One of the most ridiculous documentaries I have ever watched was a 2019 film produced by Al Jazeera Documentary Channel titled "The Yellow Fleet", directed by the Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Qanawi, who resides in Italy. I tried to find some excuse or justification for the film’s shallow content and weak direction, so I looked into his background and some of his other works. What I found only reinforced my impression: a man who studied Italian literature at Ain Shams University and later worked as a tour guide in Egypt, carrying a camera with him, seems to have assumed that emigrating to Italy and learning a few editing software shortcuts was enough to make him a documentary filmmaker and director.
For example, there are scenes in the film that are supposedly about the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, but are in fact footage from the 1973 War. Moreover, the interview format—guests occupying half the screen against a black background while archival footage fills the other half—reflects a level of directorial bankruptcy that should have been unacceptable in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Returning to the German documentary produced ten years earlier, in 2009, titled "Stuck in the Bitter Lakes: The Ships Trapped in the Suez Canal," we encounter a different kind of absurdity—this time at the level of content, marked by a striking naïveté. Despite its strong archival footage, the film is built around the simplistic notion that human beings are inherently good once they are freed from their political ideologies and national affiliations.
The only conclusion I drew from this unique historical episode is that conflict among human beings is unavoidable, and that unity and cooperation emerge only when people face a common existential threat that does not distinguish between them—such as an alien invasion of Earth or a global pandemic that threatens all human life.
Indeed, competition, conflict, and intrigue among members of the same camp are often the normal path for those seeking leadership, climbing institutional ladders, or pursuing privilege and advantage.
Returning to the story of the Yellow Fleet, it remains one of the strangest, most compelling, and most inspiring episodes in the history of the Suez Canal. Not because it involved a decisive battle or a dramatic shift in the balance of power, but because it tells the story of how fifteen merchant ships became trapped in the heart of a war and, over the course of eight years, evolved into a small world of their own—one that resisted isolation through solidarity.
None of those sailors could have imagined, on the morning of June 5, 1967, that what was supposed to be a routine voyage through the Suez Canal would turn into a prolonged, involuntary stay in the midst of one of the most politically and militarily tense environments of the twentieth century.
The ships had been proceeding along their normal route as part of a maritime convoy transiting the Suez Canal northbound when the calm of the morning was shattered by the roar of Israeli aircraft striking Egyptian airfields. Thus began the war that would later become known as the Six-Day War or, in the Arab world, the Naksa (Setback).
In that moment, the merchant vessels ceased to be mere carriers of goods between continents. They suddenly became eyewitnesses to the eruption of war across the region—objects trapped between two fires, unable either to move forward or turn back.
When the initial shock subsided and the major battles ended, Egypt’s decision to close the Suez Canal left those ships in complete isolation.
