Solidarity is dangerous
The power of the efforts to break the blockade of Gaza is seen as an act of futility by some. It isn’t; it’s an act of solidarity and it is powerful because of that.
Four Scots sailed into a storm. One – 71-year-old Margaret Pacetta – is home, telling a Glasgow crowd about being stripped, denied her medication, and fed ant-infested cucumbers in the notorious Israeli Ketziot prison. At the time of writing, three others – Yvonne Ridley, Jim Hickney and Sid Khan – are still imprisoned, reportedly on hunger strike, being denied consular access and subject to the same psychological games and intimidation that Israel uses against Palestinian detainees.
These were not militants, smugglers or gun-runners. They were part of the Global Sumud Flotilla: a convoy of 42 boats, loaded with food, sailing from Barcelona to Gaza. Their mission was simple and symbolic – to break the blockade that starves two million people. They knew they would be stopped. That was the point. When governments do not act, ordinary people sometimes decide to make the point themselves.
If Israel really believed its own narrative – that it’s acting only in the name of ‘security’ - then a pensioner with a crate of pasta would not trouble it. Yet it dispatched warships, soldiers, guns and dogs to confront them. It detained nearly 500 people, stripped them, beat them, and scattered them into cells while denying them lawyers and consuls.
Why? Because this symbolic breach of the siege exposed its absurdity. A handful of boats loaded with food says more about Israel’s war on Gaza than a thousand diplomatic communiqués. It proves what Palestinians have always said: this is not about security, it’s about domination.
This is why flotillas matter. They are small, fragile, sometimes quixotic, but they are dangerous because they reveal the truth. It’s not only weapons that frighten a settler project. It’s symbols. It’s ordinary people saying ‘if you will not let food through, we will’.
That brings us to Scotland.
While Margaret Pacetta and the others were detained, Scotland’s ministers were issuing statements of ‘concern’ and promising they had raised the matter with the Foreign Office. That is what devolution allows: a voice, not a lever. Scotland can be ‘deeply concerned'. It can plead for “urgent consular access”. Yet it cannot act.
The Scottish Government has no embassies, no foreign service, no capacity to defend its citizens abroad. It can lobby Whitehall, and Whitehall can decide whether to lobby Tel Aviv. That is the limit of sovereignty under the Union. The democratic deficit is laid bare not in theory but in the lived reality of Scots sitting in Israeli prison cells.
This is not about the limits of devolution. It is about political choice.
In 2024, External Affairs Secretary Angus Robertson met privately with the Israeli Ambassador, resisting publishing the minutes until forced. The backlash was fierce: not because anyone thinks diplomacy is inherently wrong, but because secretive engagement with a state waging a genocidal war is complicity. It offers something priceless to Israel – the image of normality. That while bombs fall on Gaza, while famine is used as a weapon, Scotland is still willing to ‘talk business’ quietly.
“You cannot blockade a people forever without also blockading the conscience of the world”
Diplomacy always involves dirt, but there is a difference between necessary engagement and silent legitimisation. Israel cares desperately about appearances. It wants international audiences to nod along with its story of ‘security’. A few Scots sailing dry foods into Gaza punctured that.
Such is the dissonance that cannot be ignored. Pensioners and activists from Glasgow and Dundee risk imprisonment to deliver food because governments will not - the burden of solidarity falling not on the state, but on citizens. That is unsustainable and unjust. We should be blunt: Scots in Ketziot have an enormous privilege. They will go home. They will be met at the airport with hugs. They will rightly give interviews about their humiliation and mistreatment.
However thousands of Palestinians remain in Ketziot and other prisons indefinitely, without trial, without consular officials, without anyone in government acting on their behalf. They will not be celebrated as brave dissidents. Their lives are expendable in a way ours are not. Their country will remain under siege. Their sovereignty denied.
That is the real obscenity: that a violent state can jail both Palestinians and Scots in the same prison, but only one of those groups will only ever truly be free. So yes, the Scottish Government was right to suspend meetings with Israel after the backlash. Yes, it’s right to press the FCDO for access and release.
However, let’s not pretend this is about the consular process. The deeper point is that the people of Gaza should not have to rely on pensioners aboard rickety boats for their rights to be recognised. When you treat settler colonialism as if it can be managed, rather than named, you will eventually find your own citizens in its cells.
Israel reacts with violence because it recognises the truth: you cannot blockade a people forever without also blockading the conscience of the world.
This is why Keir Starmer’s response – that detaining activists in international waters is simply a “matter for the Israeli government” – is not just cowardice, it’s complicity. To call an act of piracy and political repression “a matter for Israel” is giving the green light for it to happen again. It’s the language of a man desperate not to disturb the powerful. Even at the cost of abandoning his own citizens.
The flotilla has shown something that our politics tries to obscure. Solidarity is dangerous. Symbols are dangerous. And Scotland’s place in this story is precarious. Our people can sail and be jailed, but our government cannot act. That is the absurdity of devolution, the complicity of hidden diplomacy, the disgrace of Westminster cowardice and the privilege that separates Scots who come home from Palestinians who do not. It should not fall to pensioners in borrowed prison trousers to remind us and yet it does.
That is an indictment not of them, but of us.
