Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Extreme-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to turn Israel into a 21st century version of the Flying Dutchman. Britannica tells us that Europe produced the legend of the “Flying Dutchman,” a ghostly vessel that is fated to sail forever. When sailors descry it in the distance, they know a catastrophe looms. One common version of the tale concerns a Captain Vanderdecken, who wagers his immortal soul, vowing to round the Cape of Good Hope amid a tempest. He and his ship end up being doomed to ply those same waters forevermore. The legend forms the subject matter of Richard Wagner’s opera, Der fliegende Holländer [The Flying Dutchman] (1843).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” also refers to the story:
- “The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
‘The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!’
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out;
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.”
Tuesday morning last week the Crown Iris cruise ship full of Israeli tourists tried to stop off at Syros island just south of Athens. They were blocked by a massive popular demonstration at the Ermoupolis harbor, conducted despite a curfew issued by the municipal authorities for local residents, forbidding traffic and circulation at the port in hopes of allowing the Israeli tourists to get off. People ignored the traffic ban to assemble anyway. In the end the cruiser had to cast off its moorings and depart without unloading any of its 1600 passengers.
The protest that blocked the disembarkation was staged by trade unionists and civil society groups, whose members flew large Palestinian flags and raised a banner emblazoned with the logo, “Stop the Genocide!”
Despite the attempt of Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar to get Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis to intervene, the protesters proved victorious. The center-right Greek government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis condemned the actions of the protesters.
The Crown Iris did manage to dock at Limassol in Cyprus, and then returned to Israel, before returning to Crete with the intention of going to the island of Rhodes.
But the unions and civil society organizations in Rhodes are now mobilizing against the visit, with a demonstration set for Monday afternoon (i.e. tomorrow) at the Old Commercial Port half an hour before the Crown Iris is scheduled to dock.
Organizers issued the following call:
- “On Monday, July 28, 2025, in the afternoon (3:30 pm), the Israeli cruise ship Iris Crown will arrive at the port of Rhodes (old commercial port – customs office). This is the same ship that recently approached Syros, provoking the symbolic protest of the islanders against the genocidal policy implemented by the extreme-right [ακροδεξιά] Netanyahu government against the Palestinian people. Residents, together with visitors to the island, managed to prevent its docking at the port, necessitating that it turn around and leave…
“The Municipal Employees’ Association of Rhodes calls on its members, as well as on those who refuse to compromise with the very idea of slaughtering civilians, of their extermination by enforced starvation, and of systematic genocide — but who at the same time seek a just and viable solution to the Palestine issue — to gather at the old commercial port/ customs office at 3:00 PM on Monday, July 28.
“The message of our protest is clear: we resist the ongoing murderous policy of the extreme-right Netanyahu [ who they point out was indicted by the International Criminal Court as a war criminal] and his supporters — while we have nothing against those Israelis or Jews-by-religion who oppose the crime or do not participate in it.”
Although Israeli propagandists lambaste the protests as antisemitic, the organizers, at least, deny that they are about Jews or Jewishness or even about Israelis. They are protests against the genocidal policies, they say, of a particular Israeli government, which they characterize with the same Greek word typically used to refer to neo-Nazi parties in Europe such as as Germany’s AfD.
“Flying Cruise Ship,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
The episode, which has turned Israeli cruise ship passengers into the Flying Dutchmen of the Mediterranean, shows not rising anti-Jewish bigotry but the ways in which Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and a rogues gallery of war criminals at the top of the Israeli state have made Israel a pariah state. Their propaganda was always that Zionist state-making is crucial to Jewish safety, but their hard Right policies have boomeranged, making Israelis and Jews less safe. What would have made Israelis safe was an implementation of the Oslo Peace Accords, signed by Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, and which Netanyahu loudly and interminably boasts he destroyed.
There have been lots of protests against Israeli cargo ships — in Oslo, Istanbul, and San Francisco — and Spain declines to let Israeli ships believed to be carrying arms shipments dock at Spanish ports.
Alas, this is only the beginning. As images of the emaciated corpses of Gaza Palestinians, including children, emerge onto the world’s smartphone screens in the coming weeks — for all the world like the photographs taken by the American soldiers who liberated Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz — the pariah status of the Israeli state will be ever more solidly cemented.
Personally, I don’t agree with boycotting individual Israelis. People should be judged by their deeds, not by their origins. But this crime of the 21st century will unfortunately and inevitably cast a long shadow. And nor should Americans, who are joined at the hip with Netanyahu and his millenarian crazies, think they will themselves escape this gathering global opprobrium.
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