A controversy arose among activists in the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) last week when a Maghreb contingent coordinator withdrew from the project over the involvement of LGBTQ activists.
The French publication Le Courrier de L’Atlas reported on the now-deleted September 15 videos filmed at the port of Bizerte. In them, a Tunisian activist called Khaled Boujemaa could be seen accusing GSF steering committee member Wael Nawar of concealing that Tunisian LGBTQ+ activists were being prominently featured in the flotilla.
Boujemaa threatened to leave the expedition if the issue was not resolved.
He remarked in a September 16 Facebook live stream video from his home country that he had been left with the option of participating or leaving.
“The reasons for withdrawal are bitter,” said Boujemaa.
He did not explicitly state that he withdrew over the involvement of LGBTQ+ activists in the video, but Boujemaa did mention problems with some of the purchased vessels. He noted that the age and disrepair of some of the ships led some other foreign activists to remain in Tunisia.
On Wednesday, Tunisian flotilla participant Saif Ayadi, who describes himself on Instagram as a communist queer militant, rejected claims that he was denied by other activists, decrying the reports as a smear campaign by pro-Zionist media and public figures.
He accused such bodies of exploiting LGBTQ+ people through “pinkwashing” to delegitimize the flotilla.
“The Zionist lobby uses propaganda around our queer identities to attack the flotilla, break its unity, and discredit it,” said Ayadi.
Internal rifts in the Gaza aid flotilla
The incident occurred around the same time that activist Greta Thunberg was reportedly removed from the leadership committee list on the GSF website.
Italian Il Manifesto reported last Tuesday that Thunberg was seen dragging her suitcase along a Tunisian dock as she transferred from the steering committee’s flagship, Family, to another vessel, the Alma.
Il Manifesto had detailed that there were rifts between the organizing committee over a communication strategy that focused too much on internal flotilla issues and not on the situation in Gaza.
This also coincided with the departure of flotilla spokesperson Yusuf Omar on September 13, who shared that the move was a strategic decision “to redirect more attention to the genocide in Gaza right now.”