by Dalia Maini
At the port: witnessing complicity
I was carrying a trolley and a handbag when I walked toward the gate, where security checks would allow the crowd of people gathered in an unruly multitude to embark on the ferry. Mostly men of different ages, smoking cigarettes, waiting outside their cars loaded with goods, bags, furniture, and toys. Women and children sat in the vehicles waiting for the gate to open. Many families knew each other and greeted one another with handshakes in a congratulatory manner, as if they had all been invited to an appointment at the port of Salerno, southern Italy, yet were surprised to have made it together on that route, with so much to bring back home and more to maintain across the water.
Several gates, checkpoints, and Maersk containers built the port environment, surrounded by a rocky headland of the Salentinian coast, pierced by tunnels that allowed people and goods to reach the most remote areas inland, places where tourists paid less attention, discouraged by the rawness of the roads. And yet, the mystery and the rituals of the autochthonous population expressed themselves at their best, sheltered by a crown of mountains and nurtured by the Mediterranean sea. This was the landscape of myths and longing, but also of Europe’s ongoing colonial violence against North Africa, made concrete. I photographed the Maersk containers for Instagram, a small gesture toward bearing witness to a visible reality. A report released by the Palestinian Youth Movement identifies the Danish corporation as responsible for nearly all maritime shipments of fighter jet components to F-35 production hubs in California and Texas, connecting suppliers from Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, the two US-based defense contractors that run the most critical F-35 production hubs. This company was complicit in genocide, its logo floating on seas already thick with deadly policies.
While ports in Haifa and Tel Aviv welcome international ships bearing weapons and explosives from Mediterranean ports, Israel’s colonial logic blocks Palestinian naval traffic while using the sea to seal, infiltrate, and massacre. The Mediterranean bathes Palestine, yet no Palestinian ships ply its waters. Since 1993, while Oslo peace negotiations were underway, Israel imposed a naval blockade on the Gaza Strip, sealing its Mediterranean port and, in Noura Erkat’s words, relegating Palestinians to “bare life” in a bid to take the land without the people. A comprehensive land and sea blockadehas strangled the movement of goods and people since 2007, ostensibly to prevent weapon smuggling but functioning as collective punishment. In March 2024, six months into the US-backed genocide, President Biden announced a $230 million temporary floating pier in Gaza to facilitate aid delivery. The pier shut down two months later, but not before evidence emerged that on June 8th, IDF and US forces used it to infiltrate the Gaza Strip and commit the Nuseirat refugee camp massacre, killing at least 274 Palestinians to free four Israeli captives.
The Freedom Flotilla and European exceptionalism
It was May 31, 2025, and the following day, the Madleen ship, launched by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, would depart from Catania, Sicily. I felt particularly drawn to sharing the same body of water with this solidarity mission, one that had stirred more empathy in European hearts than the very siege, oppression, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians ever had. The dehumanization that functioned as justification for the Palestinian genocide shared the same racial and colonial logic that buried, under Frontex border patrols, North Africans in the Mediterranean. Yet the freedom flotilla captured European attention in ways that the ongoing drownings of migrants never did. The spectacle of solidarity offered Europeans a comfortable narrative of their own moral goodness, one that demanded no reckoning with the constitutive violence perpetuated at their own borders. It was easier to support humanitarian gestures in distant waters than to confront the systems of exclusion and death operating as the foundation of their democracies on the same sea. Europeans, after all, fall for aspirational narratives of generosity and humanitarianism with ease, stories that conceal the roots of violence itself. Even solidarity initiatives can reproduce the logic of European exceptionalism: the assumption that Europeans sailing to Gaza represents a more meaningful gesture than North Africans simply trying to cross the same sea in self-exile from their homeland.
Border violence and the traveler-migrant divide
At the port, the space between the soon-to-be passengers of the 28-hour Salerno-Tunis journey was filled with reciprocal gazes, a moment to meet and recognize oneself, to prefigure the reshaping of Tunisian society already on the waters, amongst which I was still unsure about how to find my place. My attempt to mediate my presence amongst the people became more complex when checkpoint guards enforced racial violence in front of the entire group. My passport indicated that the reasons for my travel were different from those of the people around me, who mostly went back home for the Eid holiday. With my appearance suggesting privilege, I was a minority amongst a majority, yet the numeric quantity was not enough to humanize the eyes of border control; the guards waved me forward in the line of passengers. The gesture felt like an assertion of power over me, too, and a violation of any anti-racist determination I try to cultivate.
The difference between being a traveler and being a migrant was starkly visible at that node of overseas logistics: from the vividness of the families’ excitement in the air, the size of their luggage, and the attitude of the port police toward me. An understanding I had reached before, mostly moving through airports and taking planes, but I hadn’t felt so sharply yet. It was clear now that airports, with their tourist or business purposes, pre-select passengers and partially conceal the violence of the land borders enclosing the European Union. The route and the denigrating ritual attached to it were surely a first time for me, but not a first experience for the group of people who had remembered it at least once before, when they had crossed to reach another shore of the same sea. In this asymmetry of experience, of how racism operated, discomfort crowded out my initial enthusiasm; the weight of it had already settled in. An embodied acknowledgment that systemic violence regulates bodies differently, but excavates us all.
Externalized borders: Europe’s proxy regime
The Mediterranean’s geography belies the political reality that European borders now extend far beyond its northern shores, reaching deep into North Africa through a system of externalized border control. Italy has forged agreements with Tunisia and Libya that transform these nations into buffer zones between the Saharan region and Europe, effectively outsourcing the racist work of migration deterrence. Since the 2017 Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding, Italy and the European Union have provided funding, naval vessels, training, and operational support to the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, despite overwhelming evidence of abuses, illegal interceptions, and systematic violence against people fleeing persecution. An estimated 169,000 people have been intercepted and forcibly returned to Libya since 2016, subjected to what survivors describe as inhumane violence in detention centers and at the hands of militias. Similar dynamics operate in Tunisia, where an EU Memorandum of Understanding has pledged €105 million in migration-related funds for coast guard equipment, return programs, and technical training designed to prevent Europe-bound migration. This apparatus is a diffused border regime that operates through proxy forces, creating zones where human rights protections dissolve and violence becomes routine, all while Europe absolves itself of guilt.
On board: infrastructural exclusion
I had reserved a chair on the ferry, where I spent the night uncomfortably. Around me, people constructed makeshift prayer spots with carpets, bending on the fl oor facing Mecca. Needing to charge my external battery, I asked the men near an outlet if I could use it once their phones were done. They agreed. While waiting, I went to the bathroom where another outlet was hidden. There, I met a girl, also traveling alone, about to fi ll her water bottle from the sink, as a bottle of water on board cost 4 euros. I stopped her just in time from drinking the water stagnating in the boat’s tanks. Returning to ask for the outlet, I found more people had lined up to charge their phones. The man I’d asked seemed to have forgotten. With no alternatives, I squatted near the bathroom where the hidden outlet stood unused. From there, I observed men coming and going during prayer hours to perform wudu, passing wet hands over their heads, and washing their feet. A crew member tasked with cleaning worked continuously to dry the floor, their effort betraying something between disgust and resignation. From this observation point, it became clear that the architecture of the bathroom, of the boat itself, was poorly designed to accommodate Muslims whose relationship with God required purification several times each day. The only ferry routing from southern Italy to Tunis had no prayer space, no infrastructure where believers could worship comfortably, and no water available to drink. The infrastructural neglect was deliberate. The ferry becomes a microcosm of how European infrastructure is designed to accommodate certain bodies while rendering others perpetually out of place.
Infrastructure as a colonial weapon
I thought about the notion of infrastructure colonialism. Water infrastructure has served as a powerful instrument of colonial control, embedding capitalist relations and state power through the strategic manipulation of essential resources. During the time of Fascist Libya, Italian colonizers transformed the environment through massive hydraulic projects that simultaneously served regime-building and settler colonization, creating a process where natural systems were reconfigured to serve authoritarian ends and facilitate Italian migration while dispossessing indigenous populations. These infrastructural interventions established ecologically unequal exchanges that privileged colonial settlers’ access to water while marginalizing Libyan communities from their own resources. Similarly, in Palestine, water infrastructure has become a mechanism of territorial control and population management at the hands of the occupation, where the construction of pipelines, wells, and distribution networks has created stark disparities in water access between Israeli settlers and Palestinian communities. In both cases, hydraulic infrastructure operates beyond mere technical systems, functioning as physical networks that carve out state spaces, interrupt flows to certain populations while enabling them for others, and ultimately shape the very possibilities of life and livelihood.
Smoke on water: histories of violence
Fifteen hours into the crossing, on deck, passengers smoked and gazed at the horizon where water and sky merged into a single continuum. Puffs of smoke from the boat’s engines twisted in the wind, mingling with cigarette smoke. The ferry’s diesel engines, descendants of the coal-powered steamships that once revolutionized Mediterranean warfare, reminded me that this sea has long been an arena of violent transformation. When Britain deployed steam-powered warships against Muhammad Ali’s forces off the coast of Palestine and Lebanon in 1840, it marked more than a military innovation. Those vessels, freed from dependence on wind and current, could impose their will on any shore regardless of weather or season. The coal they burned announced a new imperial logic: nature was no longer a partner but fuel, and the Mediterranean became a proving ground for fossil-powered domination that would reshape the global economy. The presence of fire on water has always signaled the presence of violence. Standing there among the smoke and engines, I imagined how different it must have been to cross these waters by sail, carried by wind in something closer to attunement than conquest. I tried with my eyes to catch glimpses of the flotilla again.
Arrival: the persistence of asymmetry
Hours later, at night as Tunis appeared on the horizon, families began gathering their belongings, goods retrieved from under seats, prayer mats folded and packed away, and children woken from sleep. The excitement was palpable, but so was the exhaustion. We prepared for the next checkpoint, the next performance of documentation, and security; this time, their presence didn’t require justification, mine was unquestioned, but neither was particularly welcomed.
The same sea, the same crossing, but never the same journey. The violence of these waters broadcasts itself with brutal precision. Systemic racism does not collapse us into shared suffering; it stratifies us, assigning different degrees of violation, different proximities to harm. My discomfort on that ferry, however sharp, remained peripheral to a regime designed to discipline, humiliate, and ultimately destroy those deemed unworthy of life. The asymmetry that cut through us at Salerno’s gates would not resolve itself at Tunis’s arrival, nor at any border to come. What these waves tell us about violence is this: it is never equally distributed, never random in its targeting, and those who benefit from its logic, even reluctantly, even with discomfort, remain complicit until the infrastructure itself is dismantled. The ferry will sail again, the checkpoints will remain, and Europe will continue to engineer its moral alibis while the Mediterranean swallows in an abyss those it has been instructed to exclude.