By Veronica O’Kelly

Thiago Avila is already back in Brazil after being kidnapped in international waters by the State of Israel, in an illegal operation of political and military piracy that counted with the complicity of Greece and the entire European Union. Member and one of the coordinators of the Global Sumud Flotilla, Thiago, together with Saif Abu Kashek and more than 180 activists including our comrades of the ISL of Argentina, the MST deputy in the FITU, Cele Fierro and the doctor, leader of his union and comrade of the MST, Raul Laguna, were captured on April 29 while carrying humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people in Gaza, today subjected to a genocide broadcast live before the criminal passivity of the complicit governments.

The arrest of international activists trying to break the murderous blockade imposed on Gaza reveals how far Zionism is willing to go to sustain the policy of starvation, bombardment and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people. While hospitals, schools and refugee camps are destroyed, European governments and the United States continue to guarantee political, economic and military support to the State of Israel.

Upon arriving in Brazil, Thiago denounced the torture and threats suffered in Israeli prisons, relating his own experience to the daily reality experienced by thousands of imprisoned Palestinians.

“It’s not the first time I’ve been in Israel’s prisons, but this was the first time they tried to keep me there for 100 years. But that’s what they do with Palestinians every day…”

His words expose the systematic dimension of Israeli colonial terror. What generates outrage when it happens to an international activist is the permanent reality imposed on the Palestinian people for decades: arbitrary imprisonment, disappearances, torture and detention without trial.

“…more than 9,000 Palestinians who are in those prisons still. Almost 400 of them are children. Placed there without any legal process, many of them without even being charged. Like me, I was never charged.”

Mass imprisonment is a constituent part of the Israeli apartheid regime. Palestinian children continue to be abducted by the occupying army, tried by military courts or held in prison without formal charges. All this under the complicit silence of the great powers that speak of “democracy” while financing Zionist colonialism.

“Because it is a terrorist state, a colonial state. Where they invent laws, like the absurd law of hanging Palestinians, as they did in the Middle Ages. It’s very important that we continue to denounce this.”

Thiago also recounted the physical and psychological aggressions suffered after the hijacking of the humanitarian vessel:

“I was handcuffed, with two handcuffs on each wrist, two handcuffs on each ankle, each time I was transfered. I didn’t know if it was night or day. I was alone. On the ship, not only me, they assaulted so many people that more than 30 people were hospitalized. I even passed out twice because of the aggressions. There were many aggressions”.

The brutality applied against the members of the flotilla is the same logic used daily against the Palestinian population in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. The State of Israel acts with total impunity because it knows that it has the political and military backing of US and European imperialism.

“They said directly that they were going to kill me, that they would imprison me for 100 years. At other times they were saying that they were going to get rid of me as soon as possible…”

Denouncing the international articulation of Zionism, Thiago also pointed out the interference of the Israeli State on other countries and institutions:

“It is important for us to say that Israel needs to be restrained. We cannot allow a state to think that it owns everything. That it can intervene in other countries. It thinks it can intervene in our police to put Brazilian citizens on alert. It thinks it can spy on our citizens”.

In the face of the ongoing genocide, the need to broaden the actions of active solidarity with the Palestinian people is growing all over the world. Strikes, boycotts, occupations, mobilizations and international campaigns are breaking the siege of silence imposed by complicit governments.

“Mobilization is necessary, it needs to happen. That, perhaps, is the task of the Flotilla, because it is pedagogical. The Flotilla is not more important than anything we already do, the mobilizations, the boycott, the occupations, spreading the truth. But the Flotilla brings this notion of urgency. Because it’s at that moment that people are going and it’s the time for strikes, the general strikes, the walkouts. That helps people to understand. That’s why the Flotilla will sail again.”

Even in the face of repression, international solidarity with Palestine continues to grow.

“…people are understanding that the Palestinian people deserve to be free, that that regime of hatred cannot remain in this form.”

78 years of the uninterrupted Nakba

In relation to the mobilizations for the Nakba, which is still alive in the expulsion, occupation and permanent massacre of the Palestinian people, Thiago reaffirmed the confidence in the historical defeat of Zionism and imperialism:

“This week is a very special week for the Palestinian cause. The Nakba is still alive and expanding. They should be afraid, Donald Trump and Netanyahu are going to pay, they are going to be placed in the trash can of history where they deserve to be. Their ideologies, racist and supremacist like Zionism. And that destructive ideology of American imperialism. They are going to be defeated. “

“Like other generations that defeated apartheid or Nazism, we are the generation that will defeat Zionism.”

It is necessary to transform indignation into international mobilization. We demand an immediate end to the bombing and siege of Gaza, freedom for Palestinian prisoners and an end to apartheid and occupation in the West Bank and throughout historic Palestine.

For the expansion of mobilizations, strikes, boycotts and solidarity actions around the world until the genocide and the Zionist colonial regime are defeated.

For a free, single, democratic and socialist Palestine, from the river to the sea!