This is not about me or the others from the flotilla. There are thousands of Palestinians, hundreds of whom are children, who are being held without trial right now, and many of them are most likely being tortured, says Greta Thunberg.
What we have been through is only a small, small part of what Palestinians have experienced. On the walls of our prison cells, we saw bullet holes with bloodstains and messages carved into the walls by Palestinian prisoners who had been there before us.
When I’m about to get off the boat, there are a bunch of police officers waiting for me. They grab me, pull me to the ground, and throw an Israeli flag over me.
Greta Thunberg describes how she is dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron fences. This is a protracted scene that lasts for over six hours, according to Greta, and is confirmed by several participants in the flotilla that Aftonbladet talks to.
It was kind of dystopian. I saw maybe 50 people sitting in a row on their knees with handcuffs and their foreheads against the ground. They dragged me to the opposite side from where the others were sitting, and I had the flag around me the whole time. They hit and kicked me.
They moved me very brutally to a corner that I was turned towards. ‘A special place for a special lady’, they said. And then they had learned ‘Lilla hora’ (Little Wh0re) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Wh0re Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.
The flag was placed so that it would touch me. When it fluttered and touched me, they shouted ‘Don’t touch the flag’ and kicked me in the side. After a while, my hands were tied with cable ties, very tightly. A bunch of guards lined up to take selfies with me while I was sitting like that.
Regardless of what you think about Palestinians, it’s trivial to see that the Israelis are bad guys in this conflict.
Usually, the world is shades of gray, like with Palestinians, so it’s sort of a relief when you can just point to somebody and say, “Well, those guys are clearly the bad guys, and anybody who supports their actions is also bad.”
Unfortunately, all the Israel bots need to do is say “Hamas” and suddenly everyone thinks Israel is a victim.
Bad people can also be victims. They are not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, it’s quite likely that bad people are disproportionately victims. They do something horrible to somebody else, and those people do something back. Sometimes, it’s simple justice or comeuppance, and other times, it’s escalating violence between two groups of detestable people.
Hurt people hurt people.
Israel adopted the victim mentality a long time ago. Yes, they were victims of the Holocaust and yes, the world had treated them like shit for thousands of years.
The thing is that they adopted their victimhood unequivocally and then became like the spoiled child who knows how to manipulate their ‘parents’ to get what they want. And it’s worked.
There was a time when Israel at least tried to act like a nation of people who wanted to grow, but since Netanyahu and his right-wing alliances took power Israel has become no better than Hamas – using genocidal violence to lead.
There’s plenty of Jews out there who saw what Israel would have to do in order to reach their goal of being a Jewish state from the beginning and wanted nothing to do with it. Plenty of Holocaust survivors at the time were very explicitly against the taking of land from a pre-existing population, and understood that to make it a Jewish state you’d need to remove the people there… somehow.
Some Rabbis have even made the argument that even attempting to form Israel in the first place is heretical.
Anti-zionist Jews have been a thing for as long as Zionism has existed.
Do you have an example in mind? Enough people survived that I had assumed this, but then again plenty ended up in Israel as well.
The religious arguments against were definitely a thing, and it took quite a bit of propaganda to get the Sephardis to care either way, since most of the drama was in Europe.
Hajo Meyer
Marek Edelman
Marika Sherwood
Thank you!
More like just Europe. Pre-Roman Jewish history reads pretty similarly to the history of their neighbors. In the Muslim world some stuff happened, but the religions actually agree on a lot, and I’d guess the other various minorities got it worse. In Christendom they were kind of the only group to punch down at, so it got really bad. The Roman period is complicated, and I’m not sure how much is even recorded about the more far flung diasporas.