Israel Is Trying to Smear the Gaza Aid Flotilla As ‘Terrorists’. We Must Not Let It
Sound the alarm.
by Yanis Varoufakis
21 September 2025
Israel’s tactic is tried and tested. Before or after it has attacked, maimed or killed anyone it wants to ‘take out’, it calls them Hamas. As these lines are written, Israel is deploying the same smear campaign against the Global Sumud Flotilla, the magnificent people – including doctors, lawyers, journalists, students, workers and parliamentarians – who are sailing toward the blood-soaked Gaza coast to break Israel’s siege of a devastated land on which its genocide of two million Palestinians is proceeding at a mechanical, ruthless, calculated pace.
Unsurprisingly, as dozens of boats converged from all over the Mediterranean on a common course toward Gaza, the Israeli propaganda machine began to scream ‘Hamas!’ at the top of its lungs, plastering in red the words ‘HAMAS FLOTILLA’ on photographs depicting its boats. “This is not humanitarian. This is a jihadist initiative serving the terror group’s agenda,” screeched Israel’s Foreign Ministry. But that’s not all.
If you googled the words “Global Sumud Flotilla” on Saturday, the search results you got could have been written by the Israeli propaganda machine. They include sponsored websites with titles such as “The Flotilla’s Real Goals… How are ‘humanitarian’ campaigns exploited?”, “Unmasking The Sumud Flotilla” and “Are ‘humanitarian’ flotillas just propaganda? Read the facts.” Anyone who reads further in search of the promised ‘facts’ is exposed to the clincher smear: Hamas is behind the flotilla.
It is, of course, no coincidence that Google plays the role of megaphone on behalf of the Israeli genocide machine. Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian Territories, along with its genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, is Big Tech’s ideal laboratory and testing ground. As Francesca Albanese’s report ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide’ to the United Nations revealed, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, along with Microsoft, Amazon and Palantir, have been expanding their cloud capital services at a breathtaking pace. Face recognition software, target selection algorithms and automated execution systems are being tested in real-time, at will, and with fewer ethical constraints than in experiments on laboratory rats. Big Tech could not be happier!
But enough on the political economy of genocide and Big Tech’s complicity in it. What we have here, now, is an active smear campaign which is unfolding in preparation for a strike at the brave people sailing toward Gaza to save our souls – to proclaim loudly and clearly ‘NOT IN OUR NAME’ on behalf of you and me.
These people, our people, are about to be attacked, abducted, imprisoned or worse. Their smearing is the first act in a fresh Israeli war crime. This is not the time for analysis but for action. This is the time to sound the alarm bells, to do whatever it takes to increase Israel’s discursive and propaganda losses from ‘taking out’ the brave women and men of the Global Sumud Flotilla.
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The first thing we need to do is to tell the world the truth about the people on board the flotilla. To counter their depiction by Israel as jihadists hell-bent on the destruction of the Jews. And the best way of doing this is by letting them speak in their own words. Words like those of David Adler, my friend, comrade and associate, who sent us a long letter explaining why he boarded in Tunis the good ship ‘Family’, alongside Novara Media’s Kieran Andrieu, to set sail for Gaza. In his letter, David said:
“We are now reaching the two-year mark of this genocide: two years scrolling through unbearable images of slaughter, two years witnessing our governments enable it, two years feeling powerless to stop them.
Coming from a Jewish family in the United States, I experience that feeling as acute outrage: crimes against humanity committed in my name, for my ‘safety’, with the symbolism that once adorned my synagogue. My identity, for me, thus implies a special responsibility to do whatever I can to stop the killing, save lives, and confront the State of Israel that distorts my identity for its genocidal agenda.”
This is the kind of person that the Israeli Foreign Ministry describes as an antisemitic terror supporter. Normally, it would be merely a smear, at worst incitement to others to ‘take out’ David, to leave him unmourned if some crazed gunman takes a shot at him, thinking he got a terrorist. But, no, this is not what Israel is doing.
As you are reading this, Israel is preparing to violate international law by attacking their vessels. Put differently, Israel is in the business of inciting itself to take out David and his flotilla fellow travellers. Only we can stop them. How? By making enough noise, raising consciousness sufficiently now so that the cold, calculating minds of the Israeli genocide functionaries understand that taking our people out will cost them more in propaganda brownie points than they will gain.
As always, it is up to us. Let’s stop Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla now!
Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician.
