On June 8, in the year 793, the monks of Lindisfarne Monastery on the north-eastern coast of England were shocked to see Viking longships heading their way. The raid would mark the major beginning of the Viking takeover of Western Europe.

June 8, 2025, saw another Viking taking to the seas in the form of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, with her Gaza-bound flotilla.

Thank God for Greta Thunberg. She offers us clarity and an unwavering moral compass pointed firmly at the usual villain: Israel.

The latest episode in Thunberg’s humanitarian theater sees her aboard the Madleen, a ship carrying aid for Gaza that set sail from the Italian port of Catania on June 1.

The flotilla includes citizens with French and Swedish citizenship and a diplomat and is carrying supplies for Gazan Palestinians and protesting what they say is “Israel’s “illegal, decades-long blockade, and ongoing genocide” in the enclave.

A drone view shows the Gaza-bound aid ship Madleen, organized by the international NGO Freedom Flotilla Coalition, anchored off the coast of Catania, Italy, on June 1, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/DANILO ARNONE)
A drone view shows the Gaza-bound aid ship Madleen, organized by the international NGO Freedom Flotilla Coalition, anchored off the coast of Catania, Italy, on June 1, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/DANILO ARNONE)
Their voyage is operated by the pro-Palestinian nonprofit Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which has staged other naval efforts to reach Gaza by sea over the last 15 years. The latest trip comes as the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza enters an uncertain phase – and includes Thunberg, one of the most prominent progressive activists in the world.

Defense Minister Israel Katz directed the IDF on Sunday not to allow Thunberg’s flotilla to reach the shores of Gaza and to take any measures necessary to ensure that. “I have instructed the IDF to act so that the Madleen flotilla does not reach Gaza. To Greta the antisemite and her friends, I say clearly: ‘You’d better turn back – because you will not reach Gaza,’” Katz said in a statement.

A troubling pattern among many international voices

Thunberg has gained notoriety over the past seven years since her activities began in Sweden and has, in effect, become the “poster girl” for the anti-establishment camp.

Her activities since October 7, however, have left none in the dark on which side of the fence she sits.She posted on X/Twitter on the first anniversary of October 7 that Germany continues “financing and legitimizing Israel‘s apartheid occupation and genocide,” with zero mention of the massacres exactly 12 months earlier. Her message has been one that the world has become used to seeing: Israel is the villain. There is no other guilty party.None of the realities coming out of Gaza seems to trouble Thunberg.

To be fair, she has occasionally mumbled that “it goes without saying” that she condemns Hamas’s atrocities. But what actually goes without saying is her consistent silence when those atrocities involve Palestinians being sacrificed by their own government. Her public statements, protests, and flotillas never focus on the repression within Gaza. The target is always Israel.

This is not just about one activist. It is about a troubling pattern among many international voices, from NGOs to campus groups to celebrities, who speak with moral certainty about Israel’s role in Gaza’s suffering, while treating Hamas as, at worst, a regrettable footnote.

The world is told again and again that Gaza’s misery is due solely to Israel, the bombings, and the “occupation.” Search any number of foreign media reports or social media posts on the matter, and one would be shocked to discover that Hamas does indeed have a role to play in the failure of aid to reach Gazans and in the suffering ordinary Gazans are going through daily.

And yes, there is deep and undeniable suffering. But any honest accounting must include Hamas’s theft of aid, its exploitation of civilians as human shields, and its brutal repression of its own people. Ignoring that truth is complicity and ignorance of the highest order.

Thunberg’s narrative of the Israel-Hamas war leaves no room for the messy, devastating reality that Palestinians can also be victims of their own rulers. And that Hamas’s authoritarian grip is not the liberation that Thunberg stands for.

Thunberg isn’t malicious, just willfully blind. In her zeal to defend Gaza, she’s become a symbol of selective empathy, ignoring the brutal reality that Hamas brutalizes its own people.

The child who once stood for the planet now stands, knowingly or not, with a terror regime. And that makes her voyage one of dangerous, deliberate ignorance, not the gesture of hope she thinks it is.