This activist group chat has been blocking a weapons shipment to Israel for week

For a few hours between Oct. 17-18, a cargo ship called the MV Kathrin had “gone rogue” just outside of Malta’s territorial waters. To “go rogue,” in shipping terms, is to be without a flag — and in the case of the MV Kathrin, its flag had been revoked by the Portuguese government after it sat, “at anchor,” in the Mediterranean for 10 days, rejected from its destination port of Malta.

Why such drama on the high seas? To understand, you have to go back to the beginning of the MV Kathrin’s journey — back to July, when the ship embarked on its beleaguered journey out of Hai Phong, Vietnam. It was there that sympathetic members of a Vietnamese labor union alerted the international organizing committee of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, that a ship carrying weapons bound for Israel was about to loop around the African continent. ….more