RSS
German man accused of posing as a Jew and peddling fake, antisemitism-laced Holocaust story
BERLIN (JTA) – A retired teacher living in a tiny German island town has been promoting himself as a Jew under the mantle of an official program designed to introduce non-Jews to Jewish people and practices.
But Frank Borner is not part of the “Meet a Jew” initiative operated by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the organization says.
In fact, there is no evidence that Borner is Jewish at all — and yet he has been offering a first-person perspective on being Jewish in Germany to audiences with few such opportunities, making comments sometimes smacking of antisemitism.
“The damage done by such charlatans to such an important project is great,” the Central Council said in a statement.
Borner appears to be another iteration of the “costume Jew” who advertises a false Jewish identity and builds a career or public persona around it. The phenomenon has long simmered in Germany, where Jewishness sometimes holds unusual fascination because of the Holocaust. It has become a public fixation this summer after a high-profile case emerged: that of Fabian Wolff, 33, a journalist who recently revealed that he is not actually Jewish after functioning for years as a Jewish frontman for left-wing Israel critics.
Unlike Wolff, Borner did not reveal himself. Instead, he was outed by German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder in the Die Welt newspaper in late July after Broder attended a talk that Borner was delivering in the village of Petersdorf, on the island of Fehmarn. Broder raised concerns about inconsistencies, inaccuracies and gaps in Borner’s family story — and he noted that Borner invoked antisemitic stereotypes during his presentation.
For example, Broder noted, Borner said his family emigrated to the United States after the war: to “New York and Hollywood, both full of Jews, firmly in Jewish hands.” According to Broder, no one in the audience expressed surprise at this comment, which overlaps with antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish power.
Reached via email for a comment, Borner referred the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to the Gospel of Matthew in the Christian Bible: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
He later emailed an additional note. “During German fascism from 1933 to 1945, Germans hunted down Jewish fellow citizens,” he wrote. “In today’s Western democracy, Jewish people prey on other Jewish fellow human beings.”
The German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder, seen here in 2012, happened to be in the audience for a “Meet a Jew” presentation in Petersdorf auf Fehmarn, where he found the presenter’s story to be inconsistent. (Popow/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
Borner also told JTA that he and his family have never belonged to an official Jewish community in Germany, although he insisted that he has Jewish ancestry. “We have always belonged to a liberal-political Judaism,” he wrote.
The case highlights the role of Jews in the German popular imagination. “This is a widespread situation, especially in Germany, that people make themselves out to be Jews or see themselves as such, although they are not,” German Jewish historian Julius Schoeps said in a report last month about “Jewish fake identities and the question of ‘why’” on Deutschlandfunk radio.
“I just think it’s a syndrome, a syndrome that is deeply rooted in German society,” Schoeps said. “It’s a problem that has to do with people suffering from the past. And this problem can indeed take on strange forms.”
Masquerading as a Holocaust survivor or as someone with Holocaust trauma in the family is not limited to Germany. The phenomenon is sometimes called the Wilkomirski Syndrome, after the Swiss author whose 1995 best-selling “autobiography” about surviving the Holocaust turned out to be a fake.
In another notable case, the late German historian Sophie Hingst composed a family tree of Holocaust survivors and victims and even sent 22 pages of testimony for nonexistent people to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and archive, before Der Spiegel magazine revealed that she had a Protestant background. Hingst died by suicide four years ago, shortly after the magazine made her story public.
Journalist Kirsten Serup-Bildfeldt pointed out in the Deutschlandfunk report that many such cases involve individuals who feel guilt and shame over the Nazi past and desire to be identified with the morally correct side of history.
Among the sensational cases she mentioned, without identifying the people by name:
The head of a small German Jewish community who resigned after Spiegel magazine published a story in 2018 that questioned his biography.
A man who posed as a survivor and told his story to school groups, including the detail that his father died in the Buchenwald concentration camp — when in fact, his father was a soldier in the Nazi army.
A woman who served as a Jewish community leader in a former East German city before German unification but whose claim to Jewish heritage was challenged.
A vocal critic of Israel who claimed to be the child of survivors but had a regular German housewife mother and a father who was a Wehrmacht soldier.
“This biography was her way to get into the position of a supposed Jew in order to speak against Israel,” says Serup-Bildfeldt, who is not Jewish. “People who do this are doing enormous damage to the Jewish community. It is more of a psychological problem than a political one, but they also do political damage.”
In Borner’s case, the damage could come in the form of reinforcing antisemitic stereotypes at a time when they are seen to be on the rise. That trend is one reason that the Central Council of Jews in Germany launched the “Meet a Jew” initiative in 2020 and grew it to include 600 talks by 500 volunteers last year. The goal, the council said, was to shift attention away from the past.
The “Meet a Jew” project brings Jewish volunteers into classrooms to talk about their experiences. (Courtesy of Meet a Jew)
“Our idea is really to introduce modern-day Jewish life, and to give Jewish people a face and a voice,” Masha Schmerling, the program director at its launch, told JTA at the time.
Borner said little about contemporary Jewish life when he addressed groups twice in June at a citizens’ information center in the town of Petersdorf, saying, “Here on the island I am considered to be a Jew.” Broder was in the audience for the second session.
His talk focused on his family’s Holocaust history. In addition to his comments about Jewish control of Hollywood, Borner also repeated other antisemitic tropes. He said he was interested in “why the Jews went to the slaughter like sheep,” saying, “Why did the Jews do that? They were people with money, with international connections!” according to Broder’s report.
Borner also reportedly said that there was a special Jewish “capacity for suffering” connected with the “victim role” that clung to Jews “archetypically, like primordial slime.”
Broder wrote that the audience “neither questions nor disagrees” when Borner refers to Hollywood, and “listens in silence” as he discusses Jewish victimhood.
For Broder, red flags flew as Borner told his story. When speaking about the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938, Borner described its orchestrator — Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels — as “a philologist with a PhD who wrote very beautiful poetry.” The pogrom was “the first central experience for our family,” said Borner, adding that his grandfather — a doctor — was taken by surprise, even though one of his patients had warned him.
The German island of Fehmarn is home to vacation colonies and one man who is publicly advertising himself as a Jew despite not having any evidence to support his story. (Frank Molter/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Broder points out, Jewish doctors were not allowed to have non-Jewish patients after the summer of 1938.
The question of whether Borner has any Jewish roots remains unanswered. He insists that he does, but he refused to tell Broder where his supposedly Jewish side of his family had lived and provided only sketchy details about their persecution under the Nazis.
When Broder asked where Borner’s Jewish family had lived, “he disposed of the question in the trash bin of history, with one sentence: ‘I don’t wish to say that now.’”
Broder identified three different stories that Borner had offered about his grandfather’s fate. At the “Meet a Jew” event Borner said he had been beaten to death during the Kristallnacht pogrom, known in Germany as Reichspogromnacht. In a Facebook post, Borner said his entire family survived the war because they fled the country. Finally, Borner told the Lübecker Nachrichten newspaper that his grandfather committed suicide in a concentration camp.
Broder reported that relatives contacted the newspaper later and told them the story was not true.
How Borner ended up back in Germany remained a mystery in his “Meet a Jew” talk, where he said he had been to Israel a few times with his parents, in the early 1950s. “Which is kind of astonishing,” Broder noted in his report, “since he said he was born in 1956.”
—
The post German man accused of posing as a Jew and peddling fake, antisemitism-laced Holocaust story appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
It’s Important That We Know the Truth About the Aid Situation in Gaza
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Heads you win, tails I lose. That’s how it feels watching the world’s reaction to Israel and America’s new food aid model in Gaza.
For months, Israel was condemned for not letting enough aid in and for blockading aid until the hostages were released. Now that Israel is letting in food directly — but cutting the corrupt United Nations and the Hamas terrorists out of the picture — those same voices are howling even louder.
First, the accusation was: “You’re starving Gaza!” Now, it’s: “You’re weaponizing aid!” and “You’re manipulating Gaza’s hunger!” Heads you win, tails I lose. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It’s utterly grotesque.
The images from Gaza tell the real story. Thousands of hungry people, many of them openly and unabashedly critical of Hamas, lining up at distribution points — eager to accept boxes of food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is quietly, without fanfare, working with Israeli and American support.
Suddenly, we are witnessing a population that’s been exploited and abandoned by Hamas and used as political pawns by the UN finally ready — and finally able — to challenge their oppressors.
Yet instead of celebrating this breakthrough, the usual chorus of international do-gooders — all of them card-carrying haters of Israel and America — are up in arms.
The UN leadership is outraged at being usurped from its traditional role as the world’s perpetual busybody. Apparently, if the UN is to be taken at its word, delivering aid outside of Hamas’s control somehow violates humanitarian norms.
Even European diplomats are muttering darkly that this new scheme is some kind of Israeli conspiracy.
And it goes without saying that academics in distant universities are warning about “the instrumentalization of aid for war purposes.” Has anyone in all of history ever uttered something quite so ridiculous? In any event, try telling that to the Gazan father, who eagerly thanked “everyone who helped us” to a reporter on the scene.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Since the October 7th Hamas-perpetrated atrocity and the war against Hamas that followed, all these same voices have been deafeningly silent as Hamas turned food and medicine into tools of terror. Surely, that was “the instrumentalization of aid.”
But they said nothing while Hamas stole international donations in plain sight, extorted desperate families at military checkpoints, and funneled the profits into weapons and ever more violence. Now, as soon as Israel steps in to break that deadly cycle—taking real risks to ensure that Gazan civilians aren’t starved or blackmailed—these critics suddenly find their voices. But instead of using them to support real humanitarian work, they stridently protect the “principles” of an aid system that Hamas has been openly using as a cash cow.
It’s easy to stand in Geneva or New York and patronizingly tut-tut about “neutrality.” It’s much harder to look a starving child in the face and say: “Sorry, we can’t give you food unless your terrorist overlords sign off on it,” or “There’s food for you, but you can’t have it because it’s the Israelis giving it out.”
This is the greatest moral inversion of our times: Israel’s “sin” is that it’s doing what every serious humanitarian ought to do: stop the abuse of aid by criminals and ensure that food actually reaches the hungry.
Hamas is so eager to keep control, and its international enablers are so equally keen to keep Hamas from being ousted, that a shooting last week at a food collection point quickly became an international incident. The so-called mass casualty event occurred as hundreds of Gazans made their way to the only open distribution center in Rafah.
The Hamas-controlled “health ministry” claimed that 31 people were killed and nearly 200 wounded in the pre-dawn shooting near the site — and of course, inevitably, Israel was guilty of a deliberate massacre.
But even as news outlet after news outlet blindly reported the atrocity, the IDF denied responsibility and later published an audio recording featuring a local Gazan who insisted that it had been Hamas, not Israel, that opened fire. “They don’t want the people to receive aid,” he told an Israeli officer. “They want to foil the plan so that the aid will go to them, allowing them to steal it. They’ve gone completely bankrupt.”
The Torah in Parshat Nasso teaches us about the Nazir, someone who vows to separate themselves from wine and other mundane aspects of ordinary life for a period of spiritual self-discipline. The Torah says, “for the crown of his God is upon his head” (Num. 6:7).
It’s a powerful image: by abstaining from doing what others do, the Nazir isn’t running away from the world. Instead, they’re being true to themselves — choosing to do the right thing, even if it means breaking from routine in order to achieve something positive. And for that, they are depicted as having the crown of God on their heads.
The commentators add that the Nazir’s vow of abstention is really about reclaiming control. Instead of being pulled in every direction by outside influences — whether it’s peer pressure, popular opinion, or the desire to fit in — the Nazir says: “Enough is enough. I will not be ruled by these forces. I will decide my own path.”
That’s precisely what Israel’s new aid model is doing. Israel has finally, and wisely, entered into the status of Nazir. For too long, everything about the “aid system” in Gaza has been governed by what everyone else thinks is right and what Israel should or should not be doing or allowing on their borders.
But Israel the Nazir has taken a vow of abstention. Instead of working with the UN, they’ve taken a stand. They’re saying: “Enough. We will not let terrorists decide who eats and who starves. We will take control of the situation and do what is right for us and for those who are most in need.”
And yes, it’s messy. The Torah itself acknowledges that the Nazir’s vow isn’t the norm — it’s a response to a world that the Nazir feels is no longer working for them. But when everything around you is distorted, you’ve no choice but to do something radical to restore balance.
So here we are: Israel, with America alongside it, is stepping in to provide real aid — no strings attached, no financial siphon for Hamas’ tunnels, no middlemen selling precious food that was meant to be free so they can fund terror. And just as every Nazir in history has been seen as odd or extreme, Israel is being seen as venturing outside accepted norms.
But the Torah says that when you stand apart from the mob and refuse to play by their twisted rules, you wear a crown of holiness: “The crown of his God is upon his head.”
No Nazir was ever perfect. That’s a given. Neither is Israel perfect, nor is this new system. But to those who can’t see past their own dogmas, who only find their voices when Israel acts to fix the mess they ignored –maybe it’s time to take a lesson from the Nazir. Be independent. Worry about your spiritual and moral responsibilities. And whether the rest of the world turns their noses up is unimportant.
Because when you do that, it’s heads I win, and tails you don’t lose.
The author is a writer in Beverly Hills, California.
The post It’s Important That We Know the Truth About the Aid Situation in Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
There Is Trouble on Campus as the 2024-2025 Academic Year Ends
Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The Spring semester has ended with higher education in upheaval. The political and economic relationships with the Federal government are now rapidly changing, with billions of taxpayer funding frozen or and foreign student visas on hold.
Here are some recent incidents that have occurred on campus:
- Protestors briefly and violently occupied a library at Columbia University. Later reports indicated they were mostly Columbia students, Some 65 students were suspended by the university with many barred from campus. In court, the group’s lawyer described the action as a “teach-in”;
- At the University of Washington, pro-Hamas and Antifa protestors occupied a newly opened engineering building, setting fires and damaging equipment. Over 30 arrests were made, and damage to the building was estimated at $1.2 million. The state’s governor claimed those responsible would be held “accountable,” and a Federal investigation was launched;
- At Brooklyn College, protestors attempted to create an encampment, but were driven off campus by police. As protestors left, they stopped at the Hillel house where one individual gave a speech denouncing it as a “Zionist institution.” Altercations ensued, resulting in arrests;
- An encampment at Swarthmore College was removed by police, and nine individuals were arrested. The encampment was sparsely attended and Swarthmore activists reported frustration with “unambiguously ineffective” SJP tactics, hostility toward otherwise sympathetic supporters, and an “increasingly adversarial tone towards the general student body;”
- An encampment at Dartmouth College was dismantled after the administration agreed to provide subsidies to international students “in need” and to meet with protestors regarding divestment. Later in the month, protestors briefly occupied an area outside the university president’s office;
- At Rutgers University, a pro-Hamas demonstration was held outside the Hillel building, where Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) was holding a roundtable meeting. This resulted in four arrests. One police officer was assaulted;
A number of “Nakba Day” protests were held at universities including at Trinity College (Cambridge) and Tel Aviv University, and across major cities including New York and London.
Security precautions for Jewish communities and institutions were heightened after the Washington, D.C. murders. Even prior to this, Birmingham University’s Hillel house announced it would apply for permission construct a large fence around its property as protection from antisemitic protests and attacks.
In an especially disturbing development, a local Michigan judge considered ordering the state’s gay and Jewish Attorney General, Dana Nessel, to recuse herself from prosecuting pro-Hamas trespassers at the University of Michigan because of allegations that she is biased against Arabs and Muslims that were made in a separate case.
The Trump administration continues to target leading institutions, above all Harvard and Columbia, with funding cuts and other restrictions over their refusal to rapidly address new mandates regarding the eradication of DEI politics and campus antisemitism.
Other leading institutions including Vanderbilt University and Dartmouth College, which have explicitly adopted positions defending free speech as well as maintained campus safety and civility, have not been the focus of the Trump administration.
Administration efforts to remove foreign students who support Hamas and advocate for revolution against the US have been stymied by court orders. Most key individuals targeted by an early wave of deportation orders have been freed by courts — even though they openly supported a US-designated terror group on the streets of America.
The higher education industrial complex continues to complain about Federal cuts and pressure. A recent poll, however, indicates that significant numbers of Americans hold negative views of Ivy League institutions, suggesting that the elite sector of the industry has little social capital. But concerns remain that continued administration emphasis on antisemitism, along with DEI and resulting discrimination policies, will generate resentment and antisemitism as Jews are blamed for what is happening.
As the immense confrontation between the Trump administration and the higher education industrial complex unfolds, faculty find themselves trapped. The majority of faculty who are not pro-Palestinian — much less overt Hamas — supporters have been tarred by their ideologically committed colleagues, as have scientists who have found their funding and student staffing destroyed.
Professional organizations such as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have been built as left wing pressure groups, which now give credence to far left factions explicitly in support of Hamas. Other professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Association, are suffused with antisemitism and anti-Israel bias to the point where they have now attracted political attention.
Faculty groups continue to provide largely anonymous support for pro-Hamas protestors and anti-Israel policies:
- The University of Washington chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine strongly condemned the university for taking action against protestors who caused over $1 million in damage to an engineering building and for accepting donations from Boeing;
- Columbia University’s American Association of University Professors condemned the institution’s handling of the library takeover and for plans to revise “shared governance” structures;
- The George Washington University Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine condemned the university’s response to a student commencement speaker who had excoriated Israel. She was later barred from campus;
- The University of Toronto Faculty Association also narrowly voted to divest from Israel and demanded the university follow suit.
Largely in contrast to university administrations, faculty-led groups have also rewarded student protestors. In one example, two Harvard Law School students who had assaulted a Jewish student were awarded fellowships while other anti-Israel students were recommended for Rhodes and Truman scholarships. Also at Harvard, an honorary degree was awarded to Berkeley faculty member and BDS supporter Elaine Kim.
In parallel, reports continue to appear regarding the pervasiveness of anti-Israel bias in British university classrooms, and the systematic purging of Jewish adjuncts from the City University of New York’s accounting department. These and other incidents indicate that disparate faculty members have continued or even intensified both anti-Israel and antisemitic efforts in spire of media and Federal scrutiny.
Students continued to protest against Israel with particular emphasis on the anniversaries of 2024 encampments and “Nakba Day.” One protest strategy that has reemerged are hunger strikes by students and faculty, including at Stanford University, Yale University, Occidental College, Cal State Long Beach, and San Francisco State University.
As has been the norm in previous years, commencements were the scene of pro-Hamas protests. Columbia students drowned out president Claire Shipman’s remarks, including favorable comments regarding detained student Mahmoud Khalil, which produced angry jeers from the crowd. Later several students burned their diplomas. Two students were arrested. Barnard College president Laura Rosenbury was jeered by graduates who shouted “shame.” Graduates at many institutions waved Palestinian flags and jeered, including at Brooklyn College.
In another notable case at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, the student commencement speaker deviated from the speech he had originally submitted and excoriated the US and Israel saying, “I want to say that the genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars, and has been live streamed to our phones for the past 18 months.” Students applauded the speech and the university stated the student “lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules.” It then withheld his diploma.
Other students deviated from approved remarks and called for divestment and accused Israel of “genocide” and their schools of complicity in their commencement speeches, such as at MIT and George Washington University. Disruptions were reported at City University of New York, Columbia University and Rutgers University. Faculty members dressed in keffiyehs at New York University.
Another commencement related incident saw Salman Rushdie, who was almost murdered by a Muslim protestor in 2022, withdraw as commencement speaker at Claremont McKenna College after complaints by the local CAIR branch and threats to protest by the school’s Muslim Student Association.
K-12
Anti-Israel bias and overt antisemitism continues to be integrated into K-12 education through teachers’ unions and “ethnic studies.” The continued promotion of “anti-Palestinian racism” as the pinnacle of intersectionalism is an especially ominous development. The concept, which sacralizes Palestinian narratives regarding “nakba” and Israeli evil, and makes factual counter-narratives and potentially Jewish expressions of identity and belief illegal on the basis of hurt feelings, is now official policy in Toronto public schools.
A variety of reports have shown how radical teachers in Philadelphia public schools have systematically dominated teacher training and curriculum development in the name of “racial justice,” and against Israel and Jews.
The role of teachers’ unions in promoting “Palestine” as a core principle is most developed in Britain. There, the National Education Union has been at the forefront of anti-Israel organizing with “days of action,” workshops to “advocate for Palestine in our schools,” celebrating Nakba Day, and circulating BDS petitions, all ostensibly aimed at teachers rather than students. In reality, reports continue to document how teacher routinely indoctrinate students against Israel and Jews both inside and outside classrooms, employing crude and vicious terms such as “ZioNazis.”
In the US, local teachers’ unions such as the Beaverton Education Association and internal affinity groups such as “NY Educators for Palestine” and “Teaching While Muslim” continue to push indoctrination efforts such as “Teach Palestine Week.” At the national level, the Democratic Socialists of America is currently running several candidates for the leadership of the United Federation of Teachers.
Local pushback against teachers’ unions, such as in Massachusetts, has had limited impact, since unions operate with impunity. Control of oversight institutions such as school boards has become critical, since these too are routinely taken over by BDS supporters. In an unusual outcome, in the New Rochelle, NY, school board vote a progressive candidate endorsed by former Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D) lost resoundingly to both another Black candidate and Jewish candidates. She then blamed anti-Blackness and her support for “Gaza.” Jewish and centrist voters had mobilized vigorously against her on the basis of Bowman’s endorsement.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a completely different version of this article was published.
The post There Is Trouble on Campus as the 2024-2025 Academic Year Ends first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Sailing to Gaza: Greta Thunberg’s Latest Anti-Israel Publicity Stunt
Police officers detain Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, during an Oily Money Out and Fossil Free London protest in London, Britain, October 17, 2023. Photo: Reuters/Toby Melville
Greta Thunberg is on her way to save the people of Gaza.
The 22-year-old Swedish climate crusader is one of 12 anti-Israel activists sailing to the Gaza Strip on the vessel Madleen, allegedly to bring aid to the embattled enclave and to challenge Israel’s naval blockade.
Even though the boat is still days away from reaching the coast, it is already making news due to the high-profile status of some of those onboard. Along with Thunberg are Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham, French politician Rima Hassan, and Al Jazeera journalist Omar Faiad.
As social media becomes inundated with images of the activists galivanting on the high seas and mainstream media outlets like the Associated Press, ABC Australia, and CBS News are beginning to report on the vessel’s “humanitarian mission,” it is important that news consumers understand why there is a blockade of the Gaza Strip and are aware of the sordid history of past attempts to break the blockade.
Greta Thunberg’s so-called “freedom flotilla” encapsulates the delusion and hypocrisy surrounding the Israel-Gaza war.
This isn’t a humanitarian mission—it’s a Mediterranean leisure cruise. Participants are smiling, swimming, and filming TikTok videos. This is self-serving… pic.twitter.com/eUzhsXW54r
— Maccabee Task Force (@MacTaskForce) June 3, 2025
The Blockade of Gaza: A Brief History
Following Hamas’ violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, both Israel and Egypt restricted maritime traffic off the coast of Gaza to curb weapons smuggling by Hamas.
In 2008, Israel declared the Mediterranean Sea adjacent to Gaza a war zone, and reserved the right to inspect ships entering that area. Then, in 2009, Israel implemented a total naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Since the imposition of the naval blockade in 2009, there have been several incidents of the Israeli military intercepting ships carrying weapons bound for Hamas and other Gaza-based terror groups.
This includes the Victoria, which was intercepted in 2011 carrying 50 tons of Iranian weapons, the Klos-C, an Iranian arms ship that was seized in 2014, and a weapons-smuggling vessel disguised as a fishing boat that was intercepted in 2016.
Along with the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, there are also restrictions on the importing of goods through the land crossings between the Gaza Strip and both Israel and Egypt that are also meant to contain Hamas’ ability to bring in weapons and other goods intended for its terror infrastructure.
While the Israeli-Egyptian land and maritime blockade of Gaza might appear to be harsh, it is a legal necessity that provides basic necessities for the people of Gaza while also serving as a deterrent to Hamas’ terror campaign.
It should also be noted that, contrary to its depiction as such by some activists and journalists, the blockade of Gaza is not a “siege.” Aside from a brief two-month period (March-May 2025) during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, there have never been extended periods of time when food and other necessities were entirely barred from entering the Gaza Strip.
Attempts to Break the Blockade
For almost as long as the Gaza Strip blockade has existed, activists have attempted to break it, placing greater emphasis on public attention than actually bringing aid to the people of Gaza. Even in this current case of the Madleen, organizers have admitted that the limited amount of aid on the ship is “symbolic.”
The most famous attempt to break the blockade was in 2010, when Israeli forces intercepted a naval flotilla (led by the ship Mavi Marmara) as it attempted to reach the Gazan coast. After Israeli naval commandos boarded the lead ship, a violent confrontation broke out between the “peace activists” and the soldiers, resulting in the deaths of 10 Turkish activists and the wounding of several Israeli soldiers.
The Turkish organization that organized this flotilla, the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), reportedly has ties to Hamas and was more focused on confronting the Israeli blockade than providing aid to the people of Gaza. The aid, which was offloaded in Israel, was later refused by the Hamas authorities in Gaza.
Now, 15 years later, the IHH continues to be involved with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which is sponsoring the latest blockade-breaking attempt by the Madleen.
As the publicity campaign around Greta Thunberg and the Madleen continues to gather steam, will the media provide their audience with a proper context for understanding Israel’s blockade of Gaza, or will this latest stunt merely serve as a lightning rod for false narratives and misleading information about Israel’s war against Hamas?
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post Sailing to Gaza: Greta Thunberg’s Latest Anti-Israel Publicity Stunt first appeared on Algemeiner.com.