Peace pirates
As the Sumud moves steadily toward its destination, Juan continues to harness the power of art and poetry to speak truth to power.
Sumud: A Hyapry* Line of Salt and Ashes
*Hyapry means a human chain — a linked line of bodies, hands, arms, and shoulders — formed to protect, resist, or advance together
It begins with a bull and a girl. Europa, daughter of Tyre, playing on a Phoenician shore. Zeus descends, gentle as fraud, and carries her across the Mediterranean on his gilded back. She becomes the continent's namesake, its unwilling mother.
Millennia later, the same sea carries us—four hundred souls on rusted hulls, the Sumud Flotilla—and the same crime repeats: abduction.
But now the abductors wear naval insignia, and Europe, born of rape, has learned to collaborate. Its ports refuel the kidnappers. Its courts call our lifeboat a pirate ship. Its silence is a complicit.
Unable to even ask for ceasefire onto innocent children dying every day, for the last thousand days and nights. We sail anyway.
Quixote's ghost rides our prow: not tilting at windmills but at the monstrous machinery that turns a siege into policy, children killing into a footnote statistics.
We are four hundred, but thousands wait on quays from Istanbul to Marseille : workers, nurses, grandmothers, anarchists, pacifists, punks, squatters, academics, unemployed, civil servants, politicians, artists, writers, engineers, doctors, teachers, philosophers, wild priests, imams, rabbis, activists, ecologists, sailors, sea rescuers, —all of us dreamers of peace and justice Many broken souls who cannot sleep or look away while children die of injustice or impune bombing.
We know the Mediterranean has become a free-trade zone for arms trafficking and a no-go zone for peace smugglers. We know we sail through a world ruled by financial speculators allied with arms, petrol, and chemical cartels disguised as food or pharma sales, trading power for lives. We know that to bring flour and medicine to Gaza is, in the lexicon of empire, to be a criminal. So be it.
We become pirates of this time.
Honored to break immoral rules.
Out in international waters, the shadows strike. Israeli speedboats rend the night. Our comrades are kidnapped. Our boats disabled. Our hulls gashed, comrades taken to ship- prisons and some to Israel,/sorry, occupied Palestine.
But sumud is the art of not letting go. Most of the kidnapped, many injured, rejoin us within days and again sail from Crete's home of the kidnapped Phoenician princess Europa to rescue her by returning to besieged Gaza, the stubborn glare of four hundred who refuse to look away.
We stitch our wounds, patch the boats, and drift.
Awaiting rescue that will not come, we broadcast everything: the names of European rulers who signed arms deals while Gaza starved, the shipping insurers who blacklisted our rescue vessels but not missile carriers, the individualism that whispers every body is an island.
That whisper is the real weapon. It is the capitalist's prayer and the imperialist's lullaby.
We answer with our hulls. We answer with our hands.
And yet the sea remembers other stories. Ulysses spent a decade outside Troy, then another trying to reach Ithaca. We also sail through a decade of siege—but our Ithaca is not home. It is the right to bring rights and home to others. We are the Greek ships that did not turn back. And Troy is every wall, every blockade, every legal opinion that calls starvation a proportional response.
As the salt march when Gandhi walked to Dandi to make salt from the sea, a tax protest that unmade an empire. We make a different salt: the brine of our own labor, the tears of mothers under rubble, the Mediterranean itself turning bitter with impunity and drowned migrants.
Our boats are the new salt pans. Our defiance is the new grain. And when Israel attacks again—because it will attack again—we do not scatter. We hold the line. We become a hyapry line, a rope of human hands, each knot a body refusing to let the next drown.
After Rhodes, we enter the last lap of international waters. The most dangerous stretch, where Israeli gunboats wait and European radar looks away. But instead of heading directly to Gaza's shore—into the jaws of a certain massacre—we steer north. Not retreat. Strategy. We limp toward Marmaşis, Turkey, a harbor that becomes our parliament of the waves. Here, we will not disband. Here, we will rebuild, rechart, relaunch. Because the dream is not one voyage. The dream is a fleet.
And beneath that dream lies something older and newer than any myth: the dream of a new humanity reborn from the ashes of Gaza. For Gaza is not only a graveyard. Gaza is a kiln. From its crushed concrete and orphaned children, from its doctors operating by phone light and its bakers sharing the last loaf, a different kind of human is emerging—one who knows that solidarity is not charity but defending universal rights, that freedom is not granted by power but shaped by everyday courage, that the sea belongs to no flag or power but to peace fighters, justice rebels and migrants challenging borders of greed. We are that dream's flotilla . And every attack, every kidnapping, every complicit European signature is only but wind in our sails.
We drift. We wait. The sea, that ancient abductor and liberator, holds its breath. And from the ashes—from Troy, from Gaza, from the salt plains of Dandi and the tilted windmills of La Mancha—the new humanity stirs. It has no capital, no borders, no insurance. It has only a hyapry line of hands, stretching from Marmaşis to the horizon, chanting the oldest and newest prayer:
Sal, sal, sal. Sail, sail, sail. Until the only pirates left are the ones who tried to drown us. We are the pirates now. We are the utopia they will never kill.
