“The history of philosophy is buried in Gaza, but philosophy lives on in the gesture of the Global Sumud Flotilla.”
In this article, historian and philosopher Luca Salza[1] reflects on what he sees as the political, philosophical and strategic significance of the Gaza flotilla: “What did they betray? They betrayed the reality imposed by those in power: the economy above all else, even at the cost of genocide (…), democracy as the unsurpassable form of government, endemic racism in the West, the beauty and righteousness of war for domination, and all the other simulacra on which politics and the way of life in the global North are based.”
From lundimatin #497, 17/11/2025
I just want the world to see what I see.
Fatma Hassouna
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
In Gaza, nothing happened.
Nothing.
Palestinian men and women can return to their homes. Their children are going back to school. Shopkeepers are reopening their shops, farmers are returning to work the land. The olive harvest will soon begin.
The storms of steel, the blocking of food aid, the shooting of starving crowds, terrorist incursions into hospitals and classrooms, the targeted assassinations of poets and journalists, the destruction of universities, and the devastation of the few remaining arable fields did not happen: these events evaporated.
After torturing our minds for months trying to imagine the impossible, trying to figure out how to live, without really living, in the midst of genocide, after denouncing, from an immeasurable distance, the systematic and rational murder of the inhabitants and destruction of Gaza, we suddenly discovered that nothing had happened. The course of events resumed naturally, the thousand-year history of Gaza did not stop, even though we had understood that most of the archaeological remains had been destroyed. The Israeli national anthem can be heard at the Paris Philharmonic. A perhaps somewhat painful interlude has finally come to an end for the editorial offices of the mainstream media in the global North, amid the laughter of the Knesset welcoming Trump, the brazen trafficker of death and weapons and supreme guarantor of pax Americana or Hebraica in the region (what is peace? We should answer this question again today, especially since we know that this peace can decide, as a final sovereign act, to suspend itself whenever it wishes).
Move along, there’s nothing here to see. The performative and canonical phrase used by French police officers to clear onlookers from the scene of a crime has become the mantra of our world, the West, which supported the genocide. Move away, there’s nothing to see.
To see… Did we see anything, in the end? We didn’t see much, at least up to a point. It is therefore essential to finally see, “all eyes on Gaza“, to restore the truth, from the beginning to the present day, and beyond…
However, it is not so easy to see: “Reality today would not be permitted to anyone”, writes Céline, distancing himself from Zola’s naturalism. The problem is the fantastical structure on which reality is based, following Balzac, Verga and Zola. The massacres and destruction in Gaza did not take place because it was this fantastical structure of reality that was able to transform them into simulacra, into idola.
This is why our task cannot consist solely of denouncing the idola, of fighting to restore reality (as the great realist artists did). Céline is right, reality is no longer permitted to anyone. The task of our action (artistic or political) becomes rather that of seeking what is real in this reality that eludes us on all sides.
Let us begin by saying that the struggle to assert the real against simulacra has been a philosophical question since the Greek origins of this radical form of thought, when Plato began to confront the invasion of appearances in the realm of truth, that is, the sophistical effect.
Today, as Badiou in particular demonstrates, Plato’s battle for philosophy is more relevant than ever, especially in the northern latitudes of liberal democracies. The present is now characterised by a weakening of the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction, proven facts and imaginary narratives, lies, falsifications and reliable accounts: reality is being lost, becoming nebulous; simulacra are imposing their conditions, reinforced by out-of-control technological innovation.
I will say it bluntly: Gaza is a philosophical problem because it forces everyone, at least those who want to see, to seek reality in reality once again.
Those who do not want to see (or make visible), those who support Israel as the spearhead of the new white colonialism, those who thank Israel for doing the “dirty work”, those who campaign for genocide, those who… etc., etc., are not, in fact, simply spreading propaganda. The massive evanescence of reality can also take hold of so-called venerable institutions such as the Collège de France, which, in the name of “neutrality”, seeks to conceal the objectivity of things. Incidentally, the cancellation of this conference only confirms the end of the university as a place of research; it died long ago in the “scientific” and managerial criteria of “peer review”, for example… just imagine if Galileo had been neutral… It is clear from these so-called scientific institutions that we are already well beyond what can be summed up by the term “propaganda”.
In reality, this whole discourse tends to make the destruction of Gaza acceptable. It is the only reality that must exist (reality is always an injunction). And it is precisely because it is the only reality that must exist that it assumes the power, through a gigantic production of fantasies – images, words, clichés, opinions – to deny any real element, that is to say, in plain language, to repress genocide.
Since reality is repressed, our effort, in this historical context, must consist in making philosophy function as an exercise that serves not so much to restore reality as to conquer it.
How do we conquer reality?
There was an event which, precisely as an event, broke the course of time and, by reconfiguring its order, made it possible to find reality beyond reality. It was a question of a “truth procedure” (Aain Badiou).
The event: on the 1st of September 2025, 25 ships carrying 300 people cast off from the port of Barcelona and embarked on a long and perilous journey across the Mediterranean, sometimes dropping anchor in other old ports, where new groups of boats joined the convoy, to converge together on Gaza and break the humanitarian aid blockade.
The Global Sumud Flotilla is an event because the different types of boats, the hundred languages spoken on board, and the determination of activists from 44 different countries constitute a clinamen, a deviation from the discourse that prevailed in the West when Israel decided to tear apart the Gaza Strip with its “iron swords”. Contrary to what Western decision-makers were spouting, the activists denounce that there is no war in Gaza, but genocide; contrary to what Western decision-makers were spouting, the Flotilla affirms that it is possible to organise genuine humanitarian aid to alleviate the suffering of civilians. The course of history was derailed…
The Global Sumud Flotilla is an event in the sense understood by Deleuze and Guattari: it was an extraordinary “phenomenon of clairvoyance”: it suddenly revealed what was intolerable in Gaza and, at the same time, opened up the field of possibilities.
In this respect, the Flotilla’s adventure is entirely philosophical.
Its wandering in the Mediterranean, under Israeli bombs and threats, is without history, without organisation, without weapons, without anything. It is in this “poverty” (Walter Benjamin) that women and men began to see, to emerge from the perpetual Truman Show of our time. The philosophical operation of clarification carried out by the Flotilla effectively brought a large number of people out of the cave, people who were no longer paralysed by fear and terror and experienced what a collective and cosmopolitan experience like that of the Flotilla could liberate in their lives.
The history of philosophy is buried in Gaza along with the entire cultural heritage of the West, but philosophy lives on in the actions of the Global Sumud Flotilla.
In a genocide, we think and do nothing; it is the abyss that separates our world from Gaza (a film like Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, despite the sisterhood between the two protagonists, clearly shows the gap between “us” and “them”). But in this part of the world, which remains more or less comfortable, it is possible to invent philosophical practices that allow us to rediscover at least a little bit of reality in an evanescent reality. Indeed, in the fluidity of reality, it is necessary, as a last resort, to know how to construct theories and practices (of catastrophe) that can show and guide us. In her historic speech upon arrival at the Athens airport, after being arbitrarily arrested and mistreated by the Israeli police, Greta Thunberg defined precisely the primary significance of the humanitarian convoy: “To take a stand against something that is, in every respect, unjustifiable.-“
Thunberg is very lucid: the Global Sumud Flotilla was not aimed at saving the Palestinians, but was rather the beginning of a strategy to take a stand in the current world war (in this light, the struggle for Palestine, in the manner of Genet, no longer has any identity-based or nationalist characterisation). The Flotilla takes a stand on the side of the Palestinians by attacking the governments of its own countries, which are complicit in genocide. In sum, it is a great lesson in strategy.
From a historical point of view, one could say that the Flotilla has revived the Zimmerwald model, that of the enemy within, the defeatist, the saboteur, the deserter. Moreover, this is how Western governments treated them during and after the expedition: as traitors.
What did they betray? They betrayed the reality imposed by power: the economy above all else, even at the expense of genocide or thanks to genocide (see Francesca Albanese’s reports), democracy as the unsurpassable form of government, endemic racism in the West, the beauty and righteousness of war for domination, and all the other simulacra on which politics and the way of life in the global North are based.
It is because it deserts this reality that the Flotilla is a philosophical adventure.
Men and women, without community and without heroism (as Thunberg also pointed out), distance themselves from the world at war, distance themselves from themselves in order to conquer reality. Their desertion opens up unprecedented political and existential possibilities, insofar as their gesture can be repeated.
This is what happened in Italy in September when boys, girls, workers, ordinary people took up this gesture and blocked towns and villages, fraternally reaching out to the Flotilla. In a country ruled by former fascists, among Trump and Israel’s most loyal allies, this was precisely a “truth procedure”. The (non)people of Italy’s thousand squares seemed to be shouting at their political and economic elites: you are at war, you are committing genocide, you are enriching yourselves through war, you are “firm”, we are preparing for our war, alongside the Palestinians and other oppressed people of the world, “again, and with little” (Walter Benjamin). In doing so, the rebels have rid themselves of white racism, one of the reasons for the silence surrounding the genocide in Gaza, and have been able to embrace this anti-colonialist struggle.
This is precisely a major political upheaval. Where the warring factions draw maps and trace lines within which they must keep and move their subjects, the deserters from the Flotilla and the Italian squares, without any particular means, based on “understanding and renunciation”, propose to break them, to cross them (without breaking any laws, it should be remembered). The map of the Mediterranean is thus no longer that of NATO, but that of the ancient portolans, in the recesses of which the lingua franca was spoken, creating a common world. As Jean-Luc Godard had already shown in Film Socialisme, touching on the journey of “The Love Boat” to various historic ports in the Mediterranean, the question is the invention of another geographical map. The colourful boats of the Flotilla, their perilous and uncertain journeys between ancient ports steeped in history and on sea routes that have always been criss-crossed by sirens and pirates, are building a new/old world. On the routes of this counter-map, the new/old lingua franca of rebellion is still spoken. This is how activists from many countries, the destroyed Palestinians, migrants travelling the same sea and suffering the same absolute homicidal violence, and those who, filled with shame, break ranks behind genocidal governments, make “common cause”… an International too? Who knows…
The philosophical work of truth carried out by the Global Sumud Flotilla made this meeting possible. If war does not interrupt these flows (wars always arise, above all, to interrupt them), other meetings may take place in the coming months. Other deviations from the itineraries imposed by those in power. Other insurrections. Other cartographies. Other bursts of reality.
[1] Luca Salza has just published the remarkable La désertion, Une cartographie littéraire et artistique (Desertion: A Literary and Artistic Cartography) with Mimésis Publishing. Coming soon from lundimatin editions: Arts et politiques de la désertion, de la Première guerre mondiale à nos jours (The Arts and Politics of Desertion, from the First World War to the Present Day).
Luca Salza: Philosophy on a boat
“The history of philosophy is buried in Gaza, but philosophy lives on in the gesture of the Global Sumud Flotilla.”
In this article, historian and philosopher Luca Salza[1] reflects on what he sees as the political, philosophical and strategic significance of the Gaza flotilla: “What did they betray? They betrayed the reality imposed by those in power: the economy above all else, even at the cost of genocide (…), democracy as the unsurpassable form of government, endemic racism in the West, the beauty and righteousness of war for domination, and all the other simulacra on which politics and the way of life in the global North are based.”
From lundimatin #497, 17/11/2025
I just want the world to see what I see.
Fatma Hassouna
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
In Gaza, nothing happened.
Nothing.
Palestinian men and women can return to their homes. Their children are going back to school. Shopkeepers are reopening their shops, farmers are returning to work the land. The olive harvest will soon begin.
The storms of steel, the blocking of food aid, the shooting of starving crowds, terrorist incursions into hospitals and classrooms, the targeted assassinations of poets and journalists, the destruction of universities, and the devastation of the few remaining arable fields did not happen: these events evaporated.
After torturing our minds for months trying to imagine the impossible, trying to figure out how to live, without really living, in the midst of genocide, after denouncing, from an immeasurable distance, the systematic and rational murder of the inhabitants and destruction of Gaza, we suddenly discovered that nothing had happened. The course of events resumed naturally, the thousand-year history of Gaza did not stop, even though we had understood that most of the archaeological remains had been destroyed. The Israeli national anthem can be heard at the Paris Philharmonic. A perhaps somewhat painful interlude has finally come to an end for the editorial offices of the mainstream media in the global North, amid the laughter of the Knesset welcoming Trump, the brazen trafficker of death and weapons and supreme guarantor of pax Americana or Hebraica in the region (what is peace? We should answer this question again today, especially since we know that this peace can decide, as a final sovereign act, to suspend itself whenever it wishes).
Move along, there’s nothing here to see. The performative and canonical phrase used by French police officers to clear onlookers from the scene of a crime has become the mantra of our world, the West, which supported the genocide. Move away, there’s nothing to see.
To see… Did we see anything, in the end? We didn’t see much, at least up to a point. It is therefore essential to finally see, “all eyes on Gaza“, to restore the truth, from the beginning to the present day, and beyond…
However, it is not so easy to see: “Reality today would not be permitted to anyone”, writes Céline, distancing himself from Zola’s naturalism. The problem is the fantastical structure on which reality is based, following Balzac, Verga and Zola. The massacres and destruction in Gaza did not take place because it was this fantastical structure of reality that was able to transform them into simulacra, into idola.
This is why our task cannot consist solely of denouncing the idola, of fighting to restore reality (as the great realist artists did). Céline is right, reality is no longer permitted to anyone. The task of our action (artistic or political) becomes rather that of seeking what is real in this reality that eludes us on all sides.
Let us begin by saying that the struggle to assert the real against simulacra has been a philosophical question since the Greek origins of this radical form of thought, when Plato began to confront the invasion of appearances in the realm of truth, that is, the sophistical effect.
Today, as Badiou in particular demonstrates, Plato’s battle for philosophy is more relevant than ever, especially in the northern latitudes of liberal democracies. The present is now characterised by a weakening of the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction, proven facts and imaginary narratives, lies, falsifications and reliable accounts: reality is being lost, becoming nebulous; simulacra are imposing their conditions, reinforced by out-of-control technological innovation.
I will say it bluntly: Gaza is a philosophical problem because it forces everyone, at least those who want to see, to seek reality in reality once again.
Those who do not want to see (or make visible), those who support Israel as the spearhead of the new white colonialism, those who thank Israel for doing the “dirty work”, those who campaign for genocide, those who… etc., etc., are not, in fact, simply spreading propaganda. The massive evanescence of reality can also take hold of so-called venerable institutions such as the Collège de France, which, in the name of “neutrality”, seeks to conceal the objectivity of things. Incidentally, the cancellation of this conference only confirms the end of the university as a place of research; it died long ago in the “scientific” and managerial criteria of “peer review”, for example… just imagine if Galileo had been neutral… It is clear from these so-called scientific institutions that we are already well beyond what can be summed up by the term “propaganda”.
In reality, this whole discourse tends to make the destruction of Gaza acceptable. It is the only reality that must exist (reality is always an injunction). And it is precisely because it is the only reality that must exist that it assumes the power, through a gigantic production of fantasies – images, words, clichés, opinions – to deny any real element, that is to say, in plain language, to repress genocide.
Since reality is repressed, our effort, in this historical context, must consist in making philosophy function as an exercise that serves not so much to restore reality as to conquer it.
How do we conquer reality?
There was an event which, precisely as an event, broke the course of time and, by reconfiguring its order, made it possible to find reality beyond reality. It was a question of a “truth procedure” (Aain Badiou).
The event: on the 1st of September 2025, 25 ships carrying 300 people cast off from the port of Barcelona and embarked on a long and perilous journey across the Mediterranean, sometimes dropping anchor in other old ports, where new groups of boats joined the convoy, to converge together on Gaza and break the humanitarian aid blockade.
The Global Sumud Flotilla is an event because the different types of boats, the hundred languages spoken on board, and the determination of activists from 44 different countries constitute a clinamen, a deviation from the discourse that prevailed in the West when Israel decided to tear apart the Gaza Strip with its “iron swords”. Contrary to what Western decision-makers were spouting, the activists denounce that there is no war in Gaza, but genocide; contrary to what Western decision-makers were spouting, the Flotilla affirms that it is possible to organise genuine humanitarian aid to alleviate the suffering of civilians. The course of history was derailed…
The Global Sumud Flotilla is an event in the sense understood by Deleuze and Guattari: it was an extraordinary “phenomenon of clairvoyance”: it suddenly revealed what was intolerable in Gaza and, at the same time, opened up the field of possibilities.
In this respect, the Flotilla’s adventure is entirely philosophical.
Its wandering in the Mediterranean, under Israeli bombs and threats, is without history, without organisation, without weapons, without anything. It is in this “poverty” (Walter Benjamin) that women and men began to see, to emerge from the perpetual Truman Show of our time. The philosophical operation of clarification carried out by the Flotilla effectively brought a large number of people out of the cave, people who were no longer paralysed by fear and terror and experienced what a collective and cosmopolitan experience like that of the Flotilla could liberate in their lives.
The history of philosophy is buried in Gaza along with the entire cultural heritage of the West, but philosophy lives on in the actions of the Global Sumud Flotilla.
In a genocide, we think and do nothing; it is the abyss that separates our world from Gaza (a film like Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, despite the sisterhood between the two protagonists, clearly shows the gap between “us” and “them”). But in this part of the world, which remains more or less comfortable, it is possible to invent philosophical practices that allow us to rediscover at least a little bit of reality in an evanescent reality. Indeed, in the fluidity of reality, it is necessary, as a last resort, to know how to construct theories and practices (of catastrophe) that can show and guide us. In her historic speech upon arrival at the Athens airport, after being arbitrarily arrested and mistreated by the Israeli police, Greta Thunberg defined precisely the primary significance of the humanitarian convoy: “To take a stand against something that is, in every respect, unjustifiable.-“
Thunberg is very lucid: the Global Sumud Flotilla was not aimed at saving the Palestinians, but was rather the beginning of a strategy to take a stand in the current world war (in this light, the struggle for Palestine, in the manner of Genet, no longer has any identity-based or nationalist characterisation). The Flotilla takes a stand on the side of the Palestinians by attacking the governments of its own countries, which are complicit in genocide. In sum, it is a great lesson in strategy.
From a historical point of view, one could say that the Flotilla has revived the Zimmerwald model, that of the enemy within, the defeatist, the saboteur, the deserter. Moreover, this is how Western governments treated them during and after the expedition: as traitors.
What did they betray? They betrayed the reality imposed by power: the economy above all else, even at the expense of genocide or thanks to genocide (see Francesca Albanese’s reports), democracy as the unsurpassable form of government, endemic racism in the West, the beauty and righteousness of war for domination, and all the other simulacra on which politics and the way of life in the global North are based.
It is because it deserts this reality that the Flotilla is a philosophical adventure.
Men and women, without community and without heroism (as Thunberg also pointed out), distance themselves from the world at war, distance themselves from themselves in order to conquer reality. Their desertion opens up unprecedented political and existential possibilities, insofar as their gesture can be repeated.
This is what happened in Italy in September when boys, girls, workers, ordinary people took up this gesture and blocked towns and villages, fraternally reaching out to the Flotilla. In a country ruled by former fascists, among Trump and Israel’s most loyal allies, this was precisely a “truth procedure”. The (non)people of Italy’s thousand squares seemed to be shouting at their political and economic elites: you are at war, you are committing genocide, you are enriching yourselves through war, you are “firm”, we are preparing for our war, alongside the Palestinians and other oppressed people of the world, “again, and with little” (Walter Benjamin). In doing so, the rebels have rid themselves of white racism, one of the reasons for the silence surrounding the genocide in Gaza, and have been able to embrace this anti-colonialist struggle.
This is precisely a major political upheaval. Where the warring factions draw maps and trace lines within which they must keep and move their subjects, the deserters from the Flotilla and the Italian squares, without any particular means, based on “understanding and renunciation”, propose to break them, to cross them (without breaking any laws, it should be remembered). The map of the Mediterranean is thus no longer that of NATO, but that of the ancient portolans, in the recesses of which the lingua franca was spoken, creating a common world. As Jean-Luc Godard had already shown in Film Socialisme, touching on the journey of “The Love Boat” to various historic ports in the Mediterranean, the question is the invention of another geographical map. The colourful boats of the Flotilla, their perilous and uncertain journeys between ancient ports steeped in history and on sea routes that have always been criss-crossed by sirens and pirates, are building a new/old world. On the routes of this counter-map, the new/old lingua franca of rebellion is still spoken. This is how activists from many countries, the destroyed Palestinians, migrants travelling the same sea and suffering the same absolute homicidal violence, and those who, filled with shame, break ranks behind genocidal governments, make “common cause”… an International too? Who knows…
The philosophical work of truth carried out by the Global Sumud Flotilla made this meeting possible. If war does not interrupt these flows (wars always arise, above all, to interrupt them), other meetings may take place in the coming months. Other deviations from the itineraries imposed by those in power. Other insurrections. Other cartographies. Other bursts of reality.
[1] Luca Salza has just published the remarkable La désertion, Une cartographie littéraire et artistique (Desertion: A Literary and Artistic Cartography) with Mimésis Publishing. Coming soon from lundimatin editions: Arts et politiques de la désertion, de la Première guerre mondiale à nos jours (The Arts and Politics of Desertion, from the First World War to the Present Day).