The laws of buoyancy are fixed in stone, and soil. If it can float, then it must be a country.

Courtrooms excavate history to hear their own echoes, like embers that need to be fanned to keep alive. The acoustics of the banisters reverberate what was decided in the past.

Each type of incident has its own celebrity legal-case. Whether a case of collision, or hovering outside nautical borders, each will have their own moment in the past to refer to, against which they will be located in the present. There are no landmarks at sea.

For example, if a ship is caught sailing without a flag, the primary case that will be used as precedent in court will be the historical case of the Asya ^[1] . Rather than saying “as we all know the case of the Asya”, lawyers to this day retell the story, as if due process. When first sighted off the coast of Palestine, this ship was not waving the flag of any country, and eventually they raised a flag that was of something other than a country.

The states of matter are such that what floats must be considered land, though it does not matter which nation-state you claim the ship to be territory of, as long as it exists. Liquids allow you to frame any action as taking place within a judicial context of your choosing. While for some it may be hard to speak with a mouth full of water, for others it is hard not to.

In aquatic cases brought forward, the same historical moment is always used as a reference point through which the present can be seen. Because on March 27, 1946, a ship once flew the flag of a non-existent country, to this day every ship must fly the flag of an existing country. The fact that this country does not exist is echoed within the legal breath exhaled in contemporary waters.

If to float is to be considered land, then what can we learn about buoyancy by looking at fields of olive trees? The law of buoyancy states that the upward force holding the land up is equal to the weight that is displaced. While marking distance from the river, the sea provides freedom of navigation to any vessel that carries its own laws, transporting jurisdiction as its cargo. The empty space of non-state, which the wetness of our logistics economy relies on, is a freedom of exception.

The words that require a mouth to be filled with empty space, solidify the lack of a nation that signs displacement within the laws of buoyancy. A doctrine, hurled from the lips of the non-state, begged its own justification.

“The appellant has invoked the doctrine which is called "the freedom of the open sea," alleging that under the shield of that doctrine the Asya was entitled, whatever her mission might be, to sail the open sea off the coast of Palestine.”

To send is to float; to become land. 90% of traded goods continue to be shipped by sea, according to the International Maritime Organization. The proper noun of a vessel, holds its place in files and records. To float is to name that which floats, and in doing so, every title becomes a citizen within the language of nations. The Asya as a name, is remembered outside of linguistic existence. This is archived in the echoes of legal utterances within the courtroom trial.

“The freedom of the open sea, whatever those words connote, is a freedom of the ships which fly, and are entitled to fly, the flag of a State which is within the comity of nations. The Asya did not satisfy these elementary conditions. No question of comity nor of any breach of international law can arise if there is no State under whose flag the vessel sails.”

Precedent is a principle or rule established in a legal case that becomes authoritative to a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar legal issues, facts, or states-of-matter. The laws define a solid as being more fixed-in-place than liquids. An unmoving monument stored in location, a ritual that reenacts the past into the present: “to stand by decisions and not disturb the undisturbed.”

“When she was sighted she was flying no flag. She ran up the Turkish flag when the boarding party approached, but that was pulled down and the Zionist flag hoisted in its place.”

If any vessel involved is not registered to an existing nation, if what floats is not considered land, then this one historical moment will be reawoken into the present. The legal doctrine stating that courts should follow precedent is called stare decisis (literally meaning "to stand by things decided"). When standing on solid ground, the normal force is the meeting point between that of gravity, and the mass of earth pushing upwards.

A mouth full of water recites to the present that the Zionist flag cannot float, as it sails from a cavity of statehood, to that of decay and infection.

The weight of a fluid is 30 times cheaper than a solid. While planes are faster than ships, aerodynamics do not allow planes to carry as much weight in the air as can float on massive ships at sea. The upward force exerted on a body, is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces.

When the past meets the present, the trial reads that none of the people on board the Asya “had any passport or travel document or visa to enter Palestine”, and therefore are subject to its laws. The Zionists defending the Asya used that very same point to their attempted advantage. Their argument was: because they were specifically “not local to Palestine”, and “were not citizens of that country, then there is no reason that they should be subject to the Laws of Palestine”. While this argument was true, it did not hold up in court, because the ship did not fly the flag of an existing nation, and thus was not eligible for the freedom of the seas.The syntax of self-proclaimed nonlocality, carved into the same judicial stone as the laws of buoyancy. Fixed in place, as a state of matter, and a matter of fact.

The law of economic buoyancy structurally proves itself in the system that it motorizes. An engine speed capacity that has not changed in almost a century. The train of thought to get there has to travel by sea, in order to hold its weight.

Every incident has its own echo: spoken (as if the historical moment were meant for that preminatory function) into current ears, awoken from its stored slumber, eternally present in its readiness to stake claim to the present. Sending the lack of a state between moments, creates a vacuum that propels toward the cracks of now.

“To send” is to board the upholding surfaces (whether liquid, solid, or gas) that carry weight. Of the fossilized histories according to which contemporary shipping navigates; to fan the embers and prevent them from getting wet.

1. The Asya was a ship (owned by Naim Molvan) destined for Jaffa, to settle Europeans on Palestinian land as part of the settler colonial project, two years prior to the invention of the state of “Israel”.