily accepting a challah sandwich from Israeli soldiers or sitting comfortably on their plane ride home. Needless to say, whoever organised these flotillas were less than impressed with the results, and the next flotillas were accompanied by less and then no photographic evidence – indeed, there’s even a now infamous photo out there of Greta and co. disposing of their phones just before they were bordered – and allegations that grew increasingly severe against Israeli authorities. Certainly, they no longer even pretend to be about aid.It’s more than a little suspicious then that in a time when Gaza is mostly out of the news and the public consciousness, and the actual situation is stuck in a perpetual stalemate led by Hamas’ absolute refusal to honour “stage 2” of the truce and disarm, that we now have a flotilla whose members are making the gravest allegations possible against Israel. .Read more:.Trump's Middle East triumph: Israel, Hamas reach hostage deal in Gaza breakthrough. It’s a “coincidence” right up there with a poorly-researched New York Times “op-ed” alleging systematic rape and sexual abuse against Palestinians by Israeli prison staff, soldiers and cops, that happened to be released the night before an extensive and impeccably researched report came out detailing the use of rape and sexual abuse in the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th Inverting RealityOne of the key elements of the disinformation campaign against Israel has always been Holocaust inversion, whereby Israel is accused of doing to the Palestinians exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews. This is still employed liberally by the anti-Israel movement, but after 7 October 2023, Holocaust inversion took a back seat to what we can call “7th of October inversion”, whereby Israel is guilty of committing against Palestinians the exact crimes that were committed against them on that horrendous Saturday morning. This was first accompanied by allegations that Israel was fabricating the Hamas attacks, but as the mounting, irrefutable evidence of those crimes comes to light, it is now accompanied by conveniently-timed allegations against Israel that directly echoes all new evidence being released against Hamas.Just as a report was about to drop detailing Hamas’ widespread use of sexual abuse on 7 October, it was buried under an inflammatory New York Times op-ed that used isolated incidents of sexual abuse in Israeli prisons to “prove” the exact sort of systemic rape that Hamas was about to be proven to be guilty of. Days and weeks after those same reports detailed the horrors that the hostages endured in Gaza under Hamas, a flotilla – whom the US Treasury accused, based on documented evidence, of having very strong ties to Hamas and other Islamist terror organizations – accused Israeli authorities of doing the exact same thing to them when they “kidnapped” them.The groundwork, incidentally, was laid by previous flotillas where the language around them started to directly refer to Hamas’ actions on October 7th – words like “hostage”, “abducted” and “kidnapped” started to show up regularly in describing the arrest of activists who were illegally trying to break a naval blockade; not least by the ANC and the ANC-captured DIRCO, who continue to play their parts to the tee. Evil GeniusWhat’s truly, horrifically, cynically brilliant about all, though – the thing that makes this disinformation and demonization campaign so shockingly effective – is that it makes those of us who point it out look like crazed conspiracy theorists. It also, at the same time, shifts the onus of responsibility fully onto those of us who defend Israel to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that allegations that are offered with only the scantiest of evidence, are provably and incontrovertibly false..Read more:.Why Israel’s war in Gaza did not meet the legal definition of genocide: Mark Oppenheimer.It’s a tactic that has been used far and wide throughout this disinformation campaign against Israel, where Jews are forced to prove that we are, in fact, Jews; that Jews have any sort of connection to the land of Israel; that Israel did not use a false flag operation to start a war against Gaza; that the Israeli government isn’t every bit as bad as the radical Islamist terrorists of Hamas; that Israel is more democratic than the non-democratic countries around it; that an army that sends its young men to search booby trapped buildings in the hope of avoiding civilian casualties is not genocidal; that committing unspeakable acts against some 400 (often famous) people who travelled across the globe with the sole purpose of delegitimizing Israel, is not actually in Israel’s best interests.And the very worst part of it? It’s working. Brilliantly, horrifically, and exponentially so.We can only hope that truth, logic, critical thinking, and evidence will ultimately prevail. .Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Ilan Preskovsky: Unpacking the May Gaza Flotilla allegations

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