If you drew a Venn diagram of Palestine, eco and trans activists, it would look like an eclipse of the sun
31 August 2025
Daily Telegraph
The sequel is rarely as good as the original, so it’s unlikely that “Greta II: the Flotilla Returns” will be as uproariously hilarious as the first version starring Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist best known for her time as a teen climate campaigner.
Thunberg is sailing today from Barcelona towards the coast of Gaza in an attempt to recreate the same stunt she tried in June, when she was one of a dozen activists on a boat carrying what they called a “symbolic” amount of aid for Gaza. The boat was intercepted by Israeli forces, with the passengers detained and then expelled by Israel. “Symbolic” was the only word that mattered, because it wasn’t an actual aid mission; it was a publicity stunt.
The publicity they secured wasn’t quite what they expected. As a climate activist Thunberg was used to world leaders and the media prostrating themselves before her. The idea that her presence in a war zone might not have been welcomed by the Israelis doesn’t seem to have occurred to her. The resulting footage of the boat being boarded and Thunberg’s subsequent time in Israel turned out to be comedy gold – at her expense. “We’ve been kidnapped!”, she yelled. “This is a war crime!”, shouted another of the crew, as Israeli soldiers handed round sandwiches and blankets to the activists.
The Israelis, who have not had much to laugh about since the Hamas massacre on October 7 2023, then went overboard with social media posts, describing the “selfie yacht” of “celebrities”: The “tiny amount of aid on the yacht [that] was not consumed by the celebrities will now be transferred to Gaza”, the foreign ministry posted.
Now Thunberg is back to “break the illegal siege of Gaza” – to “open a humanitarian corridor and end the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people”, according to the flotilla’s organiser. On one level, this is about as tedious and unimportant a story as it gets. Thunberg and the rest of her fellow activists will meet the same fate as she did in June.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the security minister, has reportedly said the activists should be detained in “terrorist-level” conditions. The far-right minister shoots his mouth off with depressing regularity, but his verbal effusions are usually no more than that. At the very least, Greta and her allies stunt will achieve its aim of garnering some publicity for those taking part, and that will be that. Yawn.
But there is a more interesting element to it. Thunberg is the exemplar of the so-called “omnicause”. Much like the British protestors who have sought arrest by holding placards announcing their support for Palestine Action, the proscribed organisation, their actions are driven not because they have any particular focus on Gaza or Palestine Action.
It is because they are examples of the causes which today’s modern activists must champion, along with the “climate emergency” and the fight for “trans rights”. It is the same people demonstrating about the same things. If you drew a Venn diagram of Palestine, eco and trans activists, it would look like an eclipse of the sun, because they are one and the same people.
The blending of Thunberg’s eco-activism and her presence on the Gaza flotilla is perfectly expressed in an earlier, unrelated, statement by Just Stop Oil: “Palestinians are among the most vulnerable people on earth to the effects of climate collapse, and in the daily struggle to survive in an apartheid state, they have no capacity to protect themselves against what is coming.” Another group, Youth Demand, seeks to expose the UK government’s “complicity in genocide: the Palestinian genocide and the global genocide from burning fossil fuels.”
Thunberg and her fellow wannabee Gaza tourists are cut from the same cloth, and for them it is the omnicause which matters above all else. Their latest stunt will garner publicity, and then they, and the rest of us, will move on to the next.
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