Corsairs of the Mediterranean: Israel’s Latest

Act of State Piracy Unmasks the Zionist

Regime, Yet Again

Michael Leonardi

May 22, 2026

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Photograph Source: Global Sumud Flotilla

This has been yet another week of raw Israeli extremism, broadcast live to the world. On May 18th and 19th, 2026, Israeli commandos carried out an act of state piracy in international waters near Cyprus — more than 250 nautical miles from Gaza. They stormed vessels of the international flotillas, brutally detained unarmed humanitarian activists, destroyed equipment, and held dozens hostage. The Squid Game like images of civilians forced to kneel, zip-tied and humiliated, have shocked global conscience.

Wanted International war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu emerged from a military command bunker to triumphantly praise the raid, bragging that Israeli commandos had successfully stopped the unarmed humanitarian flotilla activists from “supporting Hamas.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — himself the subject of an active International Criminal Court arrest warrant — arrogantly dismissed international law, declaring that Israel would continue to act as it pleased regardless of “so-called” legal constraints. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir turned the assault into a sadistic public spectacle. On May 20, he paraded detainees, forcing many to lie face-down on the ground with their hands tightly chained or tied behind their backs, mocking them for the cameras in a grotesque display of fascist cruelty and arrogance. Ben-Gvir, a convicted racist who has long advocated executing Palestinian prisoners by hanging, has repeatedly celebrated such imagery, including wearing a noose pin and posting videos fantasizing about mass executions. His behaviour this week was not an aberration — it was the logical expression of a regime that views Palestinians as subhuman and international law as an inconvenience.

Some have aptly called the Mediterranean Israel’s own or God’s chosen swimming pool — a lawless expanse where the self-proclaimed chosen people believe divine right grants them total impunity to rampage across international waters, throwing basic humanity to the wind in service of their messianic delusions. So far, they have done exactly that, and with complete impunity.

The mission of the flotillas is both immediate and strategic: to break Israel’s illegal naval blockade of Gaza, deliver desperately needed aid, and shine an unrelenting spotlight on the ongoing genocide. Imposed in 2007 as collective punishment, the blockade has long been calibrated through the infamous “Red Lines” policy — allowing just enough food to keep 2.3 million Palestinians on the edge of starvation. Since October 2023, it has helped enable a live-streamed extermination: hospitals systematically destroyed, children dying of malnutrition, entire families erased. With total impunity, backed by Washington and its European allies, Israel has turned Gaza into the most documented slaughter in modern history.

Art by Vauro Senesi

Three coordinated efforts — the Global Sumud Flotilla, the Thousand Madleens to Gaza, and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition — represent the largest civilian maritime challenge to this siege in history. Their deeper goal is to forge a durable, global network of solidarity, connecting ports, unions, cities, and movements in an unbreakable chain alongside the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation.

In Italy, Freedom Flotilla Italia is playing a vital role. Its “100 Ports, 100 Cities” campaign, which departed from Taranto on May 2, combines the sailboat Ghassan Kanafani — named after the legendary Palestinian writer and revolutionary assassinated by Mossad in 1972 — with a mobile caravan that travels from port to inland towns. As the organizers state, the mission is “to build a solid and lasting network to stand alongside the Palestinian people and put the liberation of Palestine at the forefront of the struggle against imperialism and the world powers that enrich themselves through war and unrestrained capitalism at the expense of all of us.” It is also raising essential funds for the besieged Al Awda Hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities in Gaza.

The latest act of piracy has triggered widespread outrage. Saif Abu Keshek, recently released after his previous abduction, was in Rome this week joining protests against this new assault. The courage of the Flotilla activists has only fueled the movement. The story has dominated front pages in Italy and made international headlines, with global leaders, human rights organizations, and ordinary citizens denouncing Israel’s behaviour as a flagrant violation of international law. Yet, as always, condemnation has not translated into concrete action.

This week’s events lay bare Zionism’s essence: a European settler-colonial project, an ethno-supremacist enclave built on stolen land and sustained by relentless violence. Palestinians are the indigenous Semitic people of the region. The European colonizers are not. “Make Israel Palestine Again” is not revenge — it is justice and decolonization.

The moral bankruptcy of the West stands fully exposed. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas offers empty rhetoric about supporting Palestine while the bloc continues weapons supplies and uninterrupted economic cooperation with Israel. Italy under Meloni — whose government carries the living DNA of Italian fascism — and Germany — a country with Nazism still in its blood, now expressed through brutal repression of Palestinian solidarity activists and blind support for Zionism — were instrumental in blocking any serious EU sanctions on the Zionist entity. Their complicity is criminal.

Meanwhile, Trump’s grotesque “Board of Peace” — a cabal of Zionist speculators and evangelical extremists — fantasizes about turning Gaza’s ruins into a luxury Riviera while Palestinians still die under bombs and blockade. This is gangster capitalism at its most depraved.

Despite Israel’s hundreds of millions poured into hasbara propaganda, the mask has fallen. The sadistic reality of Zionism — apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide — is now visible to millions all around the world. The more Israel lashes out in arrogance and brutality, the faster the global awakening spreads. People across the world are connecting the dots: this is not self-defense, but the death throes of a colonial project that can no longer hide its true nature.

The flotillas sail on, in body or in spirit. The resistance at sea continues. The resistance on land must intensify.

Break the siege. End the genocide. Make Israel Palestine Again. Free Palestine!

Michael Leonardi lives in Italy and can be reached at michaeleleonardi@gmail.com

Gaza flotilla activists await deportation from Israel

By AFP
May 21, 2026


Israeli activist Zohar Chamberlain Regev is among dozens of people detained since the interception of the flotilla - Copyright AFP -

Hiba ASLAN

Hundreds of activists seized by Israel from a Gaza-bound flotilla were awaiting deportation on Thursday, as global outcry grows over their treatment in custody.

More than 430 activists from countries around the world were in custody in Israel after they were detained at sea while making the latest in a string of attempts to break the blockade of the Palestinian territory.

Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir sparked condemnation on Wednesday by posting a video showing the detained activists with their hands tied and foreheads on the ground.

Captioned “Welcome to Israel”, the footage showed Ben Gvir heckling and waving an Israeli flag among the detained activists.

On Thursday, the legal centre representing the activists said the flotilla members were “en route for deportation” from Ramon Airport in Israel’s far south.

“The majority of the participants are being transferred to Ramon Airport to be flown out of the country,” Adalah said in a statement, adding that the activists had been held at Israel’s Ktziot prison, in the Negev Desert near Gaza.

Around 50 vessels under the Global Sumud Flotilla set sail from Turkey last week in the latest attempt by activists to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza, after Israeli forces intercepted a previous convoy last month.



– ‘They kicked us’ –



Adalah said one of the flotilla participants who holds Israeli citizenship had a court hearing Thursday, and faced “absurd” charges.

“Israeli authorities are holding her under unfounded and contradictory accusations of ‘illegal entry into Israel’, ‘unlawful stay’, and for an attempt to break the blockade on Gaza,” Adalah said.

Adalah’s legal director Suhad Bishara told AFP Wednesday that the group’s lawyers had been able to give legal counsel to “many” of the hundreds of activists, though she added that others had faced court hearings without legal assistance.

“We know of at least two participants who were hospitalised… both of them were shot by rubber bullets,” Bishara said, adding that others said they feared they had broken ribs.

Alessandro Mantovani, an Italian journalist detained with the flotilla activists and deported before the others, told reporters upon landing in Rome’s Fiumicino airport Thursday that he and others had been “taken to Ben Gurion airport in handcuffs and with chains on our feet and put on a flight to Athens”.

“They beat us up. They kicked us and punched us and shouted ‘Welcome to Israel’,” he said of his treatment by Israeli security forces.

Dario Carotenuto, an Italian MP who was also detained and deported said: “It was really tough… They called us by number… with rifles pointed at us… I think those were the longest seconds in my life.”

The video posted by Ben Gvir sparked resounding condemnation by governments around the world, from Italy to Spain and Australia to Canada.

He was also criticised at home by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, as well as by US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who denounced what he called “despicable actions”.

Francesca Albanese, an outspoken UN expert on the Palestinian territories, called on Italy, where she is from, to take action.

“Words do not suffice: let Italy stop opposing the suspension” of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, she wrote on X.



– Fragile truce –



Israel controls all entry points into Gaza, under blockade since 2007.

Since the Israel-Hamas war began with the Palestinian militant group’s attack on October 7, 2023, the vast majority of Gaza’s population has become aid-dependent and forcibly displaced at least one.

While a fragile ceasefire took hold in the territory last year, Gaza still suffers severe shortages of food, medicine and other essential supplies, with Israel at times halting aid deliveries entirely.

A previous flotilla attempt was intercepted last month in international waters off Greece, with most activists expelled to Europe.

Two were brought to Israel, detained for several days and then deported.

The Nakba Never Stopped

Monadel Herzallah

 May 20, 2026

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“Arab residents being forced out of Haifa, by the armed Haganah men, April, 1948.” per Haaretz – Public Domain

My grandmother used to keep a rusted iron key in a small wooden box lined with faded velvet. As a child, I thought it was just a broken relic, but every time she held it, her eyes would grow distant. That key, she told me, once opened the front door of their family home that I have never seen in Beir Al Sabaa —  in a neighborhood now erased from every map but the one burned into our memory. When my grandparents were forced to leave in 1948, they carried that key, the clothes on their backs, and the unshakable conviction that they would return in a week or two. Seventy-eight years later, that key still sits in a box, and we are still waiting.

The Nakba — the catastrophe — did not end in 1948. It continued in different forms, deepening Palestinian suffering while also sharpening a new awareness: among Palestinians, yes, but also among a global generation that refuses to unsee what it has witnessed. What we do with that awareness, together, will determine whether this moment becomes a genuine turning point or just another chapter of outrage that fades.

For millions of Palestinians, May 15 is not an abstract date. It is a wound that never closed. The 1948 Nakba was the violent expulsion of over 750,000 people, the destruction of more than 500 villages, and a deliberate campaign of terror designed to erase a society. But as the Palestinian revolutionary writer Ghassan Kanafani taught us through his analysis of the 1936–1939 revolt, the catastrophe did not come out of nowhere. It was prepared by years of colonial manipulation, internal division, and a reliance on outside forces that ultimately betrayed the struggle. The defeat of that revolt, Kanafani argued, was a blueprint for understanding how liberation movements fail — not from a lack of courage, but from a lack of unified strategy, self-reliance, and clear-eyed analysis. It is a lesson that applies not only to Palestinians but to every solidarity movement that wants to be more than a moment of moral feeling.

And the Nakba never stopped. It simply changed uniforms. In September 1993, the Oslo Accords were signed, marketed to a weary people and a hopeful world as the path to peace. Instead, Oslo became a major defeat for the resistance. It fragmented Palestinian territory into zones of control, transformed a liberation movement into a security subcontractor for the occupation, and removed the refugees and the right of return from the negotiating table entirely. As one Arab analyst wrote, “Imposed peace — peace by coercion and criminality — is utterly void, a humiliating surrender.” Oslo was exactly that: an attempt to impose peace through power, to replace national rights with a deal that dissolved the cause into administrative zones. But history proves you cannot bomb collective memory into submission. National rights do not die. Identity cannot be erased by settlement agreements, no matter how many signatures are forced onto them.

Today, the most savage form of the continuing Nakba is unfolding in Gaza. Since October 2023, a genocidal state has been carrying out an all-out war that is nothing less than the accelerated ethnic cleansing of an entire population. Mass killing, deliberate starvation, the annihilation of entire family lines, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, and universities — all funded and armed by Western governments. For US taxpayers, this is not a foreign tragedy in which you have no part; it is a crime enabled by your tax dollars, your political institutions, and your silence. The outrage that has poured into the streets around the world is righteous, but outrage alone cannot stop a genocide that is produced by long-standing structures of power. We all — Palestinians and every person who seeks justice — must transform this immense energy of determination and anger into energy that actually changes the world we live in, the world that has so far proven incapable of stopping the slaughter.

This is the hard truth that solidarity must now confront. Many of us have participated in marches, shared infographics, or pressured our representatives, yet the bombs continue to fall. This does not mean our actions are meaningless; it means we have not yet built the kind of sustained, strategic, and disruptive movement required to shift the calculations of empire. Kanafani’s analysis of 1936–1939 is again instructive here. He showed that a revolt can burn brightly and still be crushed if it lacks unified political leadership, independent resources, and a strategy that targets the enemy’s structural vulnerabilities rather than just reacting to its provocations. Solidarity today faces a similar challenge: to move beyond episodic moral expression toward long-term, organized pressure capable of severing the military, economic, and diplomatic arteries that keep the occupation and its genocide on life support.

This means, concretely, that commemorating the Nakba cannot remain an annual ritual of memory alone — whether in a refugee camp or at a rally in a Western capital. Memory is essential; it is the condition of survival for an uprooted people. The keys to the old homes must still be held high. But memory becomes a trap when it substitutes for the hard work of building institutions, knowledge, and strategic campaigns. We need, as another writer urged, to turn the commemoration of the Nakba into a space of collective labor: oral history projects, legal documentation, political education in camps and community centers, and the construction of independent research institutions that can arm the movement with data and strategies that outlast any single news cycle.

This essay is not only for Palestinians. It is for everyone who, over the past months, has filled the streets of London, New York, Sana’a, Johannesburg, and a hundred other cities, outraged by a genocide unfolding in real time. It is for the activist in Chicago who feels their protest has not yet stopped the bombs, and for the taxpayer in Boston beginning to realize that their money is directly funding the destruction of children’s bodies in Gaza. If you have ever asked yourself what more you can do, this is for you.

For supporters of the Palestinian struggle, this means reorienting our solidarity from a posture of pity or guilt to one of partnership and strategic alignment. It means understanding that the right of return is not a metaphor; it is a legal and political demand that must be studied, explained, and advocated for in our own societies. It means challenging the anti-Palestinian frameworks embedded in Western media, academia, and legislation — not just once a year, but as an ongoing campaign. And it means recognizing that the same systems that displace and kill Palestinians are also connected to wars, austerity, and surveillance at home. Our liberation is bound together.

Seventy-eight years of ongoing Nakba have not extinguished the right of return; they have clarified it. And the global uprising of conscience we witnessed in recent months has shown that millions of people are ready to be part of this clarification. What is needed now is not to let that fire dissipate into despair or mere commemoration, but to channel it into the unglamorous, patient, and coordinated work of building political force. As Kanafani insisted, the question is not whether justice is on our side — it is whether we are prepared to organize with the same seriousness as those who deny it.

Notes.

Al-Nakba — “the catastrophe” — refers to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, during which over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced and more than 500 villages destroyed, creating the world’s most protracted refugee crisis.

The 1936–1939 Palestinian revolt was a mass anti-colonial uprising against British rule and Zionist settlement, whose defeat, analyzed in depth by Ghassan Kanafani, revealed strategic weaknesses that would pave the way for the Nakba a decade later.

Citation.

Kanafani, Ghassan. The 1936–39 Revolt in Palestine. (Originally published as Thawrat 1936–1939.

Monadel Herzallah, Ed.D., is a co-founder of the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN). He is an educator and labor organizer. and a life-long activist for a Free Palestine and the liberation of all peoples.