In the dark of night on June 9,
2025, Israeli military forces intercepted The Madleen, a yacht operated by the
Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), a political-activist group oriented to
getting food and medicine to the residents of Gaza in Israel. Activists from
the E.U., Brazil, and Turkey were on the boat until they were forced onto an
Israeli boat and taken to Tel Aviv’s airport, where they were pressured to sign
a document that they had entered Israel illegally and agreed to be deported.
Once back in the E.U., its activist Greta Thunberg told reporters that Israel had
committed “an illegal act by kidnapping us on international waters and against
our will, bringing us to Israel, keeping us in the bottom of the boat, not
letting us getting out and so on.”[1]
She had agreed to give her written consent to be deported (even if that meant
being permanently banned from Israel, she likely would have welcomed the
stipulation), but she refused to admit that she had entered Israel illegally.
She had, after all, been kidnapped in international waters. Being forced to enter
a country by its government, whose officials reason nonetheless that the
entrance is illegal, merits the spotlight on enquiry, as this actual mindset can
be said to be pathological in nature. I submit that pathology with governmental
sovereignty is never a good mix.
Of her kidnapping in
international waters north of Egypt, over 100 miles from Israel, Thunberg humbly
relativized her own plight by adding, “But that is not the real story here, the
real story is that there is a genocide going on in Gaza, and a systematic starvation
following the siege and blockade now, which is leading to food, medicine, water—that
are desperately needed to get into Gaza—is prevented from doing so.”[2]
Her priority in directing attention to the condition of the residents of Gaza
is eminently valid; even so, I contend that it should not totally eclipse the glimpse
afforded to us by the public response of the Israeli foreign ministry to Israel’s
interception of the boat and abduction of its occupants.
As if Israel’s blockade off the
coast of Gaza extended into international waters, the ministry “insisted the
blockade,” and thus the interception of the boat, “was ‘consistent with
international law.’”[3]
Stating furthermore that “unauthorized attempts to breach” the blockade “were ‘dangerous,
unlawful, and undermine ongoing humanitarian efforts,’” as if one small
humanitarian effort would undermine others as if “collective justice” would
mean that all aid would then be blocked, the foreign ministry was stating,
in effect, that motive is sufficient for such a breach even while a boat
is still in international waters, just north of another country rather than off
Israel’s coast.[4]
As against the international illegality of surrounding a boat in international
waters, harassing its passengers, spraying them with a white irritant, and forcing
them to leave the boat and be taken to Israel (as they were not yet even in
Israeli waters), motive of intent to eventually violate Israel’s
blockade by approaching Gaza from the sea means that Israel did not actually
violate international law. Treating motive as an unauthorized attempt to
breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza even outside Israel’s waters is a misuse of the
military doctrine of preemption, which in turn can be traced back to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq two decades earlier.
Accusing the kidnapped of
illegally entering Israel adds insult to injury. Furthermore, such a cognitive
warping as, “I forced you here and you came here illegally” implies that the
Israeli government had acted illegally, since that government’s action caused
the illegal entry. In addition to twists of reason, the ministry’s statement reveals
something heinous about the mental boxes of the powerful whose use is not subject
to a higher authority and whose unrelenting, still unspent hatred toward
another group warps perception and judgment as well as clear thinking. The
resulting dissidence reflects back on extraordinary arrogance fed by over a
year of de facto impunity internationally in decimating a captive population. “Drunk
with power” is yet another way of characterizing the presumption of arrogance,
which, sadly, is human, all too human. Yet even before the conflagration in Gaza,
before the dreadful yet much more limited attack in Israel on October 7, 2023,
an Israeli government presumed itself entitled to go into another sovereign
country and kidnap Adolf Eichmann, so even though he, unlike the humanitarians
on the boat, deserved his fate in court, the pattern of hyperextending beyond
Israel’s borders to kidnap non-Israelis can be discerned, and this pattern suggests
a sordid mentality of extenuated self-entitlement. Such a mentality running a sovereign
government is problematic internationally, and thus this case reasonably
comes under the purview of the international community.
From this case study’s glimpse of
a problemed mentality of government officials in a foreign ministry, the
absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty, which not only Israel, but
the U.S., Russia, and China have held onto as if it were a sacred dogma, can
and should be up for review. Absent any international coalition of willing
countries to militarily enter Gaza to protect and feed the residents, and
Israel’s ongoing naval blockade of food and medicine, which strongly suggests a
motive to exterminate the population so Jewish settlements could repopulate
Gaza, proposals to check national sovereignty at the global level, whether by removing
vetoes from the UN Security Council, making resolutions by the General Assembly
binding on countries, or establishing a rival institution capable of governance
and enforcement to at least some degree should be considered. To Kant’s point
that an international federation of countries would make peace merely possible
but not probable can be added the crucial element of whether such a federation
would have some governmental sovereignty of its own with which to act as a real
check on abuses of national sovereignty by national governments.
In short, the kidnapping in
international waters by a national government with impunity reveals for
us a mentality that is dangerous when it can draw on national sovereignty to
act out aggressively as a predator. That such a sordid mentality is able to
enjoy Hobbes’ proverbial state of nature of “dog eat dog” (so life is short and
brutish as there is no superordinate power) should be a sign that the post-World-War-Two
world order was in dire need of serious reform or being replaced outright such
that abuses of absolutist national sovereignty could be checked by limited
yet effectual authority beyond the nation-state yet accountable to a
super-majority, with minority rights protected by an international court whose rulings
could be enforced against the resistance of guilty national governments.
The implications of the decision
that was taken by the Israeli government as if its jurisdiction extended into
international waters brings up more than merely that government’s legitimacy,
for the world order itself could then be perceived as woefully inadequate, even
broken. Constructing the UN in the wake of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and
in the midst of the nuclearized Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union
did not go far enough, and thus underestimated the depravity of human
nature drunk with unlimited national sovereignty.
Indeed, the motives and actions
of Israeli officials against the innocent residents of Gaza at the scale of an
entire people to be moved or else exterminated answers the question asked in
the wake of the Second World War of whether the world would learn its lesson.
Evidently, Hitler did not sufficiently jolt humanity into engaging in
sufficient political development internationally, for Netanyahu’s cadre can arguably
be placed in the same class as the Nazis. In a way, the impunity enjoyed by
Israel and its very likely ability to continue as a nation makes this case more
dangerous than that of Nazi Germany from the standpoint of human rights, for
the lesson going forward could be that crimes against humanity do pay off.
Even in refusing to go back to
its 1967 borders, Israel as a country had been in violation of international
law for decades, again with such blatant impunity that the country’s government
went on the offensive against a subjugated and captive population of Muslims.
The mentality is the same as that of kidnapping foreigners in international
waters only to accuse them of illegally entering the country: Ignoring the
violation of international law as to borders (as well as the rulings of
international courts on the occupation of Gaza) only to go on the offensive in bombing
and starving entire cities in Gaza. The mentality of aggression in this case is
two degrees of separation from the normalcy of recognizing and atoning for one’s
own previous actions. It is astonishing that the hubris of arrogance does not
trip over itself as if running on stilts while throwing rocks. Such a mentality
renders the absolutist version of national sovereignty not only dangerous, but
deeply flawed from the standpoint of human nature.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
