A tale of two Middle East voyages

There are two kinds of ships leaving for the Middle East right now.

The first kind carries coal. It departs from Richards Bay, on the northeastern coast of South Africa. Massive bulk carriers, loaded in the holds, bound for Israeli ports. The companies arranging this trade do not advertise the destination. They do not need to. The ships move. The coal moves. The genocide is sustained.

The second kind carries people. Civilians. Doctors. Journalists. Activists. Grandmothers. They carry food and medicine and the accumulated moral weight of a world that has watched a genocide unfold for over thirty months and refused to look away. These ships form part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, an international civilian maritime mission. Its purpose is to breach the illegal blockade on Gaza in place since 2007 and open humanitarian sea corridors to a population being deliberately starved to death by occupation forces.

South Africa sends both.

This is not a metaphor. This is a fact.

In January 2024, the Republic of South Africa walked into the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and named what was happening in Gaza. Not conflict. Not war. Genocide. South Africa presented evidence. Mass civilian casualties. The deliberate destruction of food and water infrastructure. Statements from Israeli officials removed all ambiguity about intent to commit genocide, to annihilate an entire people. The court issued provisional measures demanding State action to punish and prevent ongoing genocide. The killing continued. South Africa went back. The world watched.

And in the ports of KwaZulu-Natal, the ships kept loading.

Glencore. African Rainbow Minerals. Private companies operating within South African borders, under South African regulatory frameworks, are shipping through South African ports to the very state our own government named as a perpetrator of genocide before the highest court in the world.

This is not a subtle contradiction. It is a structural one.

 It is the distance between what a state says in The Hague and what it permits on its own coastline. 

The South African government has not banned coal exports to Israel. It has not sanctioned the companies facilitating this trade. It has filed the papers and left the ports open.

A country cannot simultaneously invoke the Genocide Convention in the Hague and be the fuel supplier of the genocide it is holding to account. Alas, we found ourselves in this very contradiction. 

The Global Sumud Flotilla is sailing now. It is crewed largely by people from the Global North, from countries whose governments have not only failed to stop the genocide but have actively enabled it. The United States has supplied bombs. The United Kingdom has licensed arms sales. European governments have equivocated and hedged and continued to trade while thousands of children were deliberately starved to death in real time.

The people on these ships are sailing against their own governments. British activists defying British foreign policy. American doctors in direct contradiction to United States military aid. 

When ordinary people placed their bodies between weapons cargo and its destination, when they slowed down ships like the MSC Maya to stop shipments from moving, they did what their governments refused to do. They closed the gap themselves.

This is what accountability looks like when institutions fail. It does not come from summits. It does not come from statements. It comes from people who look at the distance between what is right and what their government does and decide they are no longer able to stand in that gap and call it helplessness.

South Africa’s contradiction is different in character but not in consequence. Private companies that operate under our flag are supplying what sustains the same machine. And our government has looked away. The ICJ case is not a shield. It is a standard. And South Africa is not meeting it.

Sumud is the Arabic word for steadfastness. The choice made daily by Palestinians under bombardment to remain. To plant. To document. To insist on existence when existence itself is under organised, systematic attack. It is not passivity. It is the most active refusal available to a people who have had almost everything taken from them.

Ubuntu is the South African understanding that a person is a person through other people. That our humanity is not individual. That the child in Rafah is not a stranger. That her hunger does not happen to her alone.

The Global Sumud Flotilla is where these two things meet the water. It is the answer to the question of what solidarity looks like when it is not performative. Not a statement. Not a march that ends and disperses. A ship that sails.

It carries no weapons. It carries food. Medicine. People willing to go. The Flotilla’s message is simple: the blockade is illegal. The starvation is deliberate. And the world is not required to watch. We sail to break the siege.

We are asking two things.

We are asking the South African government to match its legal position with its commercial policy. If South Africa believes, as it argued before the highest court in the world, that Israel is committing genocide, then South Africa must stop permitting the export of coal and other raw materials to the Israeli state. 

The moral argument has already been made. In The Hague. By South Africa’s own lawyers. What remains is political will. Civil society stands ready to support the legislative and regulatory mechanisms to make it happen. What we are asking for is not new law. It is consistency.

We are asking the South African public to support the Flotilla in whatever way they can. The flotilla is proof that ordinary people, from countries whose governments have abandoned them and abandoned Gaza, are still capable of choosing conscience over compliance. That proof matters. It needs to reach the water. It needs to be funded.

Solidarity with the people of Palestine and with the Flotilla is a vote against the idea that ordinary people are powerless. Every share is a refusal to be complicit in the silence.

There are two kinds of ships.

One sails to sustain a genocide. It departs quietly. No ceremony. Its cargo is unremarked upon by the government of the country whose port it leaves from. The companies that load it will not put out press releases. They do not need to. The silence around them is the silence of permission.

The other sails to end one. Its passengers are ordinary people who looked at what their governments were doing and decided they could not call that normal. Who looked at the gap between the world as it is and the world as it must be and decided the gap was worth crossing.

South Africa already told the world what it believes. In a courtroom in The Hague, in the most public act of international solidarity this country has performed since the end of apartheid, South Africa named genocide and demanded it stop.

Now South Africa must decide which ship it is on.

Nasiha Soomar is a South African activist, law graduate, businesswoman, and social media advocate based in Durban. She holds an executive role within the South African Palestine Movement, focusing on advocacy, public education, and digital engagement in support of global justice struggles. She has a background in local economic development, with experience in research and community upliftment initiatives.