HIGH above his head, the words "Wisdom" and "Enterprise" seem to hang heavily in the ceiling mural over the Bristol City Council chamber, as Cliff Hanley speaks to the assembled media about the horrors of his time aboard the Palestinian aid flotilla attacked by the Israelis last week.

The 61-year-old artist from Southville doesn't look up to see the words hanging over him, but you might think he would be questioning the "wisdom" of the campaigners' recent "enterprise" which led to Israeli commandos boarding the aid ships in the flotilla and killing nine of his fellow activists.

But as I chat to him after the two-hour press conference, Cliff seems remarkably calm about the whole affair – he doesn't even seem too concerned about the death threat he has received via his website since arriving back in Bristol on Sunday.

"The first thing I did when I got home was to wash my feet, then log on to my website and start blogging," he says. "I was slightly surprised when I noticed that an online comment had been left on my blog that I took to be a death threat.

"The comment simply said 'nice flat, I'll be waiting for you'," he explains with a shrug of the shoulders, before adding, somewhat laconically, "I suppose I should tell the police about it at some point."

Perhaps this cool response to a death threat is inevitable, given that little under a week ago he was standing on the deck of a ship with Israeli commandos' bullets grazing his arm as they narrowly missed him.

But what, I ask, had he been expecting to happen when the flotilla of six ships approached the Israeli naval blockade around Gaza?

"We knew the Israelis wouldn't like it, of course," he says. "But we thought they would just try to frighten us by flying low in their fighter jets or shooting at the water.

"We certainly never expected them to board the aid ships while they were still in international waters and start shooting indiscriminately."

But surely Cliff knew he was putting his own life in danger by being aboard the ship, the Mavi Marmara, as it went head-to-head with the maritime might of Israel?

Cliff thinks about the question for a moment, before responding with a peculiar metaphor, under the circumstances.

"I suppose no soldier going to war thinks that he will be the one who will get killed," he says.

Do you think of yourself as a soldier, I ask.

"I think of myself as someone who has formed a habit of wanting to help the people of Palestine. In the past I've travelled there with cross-country aid convoys and been able to deploy aid to the people.

"Of course we knew that the Israeli naval blockade existed, but we thought that by approaching in a flotilla of six fairly large ships, the Israelis might think twice about attacking us. Turns out we were very wrong," he says.

But Cliff says that the night before the Israeli soldiers attacked the ships, there was a "sense of inevitability" that something was going to happen.

"There was almost a party atmosphere on the ship because of this sense of inevitability," he says. "We expected something to start happening at some point."

With typical Scots stoicism betraying his Glaswegian origins, throughout the press conference, Cliff remained remarkably calm as he told his tale.

This was in stark contrast to his fellow Palestine campaigner Ebrahim Musaji, a 26-year-old social worker from Gloucester, who broke down in tears on a couple of occasions as he recalled witnessing a fellow activist being shot in the head and killed while taking pictures of the commandos as they boarded the ship on wires lowered from helicopters.

His voice also wavered as he told how the commandos had reputedly gained control of the ship by pointing a gun at the head of the captain's one-year-old son.

But Cliff seems far less traumatised by his experiences. "In my ignorance, it was a long time before I realised that the soldiers were actually on the top deck," he admits. "I thought they were going to board the ship from the little gun boats that they had flanking us on either side. I thought the helicopters were just lighting the scene.

"It was four o'clock in the morning, and everything happened so quickly – I simply didn't have time to be afraid. I was too busy trying to get a good photograph.

"One of the campaigners on the ship had a floodlight, which he was pointing down at the little gun boats. I went and stood behind him, because the floodlight meant I could get good pictures of the soldiers below.

"Unfortunately the floodlight also made him rather an obvious target for the soldiers. I felt something graze past my arm, and at first I looked around to see if somebody was behind me. But then I realised it had been a bullet, so I quickly got out of the way.

"I can remember thinking, I'd better get out of sight because I'm no good to anybody if I bleed to death. Then the man that was holding the floodlight was shot and killed in front of me."

After being strip-searched, Cliff's cameras and mobile phone were thrown overboard, and he was handcuffed and made to kneel on the main deck for three hours.

"The Israeli helicopters kept lowering down so they were hovering just above our heads and creating a storm of wind and spray from the waves," he says. "There is only one word I can think of to describe this tactic, and that is torture."

After more than 24 hours under arrest onboard the ship, the 1,000 campaigners were taken ashore and individually interrogated in a specially-constructed series of tents, before being taken to a newly-built Israeli prison for the rest of the week.

"At the end of my interrogation, the Israeli woman who had been interviewing me handed me my passport, pointed me towards the door, and said 'enjoy'.

"This, presumably, is what passes for humour in modern day Israel. Not everybody was treated well at the prison, but for me it wasn't too bad," he says. "The guards were mostly amiable oafs.

"I only became uncomfortable when I was finally taken to the airport at the weekend, and I realised they had taken my passport off me and wouldn't give it back.

"I tried to insist on getting it back, but after some heavy-handed pushing and shoving, I was put on the plane without my passport."

Cliff – who had been a CND campaigner in the 1970s, and only discovered the Palestinian cause after moving to Bristol a decade ago – remains forthright about his opinions on the Palestinian issue.

"Israel is not a true country," he says. "It is simply a flawed policy.

"One thing you can be sure of, in spite of the way we were treated by the Israelis, I do feel that I will probably find myself going back on similar aid missions in the future. Only next time we'll go with 30 aid ships and see what they do then."