AARON PATRICK: Greta Thunberg’s pro-Palestinian campaign carries a much more sinister message

For any young person or teenager, there are few thrills more gratifying than being taken seriously by adults.

That desire for validation may help explain why Greta Thunberg, sailing with a boatload of other pro-Palestinian activists to the Gaza Strip, dramatically announced the Israeli forces’ intervention on Monday.

“If you see this video we have been intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israel occupational forces or forces that support Israel,” the 22-year-old Swede said.

“I urge all my friends, family and comrades to put pressure in the Swedish Government to release me and the others as soon as possible.”

PR battle

The boat left Sicily eight days ago carrying a small cargo of aid and huge public relations campaign designed to shame the Israeli government over the war.

Israel has maintained a naval blockade of Gaza for years, and explicitly warned the protest boat it would not be allowed to land. Which means Ms Thunberg and the other organisers must have expected their journey would end in Israeli custody, as it has.

The Israeli Government is not without PR expertise either, and published video of soldiers handing out water and food on the boat. A photo showed Ms Thunberg being given food. She either smiles or grimaces.

The passengers were shown footage of Israelis being murdered by Hamas fighters during the October 7 invasion.

Anti-Israel movement

As the first global celebrity to emerge from the climate change wars, Ms Thunberg is a powerful force among the world’s youth.

Since the invasion of southern Israel in 2023 by Hamas, a terrorist group, she has campaigned on behalf of the Palestinian cause, becoming a leading figure in of the global anti-Israel movement.

Globally, the movement is led by Iran. Diplomatic support comes from the United Nations General Assembly. Qatar’s Al Jazeera network provides favourable media coverage. Other allies include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, left-wing unions, lawyers and academics, and Middle Eastern dictatorships which will never grant their citizens the freedoms enjoyed by Israelis, Jewish and Arab.

In Australia, sympathisers plan to hold a protest in her honour outside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s electorate office on Monday afternoon.

Instead of using her celebrity to explain a complex and tragic situation, Ms Thunberg has propagated a caricature of the Jewish state, which she accuses of conducting “livestreamed genocide”.

Israel is not perfect. But even Australia’s left-wing government accepts that it is entitled to conduct a defensive war against Hamas in which too many civilians have died on both sides.

Aid problems

The provision of food and water to Gaza, which is mostly a disaster zone, has become the latest chapter in the tragedy.

Israel does not trust the United Nations to prevent Hamas seizing aid allocated to civilians, and may have killed some Palestinians while administering its own food distribution network last week.

Everyone involved wants the killings to end. But to portray the war, as Ms Thunberg does, as a conflict between murderous Jews and Palestinian victims ignores historical reality.

Israel has offered peace several times since its foundation in 1948, offers the Palestinians chose not to accept. They sought war, and got it.

Ms Thunberg supports the aggressors in the current phase of the conflict, whose leaders in Gaza — those few still alive — want to eliminate the state of Israel.

Which sounds like real genocide.