Inhaftierte kanadische Flottillenaktivisten auf dem Weg nach Gaza kehren nach Hause zurück – CTVNews

This isn’t an analogue to „the Michaels“ in China.

These people attempted a blockade run, knowng that they’d be safe and given the option between a signed voluntary deportation home or choosing to wait through the bureaucracy of the courts. They chose the former, as expected, and were swiftly deported, to nobody’s surprise.

These people also had been offered actual, *reliable* options to safeguard the aid until final distribution — from Italy and from the Pope himself. They wanted to run a blockade, despite the lack of any coastal pier in Gaza capable of offloading large-scale aid and the most at-scale reliable aid-delivery infrastructure being land-route-based, because they fundamentally oppose Israel’s *ability* to block weapons from reaching Hamas.

Canada’s government had no diplomatic freakout because there wasn’t anything to freak out over from a diplomatic standpoint. Canada doesn’t object to the legality of the blockade (nor does the United Nations, [which determined](https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/world/Palmer-Committee-Final-report.pdf) that preventing seaborne weapons delivery from reaching Hamas is a legal cause for blockade), and doesn’t object that people attempting to illegally enter a foreign war zone are detained and swiftly deported to Canada.

Canada’s government handled this correctly — which is to say, they let a piece of kabuki run its completely-predictable course.