The Invincible Dragon Flotilla

I know very well that the Flotilla, kidnapped by Israel, fulfilled a humanitarian mission whose main objective was to denounce genocide in Gaza, without seeking any glory or victory. However, I allow myself to use the bravery of these activists as an instrument to broaden the choir for the liberation of the Palestinian people.

There are memories that do not go out and insist on. On the coast of Ceará, almost a century and a half ago, a man known as Chico da Matilde, a practical-man of a common name, refused to be indifferent. Ahead of his rafts, he looked at the slave ships and said no. He closed the ports in the strength of courage, preventing the transport of chained humans. That man, whom the story baptized as sea dragon, had no cannons, had no laws in his favor; It was only the conviction that there are orders that should not be fulfilled and complicity that cannot be accepted. His gun was the raft. Your battlefield, the sea.

Today, in 2025, the indomitable spirit of the Sea Dragon seems to have reincarnated in other waters, under other flags, thousands of miles from Mucuripe. The “Global Sumud Flotilla”, with its more than 50 vessels from 44 countries, is the raft of our time. And the cargo she refuses to accept is not that of slaves, but that of a silent complicity with the asphyxiation of an entire people. The ships she challenges are not slave, but modern war ships that impose a medieval blockade on the Gaza Strip. The logic, however, is the same: an act of civil disobedience that uses the sea as a battlefield to expose a massacre that has become a landscape on land.

And so that we do not think that this is a distant story, a geopolitical abstraction, reality punches us in the stomach: aboard the flotilla, among doctors and journalists from around the world, were 16 Brazilians. And among them, the Federal Deputy Ceará Luiziane Lins. Yes, a parliamentarian from the same Ceará of the Dragon of the Sea, kidnapped in international waters, in the middle of the humanitarian mission, by the armed forces of Israel. The historical irony is of a poetic cruelty. The heiress of the land that freed themselves from slavery four years before the Golden Law, treated as criminal for bringing food and medicine to a ghetto of sick, amputated family.

The kidnapping of a elected representative of the Brazilian people, along with fifteen other citizens, is not a smaller diplomatic incident. It’s an affront. It is the full demonstration that the law of the strongest ran over any remnants of maritime international law. Interception outside the territorial waters is an act of piracy. And our Itamaraty’s silence or protocol response would be an unforgivable cowardice, a betrayal of our own resistance history, embodied in the figure of Chico da Matilde.

The connection between the 1881 ranses and the 2025 activists is the backbone of the same struggle for dignity. Both understood that the sea, this space of traffic and freedom, can be transformed into a border of oppression or a path to liberation. Sea dragon and his companions used their dominance of the sea to sabotage the economy of slavery. Flotilha uses the universality of the sea to sabotage the policy of the siege. In both cases, it is the nonviolent resistance that exposes the brutality of the system it faces. The strength of the raft was not to sink the slave ship, but to prevent it from operating, to humiliate it morally. The strength of the flotilla is not in its non -existent firepower, but to force a military power to commit a banditism in daylight to prevent the arrival of milk powder and medicines.

Amnesty International, in its yesterday’s report (01/10), it was accurate in stating that Israel seeks to “deliberately to starve the Palestinians”. There is no euphemism to resist this accusation. Hunger as a state policy. Blocking is not a security measure, but as a tourniquet that slowly tightens the neck of two million people. It is given this realization that the act of flotilla acquires its true meaning. It is not just a gesture of charity. It is solidarity and an act of political confrontation. It is the refusal to accept the normalization of a crime against humanity. It is the incarnation of the ṣumūd, the Arab word meaning resilience, stubborn perseverance in the face of oppression.

We live, as I already pointed out here, the “Infowar” era, the narrative war. I imagine how the newspapers of the court in 1881 portray the sea dragon. Probably as a stir, a subversive, a threat to order and property. Today, the Zionist propaganda machine, with its fluent English spokesmen and their network of robots on social media, portrays the flotilla activists as an accomplices of terrorism. Language changes, the method is the same: dehumanizing the dissident to invalidate its cause. Criminalize solidarity so that injustice can follow its course without further face -to -face witnesses.

Flotilha, with its diversity of participants – from parliamentarians to doctors, from journalists to ordinary citizens – represents what remains of a global civic consciousness. They know that their load is more symbolic than material; It is not a few pounds of rice or antibiotic boxes that will resolve the crisis, but the act of challenging the normalization of injustice. It is the gesture of navigating against the current of indifference, saying that international law cannot be a letter of intent to be torn to the taste of geopolitical conveniences. They could not be defeated: if they arrived in Gaza, it would be a historical fact. They didn’t arrive. And another historical fact was created. The complaint against Israel is potent, but the response, predictably, was the usual: accuse the provocation activists and to serve Hamas, a beaten script that seeks to criminalize solidarity.

And meanwhile, global diplomacy skates in the empty rhetoric of the “two -state solution”, which sounds more and more like a bad joke in the face of the reality of the settlements that slice and devour Palestinian territory. This solution is no longer viable, and insisting on it is a form of connivance, a safe conduct for the occupation and apartheid status quo to perpetuate.

The presence of 16 Brazilians among the kidnapped should serve as a point of inflection for the foreign policy of our country. It is not enough a note of repudiation. Brazil, in the name of its own history and in defense of its sovereignty and its citizens, has a duty to lead a more forceful response in the global scenario. It’s time to use our prestige in the global south and in forums like BRICS to propose concrete actions.

I reiterate my proposal: The creation of a permanent humanitarian corridor for Gaza, protected by an international task force, which does not depend on the endorsement of Israel. What’s more, Brazil should start a movement to apply sanctions to individuals and directly complicit companies in maintaining the blockade. If traditional channels are clogged by the hypocrisy of the great powers, we need to create new pressure channels.

The courage of flotilla navigators was not an isolated act. It was a cry of the “no” of the sea dragon, which crossed an ocean and more than a century to spread through the Mediterranean and the world. That raft of yore and these boats now teach us that neutrality in the face of oppression is always an alliance with the oppressor. History will judge what we did and what we omit ourselves to do when the consciousness of the world settled in 50 boats and invited us to embark. Brazil, Dragão do Mar Land, cannot, out of shame and duty, stay in Porto.