This morning, a convoy of supply ships headed for Gaza with humanitarian aid, crewed by civilian peace activists, were boarded by Israeli soldiers. 19 people were killed, several more wounded. You already know this. You also know that it happened in international waters, that the Israelis claim that the activists shot first, that the flotilla was towed to an Israeli port and that there’s been little contact with those on board. I’m not sitting here to speculate, not really. I’m just trying to make sense of it… What little sense there is to be made of such senseless violence, anyway. What is the world coming to, and all that. It’s enough to make even me cynical, and if you know me, you know I’m about the biggest optimist who ever walked this Earth… Well, sometimes.

In many ways, it hasn’t really sunk in. It did a bit at the demonstration this afternoon. When Erling Folkvord told us that Henning Mankell had been shot, I felt it; I got a face to connect with the tragedy. Of course, this turned out to have been misinformation (misinformation that had time to spread across a fair bit of the web before it was refuted, so I don’t blame Folkvord for a minute for jumping the bullet when he thought someone he had met and spoken to had been wounded), but to me, that made everything that bit more real.

We had a nice, peaceful demonstration. There were loads of speakers, and I’d be lying if I said I remember what most of them said. I remember that Erlend Loe said that despite his right-wing tendencies (and he is a conservative, through and through), he was outraged and upset over this atrocity. I remember that a girl from Blitz whose name escapes me and a man from the Socialist Left party whose name I can’t be arsed to remember (and most of the others as well) gave passionate pleas for the boycotting of all Israeli imports and called for the Norwegian government to cease any and all financial contributions that might end up in Israeli hands. And I remember that during Erling Folkvord’s appeal, a bunch of people laid down in protest (and it got really crowded). And I remember Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, Israeli citizen and peace activist working for a free Gaza, who said that we are the last hope. That we need to act. And it makes me uncomfortable, because what can I do? Write a blog post?

And, yes, that’s exactly what I can do. I can write a blog post. That’s what I can do today. So after having spent my morning in discussion on MetaFilter and reading online news articles, and then going to a demonstration and taking some pictures, that’s what I can do, I can share my day here. My experience. I don’t know anyone who was on that flotilla. It’s not that real to me, but I know that terrible things happened today, and tomorrow it’ll probably sink in, and then I won’t be able to write about it anymore. Not for a while, anyway. Today, I’ve just been walking around with all this anger pressing on me; everything has pissed me off.

Still, first demonstration! That was fun. I put on my “Boycott Israel” t-shirt, tied my keffiyeh around my neck and went by a convenience store on my way to the embassy to buy a lemon. (Because apparently, if you bite into a lemon when you get teargassed, it counters the effect and you get off a little easier.) And I’ve heard so many stories of someone starting a riot and anyone standing at all close being arrested, and obviously worried, but no one rioted today. They didn’t let us any closer than maybe 100 metres from the embassy itself, and there were riot police everywhere, but nothing happened. So, good, peaceful demonstration. Some people were noisy, but no one threw anything.

I’d like to share with you another thing before I end this rant. In my infinite wisdom, I realised halfway through that my phone has a camera, and I started taking pictures. And then, at the end of Angela Godfrey-Goldstein’s speech, I realised that I can film things as well. So here are the last two minutes of Angela Godfrey-Goldstein’s speech: