Palestine Blog 4 – On military bulldozers that break up roads as collective punishment
15.11.2023
A couple of weeks ago, CWA were doing major works in Bambous on Allée Tamarin, which is the road that links our Ragoo Lane with the rest of the world. What, you may ask has this got to do with the Gaza blog? Read on.
In the case of CWA road works, the cause was good: to get our water supply out of the red-zone readers knew about when, during the two Covid lockdowns, we all had to be out on the road with masks on so link up with masked men on CWA water-lorries to fill up our barrels, tanks and other ad hoc containers with water. We hope to move now from hardly any water to the promised 24/7. So, the cause for digging up Allée Tamarin was noble.
But we all experienced the inconvenience of even a neatly opened up 18-inch wide and 4-5 foot deep trench that a worker could stand in down the middle of Allée Tamarin. The inconvenience was constant for all in the neighbourhood. The fact that you did not know which way would be one-way any morning or evening. And had to drive all the way around. That you had to wait to get into the road at all, in a break when the street cutters and street diggers could let you get past a stop-go man. The constant noise in our houses, as grinders marked the road and then diggers dug it up, was horrific. And the dust left afterwards was ubiquitous. You could not see the sun. And one day, we could not get out of Ragoo Lane at all. The existing pipe got damaged in the road works and the whole area got flooded, including the deep hole down the middle. So, we could not get out of Ragoo Lane at all. And we had no water coming in at all. And people had to make special arrangements with mini-bus drivers who bring their children home from school. To go meet them in the middle of the road works. People had to cancel trips to the dispensary or hospital. People in wheelchairs, or even with minor hip or ankle or knee problems, could not navigate the terrain to get out of Ragoo Lane. People had to borrow water. It was not easy. For one day. Repeat, that was for one day. A mere 24 hours. It was for the best of causes. The crisis was an accident, a mistake.
Now, on Al Jazeera, the only TV station worth watching, and that has reporters on the ground, and that has the added advantage of sparing the appliance in our house from being broken by a flying chair as a direct result of the unbearable pro-genocide propaganda on the other TV stations, we see the Israeli Defense Force using military grade bulldozers to dig up streets in the West Bank on purpose and in order to destroy the infrastructure of water, electricity, connectivity and the road itself.
The IDF perpetrates this part of the on-going genocide in the West Bank in broad daylight or in the dead of night, as the case may be, because they know everyone is looking the other way. We are indeed looking the other way, hypnotized by images of genocide in the other part of Palestine called Gaza. Our eyes tear up. And we have difficulty tearing our eyes from images of Gazan newborns being killed this way as incubators are intentionally starved of electricity. How can we tear our eyes from Gazan families forced to stay indoors for more than a month and getting killed anyway by a bomb? Or other families as they flee for their lives on a cart drawn by a donkey, and get killed as they flee, anyway? Or others, as they remain. Traumatized for life. Yet others we see fleeing to an overcrowded, already starved, south part of Gaza in anguish and uncertainty. Meanwhile, in the West Bank the IDF intentionally digs ups roads, leaving them unrepaired. People’s doors are piled with rubble and can’t be opened.
Ragoo Lane blocked for one day and for good reason makes me glimpse what the Palestinian families of the West Bank face every day – as the Israeli army attempts to force them to flee their homes. The IDF just bulldozes whole streets, waterworks and all, in State acts of vengeance and collective punishment. And when inhabitants repair the damage, the IDF comes back and bulldozes it to hell again. The IDF comes and drills a little hole in the outer wall of an old-age pensioner’s family house, measuring the thickness of wall. That means within a couple of days the IDF, now knowing how much explosives are necessary to blow up the pensioner’s family home, will come and blow it up. Leaving a gaping hole in the chests and in the souls of a whole family, a whole street, a whole village, a whole people. This is the other part of the genocide. It has been ongoing, we can say, a creeping genocide, against the Palestinians since 1948. And the only thing the world – that is all of the rest of us – has been able to do is to get the United Nations that set up this colonial mess in the first place in 1947, to give palliative care to the strangled population of Palestine through under-funded UN bodies. Now, in Gaza, these UN bodies are one-by-one having to close down, including the WHO hospitals, the schools, the suppliers of food aid in Gaza, where over two-thirds of people were already refugees from previous episodes in the on-going genocide. The UN has lost 102 staff in the Israeli bombardments.
In LALIT, and in SOMALP, we do our tiny bit. We hold a vigil. We sign a Common Declaration. We participate in a Forum. We try to get articles published – without success – in the Press. We call on Jugnauth for the miserable contribution of suspending diplomatic relations again, as they were rightly suspended in 2009. We understand the reality of Palestine and Gaza better than most because we have two members who volunteered to go there to help Palestinians – between 2004 and 2009 – face up to this IDF. Alain Ah Vee participated in the three week Palestine Solidarity March all the way along the Apartheid wall, from Jenin to Jerusalem in 2004. He then tells us what is going on. Ragini Kistnasamy has been twice to live in the village of Haris in the West Bank, as “international women” do just watching, keeping eyes on the Palestinian children threatened with IDF arrest or in trouble at a checkpoint. She wrote the book, Dayeri Palestinn. You can ask for a copy. And she tried, as part of a huge international move, to go into Gaza in 2009. She did not succeed. Mubharak controlled the Rafah crossing then. She was in the first Tahir Square demonstration a year before the big demonstration brought Mubharak down. We learnt from that, too. We say all this not to brag. But to say we each have the moral and political responsibility to prevent genocide. The Genocide Convention of 1949 actually gives us the legal responsibility to PREVENT genocide. We can only act through our State, ie. at the moment through Pravind Jugnauth, who we call on to suspend diplomatic ties, as a form of minimal pressure against the Israeli state that is perpetrating the genocide on our watch and before our eyes. Note the well-chosen words in the actual name of the Treaty. It is called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. We can call for Israel and the USA to pay the reparations to the Palestinian people afterwards. Let us, first, take our moral, political and legal responsibility, and help prevent the genocide from continuing to unfurl by calling on Jugnauth to suspend diplomatic relations to help force an immediate CEASEFIRE. Take a stand yourself. Get any organization you are in to take stand. Make the Government know it is isolated – everyone is calling for suspension of diplomatic ties as a way of forcing a ceasefire. Every action counts. The USA is suffering internal turmoil, even up to right inside Congressional staffrooms, and amongst civil servants in the State Department. They know, through their USA embassy informers, when any of us act! So, act! Many staff may already want to report such actions. Afterwards, Israel must be forced to pay the reparations. But first things first, a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the military occupation of the West Bank.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
