Carsie Blanton needed to say farewell to her guitar. The singer-songwriter was somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean sea on a sailboat last week when the 10-person crew decided to play some music. They passed around the guitar, sang a song or two, including Blanton’s “Little Flame” (sample lyric: “Prison cells/Freedom Rides/Keep the little flame alive”), then decided to give Blanton’s instrument a proper burial at sea.
The reason? Blanton’s boat, part of a 40-plus-ship, nearly 500-person coalition traveling towards Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, was anticipating being intercepted by the Israeli military later that evening.
A week or so later, Blanton is speaking to Rolling Stone, back in the United States after she and several hundred others were detained at Ketziot, a sprawling Israeli prison complex in the Negev desert. Blanton is a folk singer and songwriter who’s been self-releasing records and touring the country for the past decade. She’s opened for Paul Simon, and her most streamed song is a heartfelt tribute to John Prine called “Fishin’ With You.” In 2019, Rolling Stone named her an Artist You Need to Know as she discussed her increasing willingness to use music to agitate: “I don’t give as much of a damn about making people comfortable as I used to,” she said.
Today, Blanton, who is Jewish, is relieved to be home, outraged by how she and her fellow detainees were treated while in detention, and resolved about her purpose as an artist-activist-influencer on the flotilla: to spread the message and raise awareness about what she and many human rights organizations and scholars have termed a genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel.
A day after arriving back in the U.S, Blanton is exhausted, enraged, and quick to laugh at the dark absurdity of some of what she experienced. “I’ve discovered my own wish to create work that is useful to the movement instead of just making commodities for record labels,” she says. “Art is worth so much more than capitalism pretends.”
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OVER THE PAST six weeks, images, clips, reels, news stories, and footage of human rights activists sailing towards Gaza have flooded the West, in large part due to the high-profile participation of Greta Thunberg. That’s precisely the point of the Global Sumud Flotilla, as Blanton, who signed up in mid-late August, sees it. “The political strategy of the flotilla is to basically create a media storm,” she says. “We had people from 40-plus countries and every boat included some social media people and journalists. The point is to make everybody think about what is going on in Gaza.”
This year’s effort is the biggest yet, but humanitarian aid flotillas are not a new concept: Pro-Palestinian activists have used this way of objecting to Israel’s blockade of Gaza and its maritime border for more than a decade and a half, attempting to deliver aid by sea. Each year, the flotillas have been intercepted by the Israeli army. “The purpose is to take a bunch of people who come from privileged countries who have powerful governments and force their governments to deal with Israel,” Blanton says. “By using our bodies we are trying to use political pressure on our home countries. Coming out of this experience, what I most want to share is the understanding that as a private citizen you can put yourself in a position that creates political pressure for your government, and that’s the point of all protest.”
Everyone participating in this year’s Global Sumud Flotilla was expecting to be detained. But what Blanton was not prepared for was how she and others were treated during detention. After soldiers intercepted her boat, Blanton was sent to a Naval base in Ashdod, where she was processed, signed some papers, and had a quick court hearing. Then, she says, “I was zip-tied, thrown in a very cold van, waiting a couple of hours, then they eventually put someone else in [the van] with me and drove us to another processing place in a little outdoor cage.”
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Blanton spent four nights and five days in detention. After not receiving food for 30 or so hours, the detained activists were given rice and tomatoes the first two days, followed by an unexpected day of bread, hummus, chicken, and cheese. Each night, she says, the detainees were woken up in the middle of the night and moved around to different cells. Every few hours throughout the night, guards turned on the lights and counted them. Blanton also says that outside her cell, there was a documentary regularly playing about the events of Oct. 7, 2023, when a horrific Hamas attack killed roughly 1,200 Israelis and resulted in several hundred hostages being taken.
The activists were regularly moved around to assorted cells and outdoor cages while awaiting processing and court hearings. Blanton says detainees were routinely denied their medication and were crammed into overcrowded cells.
In a recent statement to PBS, Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, defended the flotilla activists’ treatment at Ketziot.
“I was proud that we treat the ‘flotilla activists’ as supporters of terrorism,” Ben-Gvir told PBS. “Anyone who supports terrorism is a terrorist and deserves the conditions of terrorists…If any of them thought they would come here and receive a red carpet and trumpets — they were mistaken. They should get a good feel for the conditions in Ketziot prison and think twice before they approach Israel again.”
Despite what she describes as inhumane treatment and conditions, Blanton says the detention was full of art, political theory, and solidarity. She says many of the women were on their periods at the same time: “Most of the cells said ‘Free Palestine’ in menstrual blood before we left.” (Detainees were separated by gender.)
And she says that her time in Israeli prison resulted in some of the most inspired dialogue she’d ever had on leftist ideas and tactics. “I found myself in a cell with members of parliament from Spain and Brazil and Greece, and we were all just sitting there with nothing to do all day, discussing different forms of Marxism. We would get switched around in the cells and it’d be like, ‘I just talked to the Brazilian MP and she said this; what do you think about it, Greek MP?’ If we had been there any longer we would have definitely started the revolution.”
Eventually, detainees began hearing from representatives of their respective countries. Blanton didn’t speak with any U.S. officials until Sunday, three days into her detention. By the time she and the other American detainees met with U.S. officials in Israel, she says, “We were pretty pissed off because everyone else had already spoken to their consulate, and our assumption was the U.S. and Israel are buddies, so probably we’d get to speak to them pretty soon and have some weight to throw around,” she says. “It was quite the opposite. The impression we got is that the U.S. would prefer we hadn’t done [what we did] and that they didn’t really want to get us out.”
That impression continued two days later, on Oct. 7 of this year, when Blanton and the other Americans were released from Ketziot. They were woken up early that morning and put on a bus to Jordan, where their interaction with a U.S. embassy member, Blanton says, differed substantially from other freed detainees’ interactions with representatives of their home countries.
“Everyone else had snacks and hugs and ‘Here’s a phone, here’s some money,’” Blanton says. “Our lady shows up from the embassy and was like, ‘Hey, I want you to know that we’re not going to babysit you. You’ve gotten yourself in a bad situation and the U.S. is not able to provide any money for tickets home or help.”
The U.S. embassies in Israel and Jordan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Blanton broke down later that evening, when the freed flotilla activists were treated to an unexpected banquet at the Landmark Amman Hotel in Jordan. Strangers began approaching her and thanking her for what she’d done. “We woke up in an Israeli prison, we haven’t showered, we are stinky, tired, confused and upset, and after several hours we end up in a penthouse of this five-star hotel in Amman eating this extravagant buffet with a chocolate fountain,” she says. “That was very overwhelming.”
The next day, Blanton flew home to New York’s JFK Airport alongside a handful of other activists. When they landed, they were greeted by ICE agents, who questioned one of the Americans for 10 minutes, then escorted the group through the airport. There was a press scrum and a celebratory gathering organized at the airport, and Blanton thinks “the point was to keep us from meeting the crowd.” After the ICE agents escorted them through a specific exit, she adds, “We wandered around the airport and found 300 people having a rally for us on the other side of the baggage claim.”
On her first full day back in America, Blanton is still processing what she experienced. She remains surprised by the degree to which the flotilla activists were denied basic prisoner rights, and wonders how her treatment compares to what Palestinians experience in Israeli prisons. She is eager to spread the message that someone need not be a public figure with a social media following in order to engage in the type of non-violent protest she’d just engaged in, that most of the flotilla participants had been just that: normal people — schoolteachers, retired folks, stay-at-home moms — with no strong background in activism.
“To me, that’s the extraordinary story that’s not being told, and I think it’s important for people to understand,” she says. “You don’t have to be some kind of special person with money or a platform to do a political intervention. Anyone can do it.”
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Blanton had to cancel an upcoming tour, but she’s already thinking about how to use her art moving forward. The detainees had spent much of their time in prison singing songs in Arabic that one of the flotilla activists, a Palestinian musician from New Zealand named Rana Hamida, had taught them.
“We were singing in prison because we needed to,” she says. “Music is a much deeper and more important experience than what we in the quote unquote music industry tend to frame it as. The music industry is total bullshit and always has been. We need to find something bigger to commit our lives to as musicians. With this experience, I was like, ‘OK, I’ve found something.’”
