'Determination overrides fear': Yemeni-Jewish journalist joins Freedom Flotilla to defy Israel’s siege

A Yemeni-Jewish freelance journalist based in Paris has joined the 2025 Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, saying that “determination to do the right thing overrides fear” as she and fellow activists set sail to challenge Israel’s blockade of the enclave.

Noa Avishag Schnall said she identifies herself as “an anti-Zionist Arab Jew” and renounced the citizenship of “the European colony known as Israel, or '48 Palestine.”

“I joined the 2025 Freedom Flotilla, both out of a sense of deep-rooted responsibility to my Palestinian siblings, currently enduring a genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Israel, and as an escalation of decisive action to break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza,” she told Anadolu.

Schnall criticized what she called the “neglect” of international obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, arguing that civilians are stepping in where governments have failed.

“The real question is not why I joined, but rather why it’s left to civilians to act on the duties of nation-states,” she said. “Nation-states that are neglecting their clearly outlined obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

She accused governments of offering only “lip service to Palestinian sovereignty” and said that their “strongly worded statements” have failed to stop the ongoing violence in Gaza.

“In the past 24 to 48 hours, our comrades in the Sumud Flotilla have been illegally intercepted in international waters and subsequently kidnapped and taken to Israel or '48 Palestine,” she said, referring to another humanitarian convoy stopped by Israeli forces.

Asked whether she feared for her safety, Schnall said: “Fear and worry are human responses, but determination to do the right thing overrides all of those things. What we might go through is nothing compared to what Palestinians go through every day.”

She described Israel as “an ethnostate with a racial and cultural hierarchy” and said Palestinians have faced “genocide and ethnic cleansing” for nearly eight decades.

“For people who are uncomfortable with the word genocide, I encourage them to read the key tenets of the definition,” she said, citing the Genocide Convention’s clauses on intent, bodily harm, and conditions of destruction.

She argued that the international community has a legal and moral responsibility to intervene before atrocities occur.

“States are obligated to act to prevent genocide before it actually happens, when there’s a plausibility that it’s apparent, which clearly there has been,” she said.

“So if people are uncomfortable with the term, I really ask them to reckon with what’s actually going on.”

- 'Mainstream media blackout'

Schnall said the flotilla also seeks to challenge what she described as a “mainstream media blackout” and amplify the voices of Palestinian journalists documenting the situation on the ground.

“We wish to break not only the legal Israeli siege on Gaza, but the mainstream media blackout on coverage,” she said. “Palestinian journalists are reporting on their own genocide.”

She concluded by calling on governments to enforce international law, halt arms deliveries to Israel, and end cooperation with what she described as “Israeli apartheid.”

“We want to stop arms deliveries to Israel by all countries that are themselves complicit,” she said.

“And we want to stop cooperation and support of any kind for Israeli apartheid and their genocide of the Palestinian people.”