“‘It is the most barbaric experience I have ever had in my life…’
The computer science researcher Pantelis Vlachas is one of the 19 Greek activists who were illegally captured in international waters by the ‘terror state of Israel.He is a member of the recent Global Sumud Flotilla mission and of the Communist Liberation. He wrote the following words inspired from his experience
The first thing you learn on an Israeli cargo ship turned into a floating prison is never to look up.
They drag you with your head lowered.
They torture you with your head lowered.
They beat you with your head lowered.
When you try to raise it, you are struck again.
Above you, the entire time, there is a weapon pointed at you.
For hours, forced into kneeling or bent-over positions.
Your eyes fixed on the floor, on the metal plates, on their boots,
stealing whatever quick glances you can at your comrades around you.
As if it were a systematic management of the gaze itself.
In Ancient Greek, according to one etymological tradition, the word anthropos (human being) derives from ano throsko — “to look upward.”
Whether or not the etymology is linguistically exact, it carries a truth we came to learn:
upright posture and the raised gaze are fundamental elements of the human condition.
When they are methodically taken away from you, you are dehumanized at the most basic level.
The ship where they held us resembled a cargo vessel deliberately designed and modified into a floating prison, with detention and torture containers, barbed wire, intermediate checkpoints.
The procedures were standardized: step by step, in sequence, with specific people assigned to each stage.
We are talking about a Fordist factory of torture: an assembly line, transfer from one stage to another, division of labor, the production of submissive bodies.
What we experienced — a few hundred foreign activists over the course of several days — is only a fraction of what Palestinian prisoners endure.
In Sde Teiman, Ofer, Megiddo, and Ketziot — where we too were taken — thousands of Palestinian bodies are held for years.
With the same and far worse forms of torture, the same forced positions, and much more: sexual violence, electric shocks, amputations, deaths.
Since October 2023, hundreds of Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons.
Many without ever having been tried.
Adalah, B’Tselem, and the UN have documented this repeatedly, yet no one is moved.
When the same torture reaches European, American, or Latin American bodies, the Western world is moved just a little more.
We are “legible” to the Western gaze: we have names, nationalities, families.
To the Western eye, the Palestinian is a statistic, a number in genocide documentation reports.
That alone reveals the racist architecture of international law, the media, and the Western political sphere.
That is why Palestinians fly kites.
Kites have become a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
Children in Gaza, with demolished homes and fractured families, still fly makeshift kites — even ones made from scraps of cardboard.
Above the drones, above the F-16s, above the settlers.
As though reclaiming the gaze through poetry.
The kite is the exact opposite gesture to the colonial, genocidal state that forces your head downward.
It is the gaze reclaiming its own self-determination.
It is ano throsko in material form.
It is the refusal to become an animal.
The insistence on remaining human, with all the weight that word carries.
We have the privilege of returning home.
In Palestine, around ten thousand Palestinian prisoners remain incarcerated.
What we witnessed for a few days, they endured for decades.
The Greek people, like every people who know what occupation and resistance mean, bear a responsibility.
The Greek government and the state apparatus remain complicit: arms supplies to Israel, diplomatic cover, transit facilitation, IDF tourism on the islands, real estate investments, ports serving the genocide, research collaborations and funding ties with Israeli universities and companies.
Greek complicity is not isolated: it forms part of the broader EU–NATO imperial framework that supports the genocidal state and prepares peoples for the next war.
We will not stop until every form of complicity in the genocide ends.
Until the gaze of every Palestinian is free.
Free to look wherever they want.
We move forward into the next waves.
Pantelis in the following video describes shocking accounts of beatings and torture, including electric shocks using tasers, on the prison ships during their captivity.”
