Greta Thunberg has once more taken an issue of global importance and made it all about herself. Once again, she has turned a complex, nuanced issue into a social media spectacle.
She repeatedly says she doesn’t “like this attention” and yet released a pre-recorded video about the capture of the boat she was travelling on towards Gaza by the Israeli Defence Force.
And that is her brilliance as a campaigner. As she so often did in the climate crisis debate, Greta has used both her appeal to activists and her antagonism to opponents to shine a light on an issue in desperate need of the world’s notice.
Early this morning, it was reported that Greta was at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel on her way home. The country’s foreign ministry announced she and others on the 12-strong trip were “expected to leave within the next few hours”.
The boat on which she was sailing remained in the Port of Ashdod. Israel said the small amount of aid it was carrying would be sent on to Gaza. But the delivery of food and medicine was never the primary purpose of The Madleen. Its real cargo was “attention”.
And with 14.8m followers on Instagram and 5.2m followers on X, Greta – sufficiently famous to be a one-name activist – brings plenty of attention.
The video she released when the boat was stormed was shared across social media and led mainstream news bulletins. Israeli authorities were also sufficiently conscious of her influence that they too shared her image when she was held and brought to shore.
Opponents of the 22-year-old Swedish activist have been incandescent about the trip. Few can trigger the right-wing woke-slayers like Greta. Amid the insults thrown at her on yesterday’s talk shows were that she was “morally repugnant” and indulging in “performative virtue-signalling”.
They all seemed particularly riled that this was a “publicity stunt”, and then spent a good half an hour giving it publicity. But rage-baiting is good for ratings and online clicks.
The Madleen was intercepted in international waters off the coast of Egypt in the early hours of Monday morning after setting sail from Sicily on 1 June.
The activist group Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which organised the journey, said it was seeking to defy the Israeli blockade to deliver aid to Gaza – and that the crew had been “kidnapped by Israeli forces”.
Israel’s foreign ministry, in turn, attempted to diminish the trip by referring to the Madleen as a “selfie yacht” which was carrying Greta and other so-called “celebrities”.
A placard reads ‘Thank you freedom flotilla’ as participants gather during a rally to show their support for activists aboard (Photo: Alex Martin/AFP)And they were absolutely right. A selfie yacht is exactly what it was. But if your selfie is being seen by 15 million people horrified at the plight of children and adults in Gaza, then that is powerful in our visual-first media.
Of course, any aid is of use in a place where children are starving to death, but the suffering of the people of Gaza will not end until the public around the world places such pressure on their governments that they in turn push Israel to stop it.
With a block on Western journalists getting into Gaza and a collapse in faith in the mainstream reporting on the crisis, activists like Greta are seeking to fill an information void. The content created is not objective or comprehensive. But it is emotive. And emotion is the currency of activists.
All across Instagram and TikTok yesterday there were mournful-looking young people listening to the news that Greta’s boat had been “kidnapped”.
And anyone muttering: “Who cares what the idiots on TikTok think” is the real idiot. Twice as many young people get their news from TikTok than the BBC, a report revealed last year.
Greta was just 15 when she started her school strikes in Sweden over the climate crisis. It came after she had struggled for years with isolation and depression, seemingly desolate at the older generation’s refusal to stop its neglect of the planet.
She became an icon for so many other young people feeling something similar. As a young woman with Asperger’s Syndrome (which she calls her “superpower”), coupled with her straight, impassioned speaking, she captured the zeitgeist of authenticity, perfectly suited for the social media age.
In October 2023, she began posting in solidarity with the Palestinian people and then joined the onslaught of protest against the Israeli entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo.
It was reported that on arrival in Israel, Greta and her colleagues were forced to watch harrowing footage of the Hamas attacks of 7 October.
It is unsure whether they did, but they should do. Not to stop their activism, but to inform it. As Gandhi, who spoke often about trying to understand those you oppose, said: “Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.”
There is now much academic study into the “Greta effect” on the climate debate and public opinion around such issues as air travel and electric vehicles.
But she was polarising from the start, with many on the right of politics characterising her as a joyless zealot intent on snatching the nation’s steaks and sun-soaked holidays.
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While editor of the Mirror, I endured an excruciating meeting when Greta came to meet a group of national newspaper editors. The purpose was for her to engage with key media players. What ensued was an onslaught of middle-aged-media-mansplaining.
A succession of editors with little climate science knowledge but a lot of bluster told Greta her campaigning was flawed and Brits didn’t like being preached at, before asking for a selfie and then rushing back to the office to preach to their readers.
She took the whole thing quite well while still being honest enough to say she was pretty appalled by how she was treated.
Some will argue Greta’s dogmatic approach to activism did harm the climate debate by antagonising those who could have been won over. And now it could have the same impact on the crisis in Gaza.
But without the activism of that schoolgirl, would the climate crisis have remained a topic confined to the dry resolutions of endless Cop conferences? Quite possibly. And would as many young people today be weeping about the humanitarian crisis continuing in Gaza? Quite possibly not.
Alison Phillips was editor of the Daily Mirror from 2018-24; she won Columnist of the Year at the 2018 National Press Awards
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