Ship Of Fools

The latest pro-Palestine stunt has come to a ridiculous end - and a stunt is all it ever was.

So Swedish doom goblin Greta Thunberg and her fellow pro-Hamas activists have been deported from Israel in disgrace. On Sunday night Israeli marines boarded their boat and escorted them to the port of Ashdod. Israel promised to deliver the paltry amount of aid the motley crew had on board the vessel, through the organised distribution system they’ve set up; then it offered the activists the chance to see the unedited video of Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October 2023. They refused to watch, of course, because if they were forced to confront the reality of what they’re supporting the cognitive dissonance would be too much for their little brains. Israel generously shrugged its shoulders and simply deported them. Personally I’d have gone full Ludovico Technique and forced them to watch, but that’s just me.

Imagine if A Clockwork Orange was about Greta, not Alex.

Anyway, the voyage of the good ship Madleen is over - but the leftie outrage certainly isn’t. Social media, and indeed Parliament, are awash with squeals of outrage and demands that the British government must Do Something about this fragrant - sorry, flagrant - breach of international law, war crime, act of piracy or whatever else they’re calling it.

Harry Eccles is a socialist activist who works for the NHS. Things he’s not good at include spelling and knowing what words mean.

As well as a frothing tide of social media outrage, at least two MPs - the odious Zarah Sultana and stroppy schoolgirl Nadia Whittome - have demanded government action to free the “kidnapped” crew of the boat (despite Israel having already said it planned to send them home right away). The whole thing is ludicrous, of course. This wasn’t piracy. It wasn’t an illegal boarding. The vessel was attempting to run a blockade, and the whole point of blockades is that the state imposing them is allowed to intercept - and, if met with violence, sink - blockade runners. And yes, that includes Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Israel’s Blockade Is Legal

In 2010 six vessels, including the 4,140 ton passenger ferry MV Mavi Marmara, attempted to run the Israeli blockade of Gaza. While Israel has always allowed the import of anything except military or dual-use goods into Gaza this flotilla was organised by IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish “NGO” (it’s actually closely linked to Turkey’s intelligence agencies and the ruling islamist AKP party). IHH also has links to the Muslim Brotherhood; its German sister organisation, IHH Germany, has been banned over suspected links to Hamas and involvement in smuggling weapons to al Qaeda and jihadist groups in India, Libya and Syria. Unsurprisingly, Israel wasn’t keen on having six IHH-owned ships delivering an unknown cargo to Gaza, and intercepted them off the Gaza coast. When marines boarded Mavi Marmara, activists attacked them with knives and metal bars; the marines opened fire on the attackers, killing nine. In response the UN launched an investigation. Despite the UN’s widely perceived anti-Israel bias, that investigation found that the blockade is legitimate and Israel has a right to intercept blockade runners:

So when the yacht Madleen set off from the Sicilian port of Catania on 1 June everyone already knew she was setting out to run a blockade, and was likely to be intercepted. Still, millions of pro-Palestinian activists have been cheering her on and talking about the vital humanitarian aid Greta and her gang were planning to deliver to starving but oh so very photogenic Palestinian babies.

A starving Gazan tells journalists he can’t feed his children.

This is all nonsense, of course. Madleen’s voyage was never about delivering aid. It was entirely about virtue-signalling and media manipulation. We can tell this from the boat they used.

Let’s start by pointing out that there is no boat called Madleen. There certainly is no “British-flagged aid ship” called Madleen, as assorted idiots have been claiming on X (formerly Twitter). The boat is actually a sixty-foot steel-hulled ketch called Barcarole, which was built in the Netherlands in 1974. She was built by the Van Dam Nordia boatyard at Aalsmeer, and she isn’t an “aid ship”. She’s a custom-built luxury yacht, designed to carry two to four crew as well as six guests in three double cabins, but as she was actually carrying twelve people she’d have been a bit crowded.

An important point to note is that Barcarole was not designed to carry any cargo. She has no cargo hold. She has no hatches for easy loading and unloading. Her interior is entirely taken up by a covered cockpit, sleeping cabins, four small bathrooms, a combined saloon and galley that’s mostly full of couches and tables, and an engine room. There is no space to carry a significant amount of humanitarian aid - but that’s fine, because she wasn’t.

Where’s The Aid?

One of the crew of Barcarole - let’s give her her real name, not the false one she was displaying on her recent voyage - was “French” MEP Rima Hassan. Hassan, who’s actually a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp, is a deeply unpleasant individual who has called the 7 October atrocity “a legitimate act”, but let’s assume she’s a reliable source for the aid Barcarole was carrying. It was, she says, 100kg of flour, 250kg of rice and a small quantity of medical supplies, including crutches. Now, that’s more flour and rice than you can easily bring home from Lidl, but it isn’t actually a lot. It’s six sacks of flour - the size of sack I buy for £15.99 on ebay three or four times a year to feed my bread machine. It’s 20 sacks of rice at £17.99 each, enough to run a smallish Indian restaurant for a week. With two million people in Gaza allegedly starving to death (they’re not really), this isn’t even a drop in the ocean.

If Barcarole is a deeply unsuitable choice for an “aid ship”, she’s also an expensive one. I don’t know how much the Freedom Flotilla Coalition paid for her, but she won’t have been cheap. The last sale I have details for was in 1999, when she was sold for $395,000, but Van Dam Nordia yachts are very desirable. As she seems to be in good condition, it’s likely she’s appreciated in value quite a lot since then. Similar ketches regularly sell, used, for sums in the high six or low seven figures. It’s quite possible Barcarola is worth half a million pounds, and almost inconceivable that she could be purchased (by whom, incidentally? her current ownership is unclear) for less than £250,000.

So why buy a boat that’s so expensive and yet, at the same time, so limited in her cargo-carrying ability? Perhaps it’s because of Greta’s well-known aversion to fossil fuels? After all, when she went to New York a few years ago to harangue world leaders at the United Nations, she famously crossed the Atlantic on a zero-emission sailing yacht.¹ But no, it wasn’t that. Although Barcarole has a ketch rig and five large sails, she appears to have made the whole 1,050-mile voyage from Catania to Ashdod under power. Possibly the sails would have spoiled everyone’s view of the huge Palestinian flag she flew the whole way,. Anyway this boat, which can easily make over ten knots under sail, used her 170hp Volvo Penta engine to trundle along at half that speed instead - burning over 6,000 litres of diesel, belching fumes and dirty exhaust water into the Mediterranean, and spewing out over 20 tons of CO2 along the way.

Environmental purity clearly wasn’t the reason for using a luxury yacht, then. It’s inexplicable, isn’t it? I mean, surely these humanitarians didn’t just want a nice comfortable boat with air conditioning and built-in televisions? No doubt this shall remain forever a mystery. But anyway, let’s look at what they could have used.

Instead of a luxury yacht the Freedom Flotilla Coalition could have bought a fishing boat. These are rugged, can run with just two or three people on board if you don’t have fishing gear to manage, and have capacious holds capable of holding tons of aid. A 60’ trawler - the same length as Barcarole - could easily carry 60 tons of flour or rice and a huge quantity of medical supplies. Best of all, used fishing boats are cheap. There’s a used 60’ trawler for sale in Malta - very close to Sicily - right now for just €15,000:

It has a lovely big hold, too. Just imagine how much food and other aid you could fit in here:

It’s hard to see any reason why an activist group that wanted to deliver humanitarian aid would choose a completely unsuitable yacht instead of a much cheaper working vessel with a huge hold. Of course the fishing boat just has spartan accommodation for six crew, instead of luxury cabins with air conditioning and high-end stereo system, but I’m sure that isn’t it…

No, this farcical voyage wasn’t about delivering aid. It was just a publicity stunt. For the sake of grabbing some media attention, Greta and her friends wasted money and put lives at risk. They’re being lauded as heroes by activists and left-wing politicians - but the truth is they’re performative clowns who didn’t help anyone and never intended to.

How dare you, Greta. How dare you.

1. Apart from the emissions generated by manufacturing her, of course. As that particular yacht was an eight-ton IMOCA 60 racing hydrofoil built of carbon fibre and aluminium, her construction wasn’t particularly sustainable.