On July 14, the Global Sumud Flotilla announced that it would release a 14-minute documentary titled “One Struggle: Western Sahara” on July 16. The sprawling maritime coalition, which has spent the better part of a year sailing across the Mediterranean in the name of Palestinian solidarity, getting intercepted, getting detained, getting deported, and then sailing again to be intercepted once more, ultimately did not publish the film following strong pressure from Moroccans.

In the documentary, it formally and publicly endorsed the Polisario Front, described it as a “Sahrawi liberation movement,” falsely claimed that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had rejected Moroccan sovereignty over the territory, and announced that this film was merely the first episode in a new series exploring what it called “the interconnection of resistance and liberation movements around the world.” The mask, in other words, didn’t slip – it was removed deliberately, folded neatly, and placed on the table for everyone to see.

For those of us who watched the Sumud Flotilla’s emergence with a suspicion that its humanitarian mission was never quite as pure as its organizers insisted, the documentary was less a revelation than a confirmation.

It was the moment when an initiative that had always traded on the emotional currency of Gaza’s suffering finally admitted that its ambitions extended well beyond the besieged strip and into the contested ideological terrain of Cold War-era liberation politics, where every conflict is the same conflict, every state is a colonizer, and every armed separatist group is a noble resistance movement deserving of unconditional solidarity.

The comparison the flotilla is attempting to draw – between Palestine and Western Sahara, between Israel’s military occupation of Gaza and Morocco’s sovereignty over its southern provinces – is not merely historically illiterate; it is politically obscene. The Polisario Front is not Hamas, and Morocco is not Israel.

The Western Sahara question, whatever one’s position on it, is a territorial dispute governed by a UN-led political process and adjudicated through Security Council resolutions – most recently Resolution 2797, which endorsed precisely the kind of negotiated political solution that Morocco has proposed through its autonomy plan.

To flatten this complexity into a slogan – “one struggle” – is to engage in the laziest, most intellectually dishonest form of transnational activism, the kind that substitutes bumper-sticker solidarity for the difficult, unglamorous work of actually understanding the conflicts it claims to care about.

And this is where the deeper fraud reveals itself, because the Sumud Flotilla, for all its theatrical grandeur – the 100 boats, the celebrity passengers, the departure ceremonies broadcast live from Barcelona – has never actually delivered a single kilogram of aid to Gaza. Not one.

The 2025 mission was intercepted by Israeli forces........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)