On October 1, the Global Sumud Flotilla was illegally intercepted in international waters by Israeli forces, which detained all 479 flotilla members. Most members were held for up to five days in the Negev desert at the high-security Ketziot prison—a facility known for its harsh, degrading conditions and abuse of detained Palestinians. Since their release, detainees have spoken about the abuse and mistreatment they suffered while detained, which included reports of soldiers withholding medical treatment and of physical abuse—conditions that scratch the surface of what more than 9,000 detained Palestinians are still facing. While some governments of flotilla participants helped free their citizens, the flotilla’s U.S. delegates have said the U.S. State Department was unhelpful in securing their release.
Eric Lein, a musician and handyman based in New York, was aboard the Jeannot III vessel as a member of the flotilla’s U.S. delegation. The Jeannot III was about forty-five nautical miles away from Gaza’s shore when it was intercepted and boarded by Israeli forces. Lein was detained in Israel for five days. The Progressive spoke with Lein about the mission of the flotilla, the conditions he experienced while detained, and the even-worse conditions Palestinians face in their fight for liberation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you take me through what the early days of being on the flotilla were like?
Eric Lein: The entire trip there was a high level of camaraderie, helping each other all the time within the boat of course, but also boat-to-boat. If somebody needed something fixed, we could get some kind of technician to that boat who could do it. Same thing with doctors or medics. Even early on, there was a high level of that. And definitely, after a month, it felt like we were family and lived together forever.
Q: Did you frequently see drones?
Lein: Yeah, frequently, until after we left Crete and we had the Spanish and Italian warships escorting us. Until we reached the critical zone, occupied Palestinian waters. The one thing about drones is sometimes they’re either very high up or very far away, so it’s not always easy to tell if it’s a drone or an airplane. The other thing is, lots of countries have military drones and surveillance drones.
We had the attacks in Tunis , but we also had the attacks on the flotilla as a whole the night before we went to Greece. And that was a pretty rough night. With that attack they dropped what people say are flash bangs, but a flash bang is like something on the street, thrown in a crowd or something. These were very loud and could be seen and heard from seven miles away. They exploded near some boats and definitely damaged the masts and sails . Luckily, none of that shrapnel hit anybody. There were a few unexploded ones that ended up on the deck of two different boats. There was also a chemical agent dropped onto at least one of the boats—as somebody tried to deal with it, they got some in their face, in their eyes, and their mouth.
Q: Can you tell me about the interception?
Lein: The Israeli Navy spent a lot of time just trying to intimidate us. We had several of those medium-size military boats aim a water cannon at our boat or shine their lights at us or perform dangerous maneuvers around the boat. That happened many times, at least six to eight times, well before we were actually intercepted and boarded. They spent a lot of time, just trying to intimidate us, to make us try to turn around.
We knew people were getting intercepted. The protocol Global Sumud Flotilla established was just to keep going. We managed to go for a pretty long time. Around 2 a.m., one of the larger military boats started following us. We weren’t actually boarded until around 3:15 or 3:30 in the morning.
Q: What happened after Israeli forces boarded your boat?
Lein: They pointed their guns at us and they had bright lights on the guns, but it was a little bit surprising because the one guy who was in charge was being very polite. He said, “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine, you all have life vests on.” He explained that we were going to be taken individually to the front of the boat to be searched. After we were searched, he explained that we were all going to go downstairs and sit on the couch. He said “If you need anything, if you need to use the bathroom, if you need something to eat . . .,” so it was a little bit surprising.
We stayed down there the entire night. We slept. They had guns on us, but nothing happened. The treatment didn’t start becoming more severe until they docked us—because they kidnapped us, of course. After we docked, they brought us back onto the deck. They gathered a few of the other boats’ passengers on our deck as well. We weren’t there for too long, maybe thirty minutes. They were getting more strict. Israeli police and immigration people were walking around.
They moved all of us to one of the big boats. They started to get a little bit more rough. That’s where we were first zip-tied. We had to sit down in rows and columns—we were there for at least two and a half hours. There were a bunch of people we could see already zip-tied and on the ground on the dock somewhere, including Greta Thunberg. They made her hold an Israeli flag. We could see them shoving her for literally no reason. She was made to kneel. It was ridiculous.
As we got off the boat, a police officer did this thing where he put his hand on the back of your head and under your arm and bent you over. We were all locked in this one area where we were zip-tied again behind our backs more tightly, and knelt on the ground. We were there for about four hours after they got us all to the dock. That’s one of the places that Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir walked through and decided to have a media event with us and call us terrorists.
Q: After you were on the docks, what happened? Where did they take you?
Lein: After they took us off the boats, they put us in that one place where Ben-Gvir walked through. We stayed there for about four hours with our hands zip tied behind our backs. We got to really see just the manner of the police, how they treated us and how casual it was for them. They would just be laughing and making jokes, whether it was either about us or something else.
We had this interaction with Ben-Gvir and many flotilla members chanted “Free Palestine.” One of them got pulled away. One of the main organizers got lifted up and pulled away because she wouldn’t stop.
The interactions we had with the police—it seemed like they were just making up arbitrary rules and then arbitrarily enforcing them. For example, we were there for so long and we were pretty tired. People were falling asleep. I remember being kicked and they said, “Hey, get up! Sit on your ass.” I looked around and there were twenty people around me still sleeping and he just didn’t do anything. It was just the made-up rules. He would tell somebody to sit, somebody to move. For whatever reason, they were just messing with us.
There was various paperwork that we could sign or not sign. And one of the main ones that we knew about from previous missions is that if you sign a voluntary deportation, it means you’re admitting to having tried to enter Israel illegally and that you’ll be deported within seventy-two hours. Some people were going to sign for medical purposes, or they were doctors and they needed to get back. Most of the people who signed it were not deported within seventy-two hours.
We were not, of course, trying to enter Israel illegally. We were trying to go to Gaza. They stopped us, kidnapped us, and took us there, so most people didn’t want to sign that. We had a meeting with a judge, but then we never had a formal hearing with a sentencing. It just seemed like it was a kangaroo court.
Q: Did you have any legal representation?
Lein: I had three names and one phone number written down in my wallet. Of course, they threw out my wallet, so I didn’t have it.
After this, we went to meet with an immigration person and you got to have a lawyer there. I didn’t have any names. They tried to make me do this hearing without a lawyer. I said, “No, I’m supposed to have an attorney.” They said, “Well, I don’t know if we can find you one.” Eventually, somebody saw and then came over real quick. My meeting with the lawyer was probably two to three minutes at the most, and not confidential.
They cut our shoelaces off, took anything else that we had that they needed to take and put us on a bus. Again, zip-tied in front of our hands, even tighter this time.
We stayed on this bus for at least an hour before it drove away. I’m pretty sure they got us all on the bus and then just left the thing for a while just to mess with us, just to make us more tired and more aggravated. I was definitely among the last few people, and then from there, it was probably a two-and-a-half to three hour drive.
Q: Where did they take you?
Lein: They took us directly to Ketziot prison in the Negev desert which is maybe thirty miles or so, east-southeast of Gaza, fairly close to the border of Egypt.
Q: What was it like in the prison?
Lein: They put us into cells and each of the cells had four bunk beds, so that would fit eight people, but all the rooms had ten to fourteen people. Some mattresses were taken from other cells and used on the floor. They definitely had enough cells for all of us—so they just wanted it to be crowded in our cell.
They did lots of little things. One thing they did was wake us up throughout the night.
Sometimes they didn’t even open the door. They’d turn our lights on and then count us. And they would mess up and then do it again. At some point we just started assuming, we can’t really tell if they were messing up on purpose or not. They would do that a few times throughout the night.
We also did disruptive things, of course. We were able to write on the walls in various different ways. It happened throughout, but definitely on the first day. They didn’t respond to it until the middle of the night, when they would burst in with seven people. They all had guns. And I guess how you responded to that determined whether or not you were going to get beat. Our cell just de-escalated and said we’re not going to all get beat just because we wrote on the walls with jam. So we wiped it off. But other cells didn’t do that, and they were assaulted. There were definitely lots of instances of assault.
They started using dogs, too. They marched into a cell and beat the crap out of everybody in a cell where someone had removed the window panes—and especially the person who did it. He was the guy that was put in solitary confinement in a pit outside.
For days there were two people that needed insulin. We were shouting at them and chanting about it for a couple of days. Somebody else had a heart condition in the men’s block. I think somebody else had post-traumatic stress disorder that they were taking medication for but they didn’t get it, so they were kind of breaking down at some point. In the women’s cells, I know one person had a urinary tract infection and I think they were peeing blood. She wasn’t treated. They didn’t get feminine products and, of course, a bunch of people had their period.
I feel like the women were probably more resistant than the men were, actually. They did some awesome stuff. They did yoga classes. And I think they had a hula class.
Somebody from the United States had handcuffs put on so tight that he lost feeling in his thumb and it hasn’t even fully come back yet. There were so many people there, so many different cultures. We were all mistreated. Definitely some got it worse, some got it more automatically worse based on ethnicity.
Q: Do you feel like you’ve recovered from being on the flotilla? Or is it something that has stayed with you?
Lein: Emotionally, this is definitely something that’s going to stay with me. I’m pretty sure I’ve had some kind of dream about it every night. It was a very special kind of thing to do. We all pretty much had the same belief systems. You gather a whole bunch of very similar people together. Anybody who got there is very, very invested in Gaza. Emotionally, what they’re doing with their lives, you don’t really get there if you’re not really into it. Then that leads to a lot of other things socio-politically and economically. We’re all very similar. And then we’re all tight-knit, whether it was on the boat or as a flotilla. Because we all work together as a flotilla.
It’s a long journey across the Mediterranean. You’ve trusted these people with your lives, and shared a living space and bathrooms and bedrooms—and bombings and interceptions and drills and things like that. After you’ve done all that with a set of people, now you’re in prison together—so we were very close. There’s a lot of people I would absolutely love to see again. And I probably will.
Q: Is there anything you want to add?
Lein: The most important thing in terms of our detention that should be talked about by as many people as possible: We had five days, four nights of detention in an internment camp. Between that and the treatment that we got just scratches the surface of what Palestinians in their illegal detention for weeks or months and years in a lot of cases go through.
We were 450 people. There’s about 400 Palestinian children in illegal detention right now. They’re all hostages. They’re not prisoners on one side and hostages on the other side. These are about 10,000 illegally detained hostages. And they need to be free also.
Mohammed Ibrahim is a sixteen-year-old Palestinian American from Florida. He was arrested in Palestine—it’s been about eight months. He’s being illegally detained.
The State Department didn’t help us and it’s not helping him yet either. It’s Mohammed Ibrahim as a person that we've got to get back to his family. He’s an American citizen. He deserves all the protections we can provide. He’s not a terrorist. He’s a sixteen year old. He was fifteen when this happened. And that’s really important.