The Canadian boat to Gaza was also commandeered in Greece. Jesse Rosenfeld got out a report:
The boat has been pulled back into the port of St. Nicholas. The coast guard used water cannons on the side of the boat and boarded from the back with M16’s, taking the wheel room at gun point. Activssts chanted “you are puppets of the Israelis; the Greek people don’t support this” referring to a long time relationship between Greece and the Arab world.
And here’s an excerpt of Rosenfeld’s account of life in St. Nicholas:
As news started to trickle in about sabotage against the Greek-Swedish/Norwegian and Irish boats, anxiety set in. Quickly the atmosphere turned from a quasi-activist vacation into the modern reincarnation of a Casablanca-esque psychological thriller.
The activists start a 24 hour security campaign to protect their boat with groups of four to six plus a crew member on board at all times. Then at a morning briefing mid last week, news broke of suspicious conspicuous men asking locals about the flotilla in broken Greek. Soon after, the hotels and meeting room were abuzz with reports of people on rooftops snapping photos with long lenses cameras of the port and the Canadian boat.
“If anyone asks at the hotel, tell them you’re on vacation with the abcd tour group,” Tahrir owner and flotilla steering committee organizer Sandra Ruch said repeatedly over the week. Ruch, a Jewish Canadian who was on the Gaza freedom march in 2009 with the feminist, anti-war organization, Code Pink, moved to Athens three months ago to lay the foundation for the Tahriri to set sail.
Passengers desperately tried to talk about anything but Gaza, the flotilla, and their anxieties from emotionally and physically draining training sessions, but they would often guiltily catch themselves or be called out for breaking this golden rule.
Back inside the meeting room of the Coral Hotel, marathon sessions cover everything from practicing linking arms as mock Israeli soldiers charge into activists and detailed discussions of the meaning of non-violence, to media skills and the nuts and bolts of how Israel’s forced isolation of Gaza works.
These workshops could take unpredictable forms but were based around instilling what steering committee organizer and linguistics professor, David Heap, called “the red lines’’; these were a series of rules that all participants needed to sign onto, committing to non-violent action. The first and most prominent of these was a rule barring “ initiating physical contact with soldiers,” in event of an encounter.
