Share & more
Around 430 humanitarian activists were seized by the Israeli military from international waters on 18 and 19 May. Footage of their mistreatment circulated rapidly, and the global outcry was immediate. The reaction is valid and justified, but also poses critical and possibly uncomfortable questions.
Why does the humiliation of flotilla activists bring more international attention than a genocidal campaign in Gaza that has killed over 72,000 women, men, and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, a figure researchers believe is likely a significant undercount? More than the documented testimonies of rape, or the other horrific abuses perpetrated against over 9,000 Palestinian prisoners currently held by Israel?
The answer has a name: white supremacy – a structure that quietly ranks human lives by skin colour and passport and determines whose pain registers as tragedy worthy of response and whose disappears as background noise.
White supremacy does more than sort victims. It also sorts perpetrators and dictates how violence is understood. When a white person commits an act of violence, we're told it's an individual failure; an exception. But when a non-white person does the same, it becomes a representation of a culture and a people that is used to justify collective punishment and racist policy implementation.
The flotilla activists understand that their relative privilege as Western passport holders, politicians, journalists, academics, and so on functions as both a protection and an amplification device. Israeli violence against them attracts attention and carries a different cost than violence against Palestinians, precisely because of the supremacist hierarchy that renders people from the Global South invisible.
This logic was explicit in the activists’ messaging upon release from Israeli detention: Testimonies of physical torture, sexual assault, and psychological abuse were shared to emphasise that if Western activists are treated this way, imagine what is being done to Palestinians. The activists deliberately leveraged their own legibility within the Western media system to direct attention to the far graver, systematic abuse of Palestinians to try to trigger public and institutional action.
When perpetrators are racialised or migrant, their actions are swiftly pathologised as inherent criminality or terrorism. When they are white, violence is individualised and explained through personal circumstance or mental health.
The pattern is consistent and historical. The Rwandan genocide, especially in its first critical month, unfolded in near silence on Western front pages, while the Bosnian war, geographically closer to Europe, commanded sustained coverage. Thousands drowning in the Mediterranean are absorbed as statistics to the extent that their deaths – so normalised at this point – don’t even make it into the news. When they do, they are portrayed as reckless choices rather than the direct consequence of Europe's deliberate refusal to open legal routes to asylum. Yet when a submersible carrying five rich tourists sank in the deep sea, the world held its breath for days.
The flotilla activists understand that their identities fit the template the Western imagination finds legible. Their perceived innocence, their ethnicity, and their proximity to whiteness are not incidental to the coverage they receive. They are precisely what make that coverage possible.
The same logic shapes how violence itself is understood. When perpetrators are racialised or migrant, their actions are swiftly pathologised as inherent criminality or terrorism. When they are white, violence is individualised and explained through personal circumstance or mental health.
When Palestinians exercise their right to resist occupation, world leaders, including those in Europe, recite ready-made talking points about “Israel’s security” and “Israel’s right to self-defence”. These frameworks treat the actions of the occupied – the victims of colonial violence – as the cause rather than its consequence. But when a settler-colonial structure commits genocide against two million people, the same world uses a more comfortable explanation: a far-right government, a rogue leader, a Netanyahu problem.
The objective is once again to locate the evil in an individual so that the system producing the individual need not be examined. The same logic applies to soldiers and settlers who burn villages, uproot olive trees, kill Palestinians, and annihilate their hometowns. They are portrayed as isolated extremists, “bad Israelis”, their actions viewed in isolation from the state that arms, funds, and legally protects them.
The same pattern has played out at the European level, where Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir has been represented as the flotilla’s singular villain, conveniently letting the system behind him go unexamined.
The flotilla coverage is not wrong. The outrage is not misplaced. But outrage that does not extend – consistently, urgently – to the more than 72,000 women, men, and children killed in Gaza, to mass detention, to occupation, and enforced statelessness, is not humanitarianism.
In response to mounting pressure over Israel’s persistent and well-documented violations of Article 2 of the EU Association Agreement, which conditions any cooperation with Israel on respect for human rights and democratic values, the EU imposed sanctions on three settlers and four settler organisations on 11 May. The move is presented as accountability. It is closer to the opposite: It names individuals while burying the legal obligation, affirmed by the International Court of Justice, to dismantle the settlements entirely.
Individual sanctions can be effective in cases where the goal is to increase political pressure on decision-makers without causing widespread harm to civilians. However, applying this approach to Palestine misses the point. Israel's occupation is not the product of a few rogue actors. It is a structural, settler-colonial project. Framing it as a problem of individual wrongdoing obscures that reality. Individual sanctions in this context are, therefore, cosmetic at best. At worst, they actively reproduce the logic they claim to challenge, treating Israeli state violence as a series of isolated excesses rather than what it is: a coherent, sustained project of colonial dispossession.
The flotilla coverage is not wrong. The outrage is not misplaced. But outrage that does not extend – consistently, urgently – to the more than 72,000 women, men, and children killed in Gaza, to mass detention, to occupation, and enforced statelessness, is not humanitarianism. It is selectivity. And when we only single out individual wrongdoers because they happen to be white, regardless of their intentions, we end up reinforcing the very system we claim to oppose. We don't just let the victims down. We actively reinforce the inequality that made that double standard possible in the first place.
The flotilla exposed something the sanctions list confirms: We are more comfortable naming villains than dismantling systems. Until the same urgency that mobilised world leaders to condemn the treatment of the flotilla activists is directed at the structures producing the killing, oppression, dehumanisation, and dispossession in Gaza, solidarity will remain a feeling, not a force.
