{"id":219,"date":"2025-10-05T10:37:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T10:37:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/?p=219"},"modified":"2025-10-05T10:37:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T10:37:13","slug":"whos-interested-in-the-global-flotilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/2025\/10\/05\/whos-interested-in-the-global-flotilla\/","title":{"rendered":"Who’s interested in the “global” flotilla?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the news stories last week was that of \u201cGlobal flotilla\u201d to Gaza, which brought no aid<\/a>, but plenty of PR. In Italy, for example, there were large protests about it\u2019s blockage by the Israeli navy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, I\u2019m fascinated to see who is interested in a news item, compared to its volume in the media. As usual, I turned to Google Trends to measure the search volume by country to the topic of the \u201cGlobal Sumud Flotilla\u201d between September 25th<\/sup> and October 3rd<\/sup>, 2025. I then tried to see what correlates with the search volume.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The table below shows a few (Spearman) correlations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Variable<\/strong><\/td>Worldwide<\/strong><\/td>Europe<\/strong><\/td><\/tr>
Number of participants in the flotilla<\/td>0.07<\/td>0.77*<\/td><\/tr>
Percent of Muslim population<\/td>0.62*<\/td>0.39<\/td><\/tr>
Number of Muslims in the country<\/td>0.30<\/td>0.53<\/td><\/tr>
Antisemitism rate<\/td>0.56*<\/td>0.44<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Stars denote statistically significant correlations (P<0.05 with Bonferroni correction).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Technical notes: I only included countries with non-zero search volume and where I had the respective variable data. The variables are from Wikipedia pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the table shows, worldwide interest is correlated with the percentage of the Muslim population in a country and with the antisemitism rate (the two are, unfortunately, correlated with each other). In Europe, the correlation was with the number of participants in the flotilla. Incidentally, while writing this blog I found that none of the (Muslim) countries surrounding Israel are represented in this event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point there were reports that the flotilla had some disagreements between its Muslim and its progressive members. I didn\u2019t find good data on the percentage of progressive voters in different countries, so let\u2019s use data from the United States, for both the share of voting for the Democratic ticket in 2024 and the search volume by state. Indeed, the correlation is high: 0.66 (P<10-4<\/sup>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s the takeaway? \u00a0Globally, people in countries that have a large Muslim population were interested in the flotilla. In Europe, it’s mostly the number of participants on the flotilla. It also seems like a left-wing political issue, at least in the USA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can we figure out the direction of the correlation? For example, does living closer to Israel (e.g., in Europe) and having more people on the boats cause more interest, or is it a different causal graph, e.g., more progressive people will be both more interested in the flotilla and want to participate in it? We\u2019ll need more careful analysis to know, but my feeling is that it\u2019s probably a mix of the two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the news stories last week was that of \u201cGlobal flotilla\u201d to Gaza, which brought no aid, but plenty of PR. In Italy, for example, there were large protests about it\u2019s blockage by the Israeli navy. As always, I\u2019m fascinated to see who is interested in a news item, compared to its volume in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Who’s interested in the “global” flotilla?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yom-tov.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}