Ethan Floyd was picking out constellations with a phone app as they sailed across the Mediterranean when they noticed one star that didn’t quite fit.

“And then it starts flashing,” Floyd says. “It goes green and red and you realise it’s actually not a star, it’s a surveillance drone that’s flying over your boat.

“Or, it’s a little octocopter that’s got an incendiary device that they’re planning on dropping on your sails.”

These sightings were a regular occurrence for Floyd and the other activists taking part in the Global Sumud Flotilla, a collection of over 70 boats carrying humanitarian aid with the aim of breaking Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

“My conscience wouldn’t allow me to do nothing,” they explain, as three weeks later we sit in the back courtyard of Sydney institution Sappho Books, Cafe & Bar in Glebe — a meeting point for political student groups at the University of Sydney.

Involved in the university’s Palestine encampment, the NSW Young Greens, weekly Hyde Park Palestine rallies, and previously student strike, the 22-year-old law and arts student has quickly developed an extensive background in local activism.

How do you connect with and then use your humanity in a way that’s going to benefit others?

The humanitarian convoy to Gaza, a grassroots movement composed of volunteers from around the globe, is only the most recent addition.

“I don’t want to be the kind of person who fails in their humanity,” Floyd says.

“How do you connect with and then use your humanity in a way that’s going to benefit others? That’s the personal motivation, I guess.”

Since 2010, no flotillas have successfully passed into Gaza (‘Yet’ Floyd adds), and the world watched as on April 30, four days after departing from Sicily, Floyd’s boat was one of 21 vessels intercepted by the Israeli military in international waters.

Over a hundred activists were detained for two nights. Many alleged they were physically abused, forced to sleep on flooded floors and some alleged sexual abuse. Floyd says three members of the flotilla were shot with rubber and live bullets and then denied medical treatment. The alleged abuse has not been independently verified by Central News.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated the activists were released “unharmed”, but several countries criticised Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir after a controversial video showed him taunting detainees.

 

While onboard, Floyd said they watched Palestinian-Spanish activist and flotilla organiser Saif Abukeshek being dragged into solitary holding to be transferred to Israel, where he was held until May 10.

“I’ve never heard anybody scream in the way that Saif screamed,” Floyd says when recounting the incident. “That feeling, the entirety of your body just goes cold.”

Floyd’s leg begins to jitter underneath the table, as they add: “There are parts that are really difficult to recount. What I find really beautiful and what I find quite easy to recount, are sort of small human moments.”

According to Floyd, other activists did cartwheels on the first night of detainment.

“That brought me a lot of comfort and a lot of happiness to see people, you know, still expressing this human feeling of joy and activity and movement,” they say. “I think those were the beautiful moments.”

My mum used to tell me ghost stories about the creek… they’re all survival stories.

Floyd draws on their childhood experience growing up in the regional NSW town of Gulargambone, and their heritage as Wiradjuri, Wailwan and Ngiyampaa, to explain how they got into activism.

“My mum used to tell me ghost stories about the creek,” Floyd says. “They’re all survival stories because she has relatives and ancestors and grandparents who would cross that bridge into the white part of town at the wrong time of day or the wrong time of night and they’d be lynched.

“And that was something that kind of, not haunted my childhood, but were stories that I would hear and I wouldn’t understand why these things would happen.”

Floyd repeats the term “Ngapartji, Ngapartji” after describing how, once released by the Israeli military on Crete, the activists were fed, housed and clothed by the local Communist Party in an old hospital refurbished into a squat.

“That means give. Just to give… And the rest will come,” they say.

“And that’s what I felt from the Greeks, is that there was just this sense of, they weren’t looking for anything in return, they weren’t asking favours for things, they saw we were in trouble and they helped us. I thought that was a really beautiful microcosm of what my motivations for doing the flotilla were.”

Main image of Ethan Floyd at Sappho Books, Café & Bar by Joe McLean.