An embarrassing public relations stunt wound down to quiet anticlimax over the weekend, as the Israeli navy intercepted the boats of celebrity activist Greta Thunberg and her so-called Freedom Flotilla before they reached the shores of Gaza. Thunberg and her team were purporting to “break the siege” of Gaza — she labels Israel’s war against Hamas a “genocide” — by carrying less than one truck’s worth of relief supplies to a population whose only difficulty in accessing aid comes from the threat of Hamas.

After being successfully interdicted by the Israelis without incident, she was invited by the government to watch footage of the October 7 massacres assembled from terrorist cameras on the day. She refused, later saying: “They tried to make us watch all kinds of propaganda videos, but I didn’t watch. This is nothing compared to what is happening in Gaza, which is in desperate need of humanitarian aid.”

Nobody should be shocked that someone as dogmatic as Greta Thunberg failed to reach a sudden moral epiphany about Zionism by the end of her journey. But the bloodless, unemotional tone of her response is itself a perfect encapsulation of the implacable mindlessness of the pro-Palestinian movement she represents, one fueled by rhyming slogans (“From the river to the sea . . .”) and buzzwords meant to trigger outrage and urgency: “genocide,” “humanitarian crisis,” “starvation.”

There should be no need for us to explain once more that what is currently happening in Gaza is not a genocide, nor are its people starving. Rather, Israel is fighting a war against a brutal enemy that seized hostages in a surprise massacre, cloaks itself among its civilian population, and avows the destruction of Israel as its inalterable goal. But large swaths of the younger generation — the left-wing products of our modern media and educational environment — believe these claims to be almost axiomatically true.

Taken on her own terms — as a former environmental crusader who instantly became a pro-Palestinian activist after October 7 in a bid for continued relevance — Greta Thunberg is a ridiculous figure, as easy to mock as she is to dismiss. But taken as an embodiment of her generation’s approach to politics, her style of activism is telling.

For one, the sheer appeal to unreason underlying Thunberg’s anti-Zionism — betraying its origins in an emotional reflex rather than a logical argument, and thus impossible to negotiate with — is identical to her earlier approach to environmental activism. That style is now the coin of the realm on the left: the guilt trip and temper tantrum as substitutes for arguments.

Then, there’s her explanation of her goal with the Freedom Flotilla: “It was a mission to tell the Palestinians — we see you and we are not ready to accept what is happening.” This resoundingly empty justification reveals Thunberg’s true politics to be those of the hollow, self-gratifying gesture. (No Gazans were interviewed to determine the caloric value of “being seen.”) Thunberg inadvertently reveals a truth lurking within so much of modern publicity-seeking activism on the left. The “issue” is oftentimes not even really the issue for these people, so much as the attention and the posturing is.