Yesterday, as a flotilla carrying international slack-tavists neared Israeli waters, I found myself doing something I know well: writing slogans.
I love protest language. Catchy phrases, compressed ideas, lines that can hold an entire argument in seven words or less. It’s a kind of puzzle — part politics, part art, part instinct for what will travel online.
Much of what I wrote was sarcastic. Some angry. Some meant to make people laugh. All of it was shaped by one reality: modern activism is visual before it is anything else. People don’t encounter political movements through policy papers anymore. They encounter them through images.
And nobody understands that better than the people on those boats.
Long before any vessel approaches Israeli waters, the story is already complete. The clips are imagined. The captions are drafted. The moral roles are assigned.
Heroes and villains. Humanitarians and oppressors. A narrative ready for circulation.
As someone who has spent years inside activist spaces, I recognize the formula immediately.
Fighting the narrative: The Israeli counter-flotilla takes to the sea
And that recognition is part of why I joined a counter-flotilla — led by Arab Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad, with Persian Israelis, Druze Israelis, and others representing the country’s layered identities.
Not because I believe boats resolve conflicts. Not because I think slogans replace policy. But because I am exhausted by how easily activism becomes performance — how quickly real suffering gets translated into content.
Yesterday I spent hours writing slogans, painting signs by hand, and loading Israeli flags onto a boat. I thought about what would photograph well, what would make people pause, what would turn into a shareable image in seconds.
One of the signs read: “Moral theater on the dock. Real life isn’t TikTok.” It was held by Tiktoker Golda Daphna, herself a content creator working in the same attention ecosystem she documents.
It was meant to be funny. It was also meant seriously. Because that is what so much of this has become.
Activism now competes in the attention economy. Every cause is shaped — consciously or not — for virality. Every image is designed to travel faster than context can follow.
The flotilla toward Gaza is no exception. It arrives with cameras ready, narratives prepared, and symbolism fully activated before it even reaches the water. That doesn’t mean the suffering it points to isn’t real. It is. But the translation of that suffering into a global media event often flattens more than it reveals. Real humanitarian work is rarely cinematic. It is coordination, infrastructure, negotiation, logistics. It does not naturally produce viral clips.
Spectacle does.
And spectacle travels farther than nuance.
That imbalance matters.
Because protest is a form of storytelling, and storytelling shapes moral perception long before facts are examined. The question is not only what is being shown — but what is being left out. What frustrates me is not the act of protest itself. I am a protester. I have been one for all of my life. It is the certainty of the narrative being staged: who is cast as innocent, who is cast as cruel, and how quickly complexity is discarded in favor of clarity that feels good online.
That is why I wanted another image in the world.
Not a replacement truth. Not a counter-myth. Just something closer to the messiness of reality.
On our boat, Israelis and Arab Israelis stood together. We did not leave Israeli waters. We did not try to manufacture confrontation. We were not there to perform heroism. We were there to say something simple: supporting Palestinians should not require legitimizing Hamas.
That matters to me deeply.
Because the conversation about this conflict has become so flattened that it often cannot hold contradiction anymore. People are forced into roles: oppressor or liberator, victim or villain. Entire societies reduced to symbols.
But real life refuses those categories.
Real life is Israelis and Arabs standing on the same deck. It is grief after October 7 existing alongside a desire for the war to end. It is acknowledging Palestinian suffering without ignoring the role Hamas plays in prolonging it.
And it is also recognizing that many Israelis are exhausted by war, by fear, and by the way their reality is constantly filtered through distant screens. After a few hours, we returned to shore. The signs came down. The cameras turned off. The sea went quiet again.
But the question remained.
What happens when activism becomes indistinguishable from performance? What gets lost when every cause is shaped first for visibility, and only second for truth? I don’t think symbolism is meaningless. I’ve spent too much of my life making it to believe that.
But symbolism without honesty becomes theater. And theater, on its own, rarely builds peace.
You can care about Palestinian civilians without empowering movements that excuse extremism. You can oppose suffering without turning it into spectacle. And you can insist on coexistence without erasing Israeli pain.
That is the space I was trying to put back into the water yesterday.
Not a slogan. Not a role.
Just reality, refusing to be simplified.
The writer is an activist and content creator. Raised in Jerusalem and living in Tel Aviv, she has become a leading voice on and offline for Liberal Zionism. A third-generation IDF veteran with over a decade in Israel Advocacy, Hallel has created and executed content for dozens of major organizations. She is an associate at the Tel Aviv Institute.