You Want to Help Gaza. So Why Are You Still Doing Things That Don’t Work?

Fifteen flotillas, zero breaches — and a map to what actually helps Gaza.

Photo by Rami Gzon on Unsplash

Last week I wrote about the Freedom Flotilla’s stop and seizure in Greek waters, and I argued that the flotilla is not a strategy — it is a refusal to grieve honestly. A few days later, the remaining boats announced they will continue towards Gaza. Of course they will. The script demands it.

Flotillas have now attempted to breach the blockade more than fifteen times since 2008. None have succeeded. None have delivered a single kilogram of aid to Gaza. The ledger is public:

• 2010: The Mavi Marmara. Nine activists killed by Israeli commandos. Cargo never delivered.
• 2015–2024: Multiple attempts. Ships sabotaged in port, boarded at sea, activists arrested, dozens injured. Zero cargo delivered.
• 2026: Boats seized in Greek waters before they could sail. Organisers insist the mission continues. The pattern says it will end the same way — interception, detention, deportation, zero cargo delivered.

This is not pessimism. This is reading eighteen years of evidence and refusing to call repetition “hope.” The flotilla is not a strategy. It is a pressure valve, and the empire loves it precisely because it never arrives.

The trap — why the empire loves your flotilla

Empires have known for millennia that it is safer to channel dissent than to crush it. Alexander absorbed Persian rituals; the British Crown turned radical chartists into petition writers; the modern American empire has perfected the art of giving revolutionaries a safe stage. The flotilla is that stage. It looks dangerous. It feels radical. And it threatens nothing — which is precisely why the governments of the imperial core permit it. They know you will sail, you will be intercepted, and you will fly home feeling you did something. That feeling is the product they are selling you.

Over the last century, protest in the West was systematically divorced from direct action. Marches replaced blockades. Petitions replaced strikes. The state learned to tolerate symbolic dissent because symbolic dissent does not interrupt the flow of F‑35 parts or JDAM guidance kits. Today’s large NGOs borrow revolutionary language while meticulously avoiding any tactic that might actually touch a weapons manufacturer. They turn your rage into a mailing list and your outrage into a fundraiser.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a machine. And your good intentions are its fuel.

You are not the problem — but you are inside a trap

If you are reading this, you genuinely want to help Palestinians in Gaza. You have signed petitions. You have called your representative. You have marched. Maybe you have donated to a flotilla. And somewhere, quietly, you have wondered whether any of it is working.

That thought is not betrayal. It is the beginning of honesty.

You are not the problem.

The problem is a system that extracts your desire for justice and converts it into rituals that produce nothing except the sensation of having acted.

Think about what a flotilla asks of you: a few days on a boat, a rough boarding, a detention centre with WiFi, then a flight home. You risk inconvenience. You gain moral certainty.

Now think about what a flotilla asks of a Palestinian in Gaza : to wait. To hope that this time, maybe, the boats get through. To watch them turned back, again, while the bombs do not pause. While the flotilla sorts out its logistics and its next press release, families in Jabalia are waiting for bread, not headlines. Solidarity that demands a starving population wait while you perform your conscience is not solidarity. It is a luxury.

And notice the story the flotilla tells about Palestinians. It sails with food and medicine, calling itself a humanitarian mission. It rarely speaks of ending the occupation. It rarely names the assault that makes aid necessary in the first place. It frames Palestinians as a starving population in need of delivery, not as a people fighting for liberation who have asked you — explicitly, for years — to block the weapons, to help them meet their basic needs. That framing is not solidarity. It is a saviour narrative, and it positions the activist as the rescuer and the Palestinian as the passive, grateful rescued. Even the language of non‑violence gets bent into a moral licence: as if non‑violence that refuses to physically impede the supply chain is somehow purer than the violence it leaves undisturbed. Non‑violence that does not disrupt the killing is not a principle. It is an aesthetic.

And every pound, euro, and dollar poured into a flotilla that never delivers is money that does not reach a Palestinian‑led fundraising campaign — the kind where Palestinians themselves set the priorities, where a family’s rent or medical supplies can be funded directly. Right now, Hammam Al-Shanti, a nurse who has been volunteering without pay in Gaza’s hospitals since the war began, has a fundraiser on Chuffed to keep his family alive. His home was bombed and destroyed. He and his family have been displaced more than thirteen times. They now live in a small tent. His brother Abood is autistic and disabled; Abood's condition has deteriorated without treatment. Hammam is currently battling the flu in that tent while he waits. The campaign sits there, verified, urgent, unfunded enough. The flotilla spent millions to put activists in Israeli detention for a few days. That same money could have fully funded Nurse Hammam’s campaign and dozens like it — direct transfers to people who do not need your symbolism, just your resources. For over two and a half years, Palestinians have been explicit about what they need: resources, not boats. The flotilla doesn’t just fail strategically. It actively diverts material survival from the people it claims to serve.

A picture of Abood (on the left) and Hammam (on the right) inside a tent

The risk that looks like courage

Flotilla defenders will tell you it’s dangerous. They’ll point to Saif Abu Keshek and Thiago Avila, the latest activists detained by Israel after the Greek seizure; to Chris Smiles, beaten and released on a prior voyage; to Greta Thunberg, assaulted and detained on two separate flotillas. They are right: the danger is real. But ask yourself what that danger actually disrupts. Does it stop a single shipment of F‑35 parts? Does it delay a single JDAM? Risk without strategic effect is courage without a lever. It is suffering that leaves the blockade intact and the weapons lines humming.

A Palestinian in northern Gaza told me recently: “The boats do not help. They never arrive. You want to help? Block the bombs at the source.” This is not an abstraction. It is the ancient logic of every colonised people that has ever faced an empire: you do not petition the machinery. You throw yourself into its gears. He does not need your symbolic suffering. He needs the bombs to stop coming.

Palestinians in Gaza face drone strikes and starvation. Honest solidarity means choosing a tactic whose risk matches the stakes — and then walking into it with open eyes. A beating on a boat that never reaches the shore is a terrible thing. But it is not the same as facing a felony charge to block a weapons shipment. One is a tragedy without strategic weight. The other is targeted risk with a material goal.

Why petitions and phone calls don’t stop bombs

You’ve been told the problem is AIPAC’s money — that a lobby buys your politicians, and if you only shout loudly enough, your representative will finally break free. That explanation offers a comfortable enemy. But it has never explained why the United States arms Israel to the teeth regardless of which party holds power, or why the weapons transfers accelerate even as public sympathy for Palestinians grows.

The real driver is not a lobbying budget. It is imperial strategy. The United States needs a heavily militarised client state standing guard over the land bridge from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. It is fuelled by Christian Zionism, stitched into the American founding myth, and propelled by the manifest destiny that never ended — it just found new frontiers. Your representative is not being forced to comply. They are executing policy. Change.org never stopped a JDAM.

Public opinion has never stopped a bomb from landing. Physical disruption of the supply chain has. That is the entire lesson.

What actually works — and the hard truth about Palestine Action

The only thing that has ever reliably halted an ongoing military campaign, short of full‑scale war, is the physical disruption of its supply chain. Israel’s military does not run on good will. It runs on F‑35s from Lockheed Martin, JDAM guidance kits from Boeing, 155mm artillery shells from General Dynamics, and thermal sights and missiles from RTX (Raytheon). These are not Israeli companies. They are American. And they have factories, warehouses, and logistics hubs in the countries where you live.

Palestine Action has proved the model works. Its activists have shut down Elbit Systems UK facilities, blockaded gates, occupied rooftops, and dismantled equipment. Their actions cost Elbit contracts — over £2 billion lost, according to the group’s own reporting — and forced police to divert enormous resources just to protect arms plants. That is real leverage: the kind that forces corporations to spend millions defending their facilities instead of expanding production, the kind that makes supply chains visible and fragile.

But here is the hard truth: Elbit Systems UK does not make the bombs doing most of the killing. It manufactures drone components and vehicle systems. The bulk of the destruction in Gaza comes from American factories. Lockheed Martin builds the F‑35 fighter jets; Israel just approved a further squadron in a multi‑billion‑dollar deal finalised in early 2026. Boeing supplies the JDAM guidance kits; in early 2026, the US authorised a new package of thousands of additional tail kits. General Dynamics manufactures the 155mm shells — 57,000 sent in one tranche and further contracts awarded in early 2026. RTX provides missiles, cluster munitions, and Iron Dome interceptors. Even if Palestine Action permanently shut every Elbit facility in Britain and the US, the pipeline from Lockheed in Fort Worth, Boeing in St. Louis, General Dynamics in Pennsylvania, and RTX in Arizona would keep running at full capacity. The UK outlets are a minor node in a global supply chain. The real target is American.

And there’s a deeper strategic mistake in stopping at Elbit. Targeting Elbit is correct — it is an Israeli weapons manufacturer, its UK facilities supply the IDF, and Palestine Action’s work has been precise and effective. The problem is not the target. The problem is that the target is incomplete. Elbit is dwarfed by the American giants that supply the bombs, the shells, the F‑35s, the JDAM kits that do most of the killing. Even within the UK, BAE Systems — the country’s largest arms manufacturer — builds components for the F‑35 and sells advanced munitions directly to Israel, rarely facing the same direct action. This is not an argument to stop targeting Elbit. It is an argument to stop pretending that Elbit alone is the supply chain. The weapons that turn Gaza into rubble are British, German, Italian, and above all American. The real target is not only the one that carries the Israeli flag. It is also the one that carries the bombs.

Why hasn’t the same direct‑action model been applied to Lockheed Martin or RTX in the United States? Because the US state does not deport you. It charges you with felonies and locks you in a federal prison for years. The repression is immediate and ferocious. So activists, understandably, choose the route that feels safer. The flotilla offers a few bad days in detention, sympathetic headlines, and a plane ticket home. That is not strategic risk; that is a ritual of innocence. Safety and effectiveness do not travel together. Palestinians get no such choice. They face the drones whether you are comfortable or not.

The ten‑minute start

If you are ready to stop performing and start acting, here is a first step that costs nothing and takes ten minutes.

Open a map application. Type in one of these names: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics. Find the facility nearest to your home — a plant, an office, a warehouse, a recruiting centre. Write down the address.

That is not a ritual. That is reconnaissance. You have moved from “someone should do something” to “I know where the lever is.”

Next, study how Palestine Action disrupted Elbit. Their methods are publicly documented. Then research the facility you found. Learn what it manufactures, its public contracts, its supply chain. Understand how it connects to the weapons pipeline.

Connect with three or four people you trust. No NGO, no steering committee, no fundraising campaign. A small crew that can move without institutional inertia. Then decide what level of pressure you can apply: a public shaming campaign, a shareholder action, a banner drop, or, if you are willing to bear the full legal weight, a peaceful blockade that slows a delivery for a single shift. Start small if you must, but start physical. The aim is to raise the cost of complicity until these companies feel it, not to host a seminar about it.

A word about real risk

Blocking a weapons plant is not a flotilla. It can carry felony charges, prison time, and the full weight of state repression. I am not encouraging anyone to break the law. I am asking you to weigh the risks honestly and make your own choices with full knowledge. Palestinians in Gaza face drone strikes and starvation. When you choose your tactic, measure it against that.

Grieve the flotilla

For eighteen years the flotilla has been an object of attachment. Activists have poured money, time, and hope into boats that never arrive. Perhaps you sailed because the flotilla was the only place your grief felt witnessed. That need was real, and it deserves honour. But it can no longer be the strategy. To admit the tactic has failed requires grieving years of effort. Grief is hard. Defensiveness is easy. So the organisations keep sailing, and they keep asking for your donations, and they keep producing headlines that make you feel something is being done while the bombs continue to fall.

I say this not to diminish the courage it took to sail. That courage was real. But courage without aim is just endurance. Your solidarity kept spirits alive in Gaza when nothing else could. But now the people there are asking for something different. They are asking for strategy, not sails.

The hardest act of solidarity is not sailing into the Mediterranean. It is sitting with the truth that many of your past actions were useless. Not “ineffective in the short term.” Useless. Performances that made you feel good and changed nothing for the people you wanted to help.

That truth hurts. But hurting is not a reason to avoid it. It is the reason to stop.

You are ready for something real

You want to help Gaza. That desire is real. But desire without strategy is just emotion, and emotion without leverage is just a performance.

The flotilla will not reach Gaza. It has never reached Gaza. It will never reach Gaza, because the Israeli navy will always intercept it, and because the governments of the imperial core find it far more convenient to let you sail into a dead end than to face a real disruption in their weapons supply chain.

But you can reach a Lockheed Martin factory. You can reach a Boeing warehouse. You can reach the logistics hub that ships F‑35 parts to Israel. Those places have addresses. They have loading docks. They have supply routes that can be blocked, disrupted, and shut down.

That is not a metaphor. It is a map.

Grieve the flotilla. Grieve the petitions you signed and the calls you made that changed nothing. Then open the map. Find the address. And while you’re there, open Chuffed. Find a Palestinian family’s fundraiser. Fund it directly — because survival is not a symbol, and it cannot wait.

Then act like Palestinian lives depend on what you do next.

Because they do.

For further research: consult the “Who Profits” database, Palestine Action’s corporate research, or supply‑chain targeting guides from the BDS National Committee. Do not donate to another flotilla. Do not sign another petition to your representative. Do something the weapons companies will actually feel. And do something that puts resources directly into Palestinian hands.