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Since 6pm on Wednesday evening, I have spent every waking minute documenting Israel's illegal abduction of 455 international passengers on board the Global Sumud Flotilla, people I was forced to leave behind after my boat broke down on the final stretch.
You may have seen it mentioned in the British press: "Israel's naval ships intercept Gaza-bound flotilla" (BBC News). "Israeli navy intercepts and reroutes Gaza aid flotilla" (FT). One word was conspicuously missing from all headlines: "Israel illegally intercepts Gaza flotilla".
What occurred was unambiguously criminal. In 38 hours, 42 civilian boats were commandeered in international waters by machine gun-wielding soldiers. The unarmed passengers were taken against their will into Israeli territory, denied diplomatic access for over 24 hours and driven to a prison in the desert. They had been exercising lawful rights: to navigate the high seas under maritime law, and to carry aid towards famine under humanitarian law. They never entered Israeli waters, nor would they have, had they not been dragged there.
Piracy. That is how maritime law defines what happened. Under humanitarian law, blocking aid during famine falls under the remit of a war crime. But instead of calling it what it was, our media euphemistically dubbed it an 'interception'. If that is not whitewashing, I do not know what is.
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This is exactly why people sailed: much of our news media, like our governments, has become so implicated in the moral stain of Gaza's genocide that their crumbling defence is to normalise Israel's crimes. Now the global public have lost so much faith in them, that they have literally sailed into the arms of a genocidal army.
I can speak personally to the UK Government's spinelessness, as a passenger on-board the fleet while it was pummelled with drone attacks in high seas during the midnight hours spanning Tuesday to Wednesday last week. My mother called the Foreign Office in the days that followed, begging them to pledge protection for their citizens on the water; they said no.
Three weeks ago when I wrote this column from on-board, my main complaint was that there weren't more journalists with me, leaving news outlets free to diminish such attacks as 'alleged' and 'unverified'. But today I see our media's failings are far greater. Today I see how they legitimised the very propaganda that laid the groundwork for my fellow passengers' abduction.
The day before the midnight drone attacks, Israel's Government and media began referring to the aid ships as the "Hamas flotilla", launching a series of tweets containing what they claimed to be "evidence" that the movement had "terrorist" organisers and intent. In reality, these were petty smears seeking to prove guilt-by-association, rather than documentary proof that the fleet carried anything other than aid and civilians. Nevertheless, baseless lies were elevated to the status of household news by Western journalists.
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LBC ran the headline: "Greta freedom flotilla 'partially funded' by Hamas, Israel claims". The Telegraph wrote: "The Israeli government has repeatedly said the flotilla is a Hamas operation" tailing it with the telling caveat: "without evidence". As if it isn't fatally dangerous to publish such slander when Israel maniacally hurls "Hamas" ...
