Solidarity spoke to Hamish Paterson, a member of the Maritime Union of Australia who joined the Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, about their brutal treatment by Israel and what they learnt about the violence inflicted on Palestinians
Our aim was to break the siege on Gaza with 50 boats. The march to Gaza earlier in the year got stopped before they even crossed the border out of Egypt. We thought we had a chance to get aid in and pioneer a corridor.
Once the flotilla got to Tunisia, there were Israeli drone attacks that hit two of the main boats. Four days in, we had a drone strike with stun grenades and really horrible stink bombs. You can’t even think straight, the smell’s so awful.
We had a warning sign: they’d hijack the radios and play a Bob Marley song, and then within a minute we’d have a drone fly straight through one of the sails with a stun grenade strapped to it. When it hits you go into shell shock basically.
Israeli ships came alongside and sprayed us with water cannons, telling us to stop the engines. They were circling the boats, trying to capsize us. We held them off for 11 hours, playing cat and mouse.
We had a big bulk carrier come up and basically try and ram us. We were just about to get sucked into the propeller wash, and then I quickly double tapped the autopilot to veer out of the way.
We got, I think, 40 miles off the coast. One one of the other boats got 26 miles out.
Then we had three soldiers jump on board, machine guns pointed at us. They dragged me up onto the onto the main deck, cable tied me, and then I had a pump action shotgun cocked and put to my head. I was terrified it was going to blow my head off.
We got to Ashdod port about seven hours after we were intercepted.
That’s when the brutality started. They took the cable ties off and literally ripped our arms up high behind our shoulder blades—there were a lot of dislocated shoulders and broken collarbones.
They dragged us onto an asphalt field, in 40 degree desert heat, and I was slapped across the back of the head and forced to hold my head down on the concrete.
They grabbed Greta Thunberg and draped her in a big Star of David and made her hold it like a flagpole the whole time.
Some of us were kept there for five hours. A lot of ribs were kicked and broken.
They told me to dance like a monkey naked in front of my comrades, just humiliation basically, with guns to my head.
We got to Ketziot prison and then we were put in a cage with about 80 to 100 men. The Israeli Minister Ben-Gvir came with media cameras, speaking in English, abusing us and saying that we’re supporters of Hamas and support the death and killing of Jewish babies.
Every hour and a half they’d come in with Alsatians and AR-15s lined at our heads, counting us.
We had no access to water. We just had one hot tap that stank of sewage next to the one toilet.
Brutality against Palestinians
Ketziot prison’s right on the border of Gaza. We could hear children in the cells next to us constantly crying, screaming for their mothers, with dogs attacking them, biting them and tearing at them, and screaming in agony.
I’m certain I heard people, from the screams that kept going until they stopped, who were dead, or collapsed from pain.
There’s body bags leaving that prison on a daily basis in my belief. It’s classed as the Guantanamo Bay of the Middle East. We got nothing compared to what’s done to the Palestinian people there. There are 11,000 prisoners supposedly still in there.
I saw the mentality of the Zionist regime, of its racial superiority and oppression of Palestinians.
On about the sixth day they took us to the Jordanian border.
Unions
I met Jose, from the Genoa dock workers union. Their main leader said before we even set sail that if anything happened to us they would shut the port down. They had a million people in Rome rallying in the streets for our release.
Unions have always been involved in solidarity work. Look at the MUA’s history of the embargoes on South Africa, over Vietnam, or the pig iron dispute with Japan.
We have to show the people of Palestine our solidarity because our purpose as unionists is sticking together for the oppressed and the underdog.
We’re not going to stop. We are planning another flotilla in April and we want to have a minimum of 200 boats. So we are going to have to raise funds and we need people that are that are brave enough to step up to go.
