David Heap, 45, is a professor of linguistics and French at the University of Western Ontario. He grew up in Toronto and you may recognize the name. Dan Heap, his father, was MP for Trinity Spadina and in 1965 marched with Martin Luther King in Selma. His mother Alice is a major organizer.



Heap, who has two children, is on the steering committee of the Canadian boat to Gaza and he and others began planning for Freedom Flotilla II a year ago, following the deaths of activists aboard he Mavi Marmara.



He is a lifelong activist involved in peace and social justice causes. In 2009, he was part of the Gaza Freedom March in Egypt.



He spoke with the Star.



What if the boat does not make it to Gaza? What if nothing changes with the blockade?



He recalls something a fellow Gaza Freedom March participant from South Africa said at the time.

“Sisters and brothers, it’s not about what we do this week or this year for Palestine. It’s a question of how many decades we’re going to be with Palestine, because that’s how long she’s going to need us.



“These people know something about defeating apartheid. We came out of that very energized, but also with the long view.



“You keep that long view present in your mind. You have to. You can’t set yourself up for failure, if it doesn’t happen in this time, in this year. But more has changed in Northern Africa and the Middle East in the last couple of months than has changed in decades.



“The other thing I keep in mind, when my father went to Selma to march with MLK in 1965, nobody knew that there was a breakthrough right around the corner in the civil rights movement. Freedom riders had been going to the American south for years and standing with African Americans, but it turned out that there was a breakthrough with voting rights and bringing down Jim Crowe laws not that far away. When they went and did it, it was a risky thing to do.”



On the symbolism of the relatively miniscule amount of humanitarian aid the flotilla intends to deliver:



“That part (aid) is symbolic and the other part of the symbolism is that we intend to open up trade, outbound. Gaza is an area that should be very prosperous. They had an exporting manufacturing sector; they had an exporting agricultural sector, all of which was devastated. Hundreds of factories were trashed. Hundreds of farms were trashed, and now the blockade means they can’t export. They produce wonderful fruit and strawberries and things and they can’t export those. They’re very restricted on the exportation of those because they depend on other people’s border crossings and they can’t export through their own border.



“So, it really comes down to mobility through the port.



“It’s symbolic, but, again, to talk about the 60s, I think one of the people from the American boat put it very well when they said when African Americans went to a lunch counter in the segregated south, the immediate goal was to get lunch but it really wasn’t about getting lunch, right. It’s really about challenging the system, and the blockade is wrong. If we can get some stuff through, that’s important, but if all of the boats were full to the brimming with material, it wouldn’t materially change the situation as much as a political shift, such that the port would open.”



On the fact Canada doesn’t approve of the flotilla and foreign affairs minister John Baird has called it “provocative”:



“The civil society is doing what our government has failed to do and setting a moral representative vision of what Canadian actually care about.”

This is the first Canadian boat to try this. After the deaths last year, how did this idea begin?



“It wasn’t a question of could we, should we, people just came up to us in the streets and said, ‘When are we sending a Canadian boat? Let’s do this. You have to go back.’ Acts like this are about intimidation. You have to go back more and more.”