Flickering Flags

Hold in your thoughts the brave souls throwing themselves on the mercy of the merciless.

If only I could sculpt the words to shape the lump in my throat every time I see the smiling faces and the flickering flags of the Global Sumud Flotilla as it heads east, picking up more boats, more people, a milquetoast military escort, as it goes.

They’re good at social media, across many organisational and personal Instagram accounts, and my window onto the digital collective mind is full of it. The soundtrack knocks the nail home. I cried when I watched a crew member playing ‘Bella Ciao’ on the violin, or another reel, with a beautiful Mediterranean sunset and Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’.

‘Love, love is a verb, love is a doing word.’

And we know they’re doing what we didn’t, or can’t, or won’t, wringing our hands at the unfolding massacre. I am as guilty of inaction as any shame-faced nation-state, hiding behind bleak poetry of witness, for what it’s worth, which might not be nothing. I wrote something about poetry sending ripples and ripples becoming waves, and know that it must be cold out there at night, under way over the ancient sea.

They thread between cities and the remnants of fallen civilizations, many the foundations of the West’s antiquity and its origin stories. Barcelona, Genoa, Catania, Tunis, Syros, then on to the ‘Holy Land’. Like lacing together a fishing net, they draw in more boats from across the sea, the Maghreb, and other oceans beyond. I was reading about the 1190 massacre of the Jews of York, then later, about the burning of the library of the Madrasa of Granada, a bitter, vengeful conflagration of knowledge and scholarly endeavour. A thousand years of burning books and the people who wrote them. It is a modern human triumph that the flotilla has members of all three ‘peoples of the book’; Christians, Muslims, Jews.

Here inland, just a sierra of mountains removed from the Mediterranean, early autumn is an almost impossibly beguiling season of cooling nights and by day, vivid Majorelle skies, the golden sun’s wind-gilded light. I think of the people on the flotilla, under the same sun, their day-to-day. You can watch the evident blossoming of firm friendships evolving on deck, between security trainings and the media and social media hoopla, as they leave Greece and head towards international waters, into the near-certainty of peril.

Because I have no doubt that Israel is coldly gaming its response, every day, attempting to determine how much it can get away with and whether it hurts or advances their cause. In 2010, the Gaza Freedom flotilla was boarded by Israeli forces, killing nine of the activists. This, and many other recent, less lethal attacks, must be uppermost in the minds behind the smiling faces I see on social media.

And what smiles. I can only hazard a guess as to the composition of the crew; the many seasoned activists, some grizzled sea dogs and marine mechanics, a significant cohort of politicians, including the former mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau, widely sanctified in city graffiti as La Santa Ada. There are doctors and journalists, actors and musicians, stand-up comics, a few sea-hippies and of course, Greta Thunberg.

It must be intense, as the pressure of threat and harassment is ratcheted up and they sail closer every day to the story’s denouement. I’m sure they’re wondering to what extent their naval escort will intervene in the face of a more robust attack from Israel. The Spanish patrol boat on its way is called Furor ; fury. If ever my Spanish taxes were for anything, it would be to defend this flotilla with a noble and righteous fury.

Smiles, tears, fury. I am inspired by the fury of activist and journalist Abby Martin as she asks, “What’s next?….Is this really the world that we’re going to live in, where this state can commit these crimes on camera with impunity? Proudly..” Watch her give voice to her anguish here:

https://youtube.com/shorts/U29YiP47260?si=C6uFs8WxDXuhYAfm

As we wonder about the scenarios being gamed in a now semi-pariah state, driven out of its mind by pitiless violence and towards a conclusion that may question its very survival, I almost can’t bear to watch the flotilla. How will Israel deal with over 50 vessels, with thousands of participants from more than 44 countries, the largest civilian-led maritime convoy in history? Killing them all is probably not off the menu, or disappearing at least some of them into its terrible gulag, for torture, as ‘terrorists’. This knowledge must backlight the daily ruminations of the brave souls onboard, among them some people I recognise as spoddy English suburbanites, who’ve probably never known a moment of raw, desperate joy and rightful intention such as this.

I also wonder what quantity of aid these small yachts and motor cruisers can carry, how much baby formula, given the scale of the need in Gaza, probably not much. What they carry, of course, is all of our hope and our collective conscience. I sense the intersectionality at the heart of the mission, with Greta Thunberg on board, about the wider choices we make between a world of humanity or an inexorable decline into war and chaos, a decline that feels almost inevitable to me.

Like Abby Martin, I think of this world into which we’ve born our children, what unspeakable things may lie ahead. One son, sometimes stalked by an understandable nihilism, listens when I tell of my grandparents, who survived WW2 and raised families, who walked those famous ‘sunlit uplands’. They made it to the other side, after the darkest retreat into our savage human impulses shook the world and them with it. That darkness too, was resisted, by quiet saints like Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian peasant farmer who refused to fight for the Nazis and was further immortalised in Terence Malick’s beautiful film; ‘A Hidden Life’. If you haven’t seen it, now is as good a time as any to ask yourself what you’d do, or what you’re doing.

Watch the trailer here:

In the US, Trump’s eye of Sauron now falls on Portland, where his regime no doubt hopes to prompt an incident or provocation that stiffens their sinews enough to declare their Reichstag moment and a subsequent American-branded enabling law. Steven Miller will scream from his pulpit, evoking Goebbels’ Sportpalast speech of total war, and the die will be cast, the world we have known in the West will come apart.

Whatever happens to the people, my kind of people, on the Global Sumud Flotilla, I take courage, between tears of fear for their safety and something approaching prayer. I take it from the hope that we may make it to a future in which they will be justly lionized for their courage. I too, I remind my son, sit on the other side, writing this in a house from which the occupants once fled the advancing fascists in terror, over 85 years ago. One day, when my son was very small, we stumbled across the memorial on London’s South Bank to the 525 British and Irish volunteers who died in Spain’s civil war, with a paraphrased quote from Cecil Day-Lewis’ poem ‘The Volunteer’ carved into its plinth:

‘They went because their open eyes could see no other way.’

Moved as I was, I wanted to write something beautiful about the flotilla, because it was the beauty of its all-encompassing purpose that shook me. A fierce hope for a better world, in every sense, as it does its best to descend into an all-too-familiar mayhem. Editing suggested I’d used the word ‘horror’ many times, so as one does, I reached for synonyms.

After looking this over, this pile of words, I walk to the coffee machine, make bread, tend to my chickens. At the other end of the ancient sea I can sometimes sniff on the wind, a humble, hungry family from some other sunny terraces of ancient olive trees will have had a tragedy detonated in its heart overnight, a pain almost beyond words. So back to the sea and the flickering flags, onward to the east, keep those brave and beautiful, even goofy faces, their defiant and hopeful smiles, in your thoughts. They are throwing themselves on the mercy of the merciless. Godspeed. x