Genocide Blog 9 – On Words and Hospitals
22.11.2023
Like for most people outside of Palestine, life has to go on, even during a genocide. Like others with this-and-that health issues, I had to go to the Bambous dispensary two weeks ago to ask a doctor to check out two funny growths on the sun-burnt back of my left hand – exposed to years of sun while riding a motorbike, and years of, miles beyond the reef, just Ram and me, in a small fisherman’s pirogue under the bright rays of the sun. The dispensary that day was a relaxed, caring place. Kisna, accompanying me, got chatting to a young woman accompanying her grandmother. She said her grandmother had told her all about Bambous Health Project, perhaps the world’s only self-run, democratic and self-financed “primary health care service”, one that the people of Bambous ran for 25 years. It turns out, her granny was on Kisna’s notebook! That was an essential “identity” for lots of people in Bambous for those 25 years – whose notebook you were on, for paying your monthly health co-op dues. I was a dues collector, too. I became a family member for 30 families on my “karne” by virtue of my regular visits. Once a Bambous person met someone at a wedding in Pamplemousses and introduced himself as someone on “Amyot’s notebook”.
Anyway, at the Dispensary I had, within 45 minutes, been given a diabetes pin-prick test, had my temperature taken by pistol, been given a cream for the meantime, and importantly a referral letter to go to the Petite Rivière Community Health Centre, where I would get an appointment to see a skin specialist. So, I will see the decentralization of the specialized services in action. I duly went there and got an appointment for Thursday. Very efficient. Ram, just before the Covid pandemic, had a throat operation to remove a small growth, followed by radiation therapy at Candos. All his and my treatment for free. It was efficient and friendly. Kisna has regular treatment at the Moka Eye hospital, too. Also free and excellent. We take all this for granted in a way. Don’t we all. Even as insurance companies and private clinics run campaigns against the state-run health care system, often via the commercial press and radio, and opposition MPs in lieu of any proper political program.
But, in Gaza, the attack on health care is something else: it is part of the Israeli genocide strategy.
Israeli MPs and military spokesmen make it clear. They target, inter alia, hospitals. Yes, hospitals. And dispensaries and community health centres. They do so with the aim of stripping the Gaza Strip of the means of survival. It is part of a physical war. It is also part of psychological warfare. The Israeli State intends to force Gazans to abandon, forsake, desert their beloved Gaza. Israel can then take it.
One of the means the IDF uses to destroy hospitals is to bomb them. So, they bomb them. Then they deny it. They say, “It is not us, it is Hamas.” Or “Yes we did it, because it is not a hospital anymore. It has been converted into a Hamas head-quarters”. Then they bomb more hospitals – and their stocks of medicine, their oxygen production units, their roads and entrances, their parked ambulances. Why? To destroy them, that is why. That is the reason the IDF bombs hospitals. That is the reason they target all the hospitals in Gaza. To make Gaza un-livable in, uninhabitable. That is the reason that there is no proof that Hamas operates its own Pentagon from under the Al-Shifa hospital, that the IDF claimed. Because it is a lie. It always was a lie. The IDF targets the hospital because it is a hospital. And because the hospital cares for Palestinians. And because a hospital is one of those things that allows Palestinians to live there. The Israeli State repeatedly targeted the Al Ahli hospital, the Indonesian hospital, the Eye hospital (like our Moka eye hospital), the Turkish hospital, the Al-Quds hospital, and finally the Al Shifa hospital, in short all hospitals in Gaza – as well as starving hospitals of water, electricity and food, for good measure. So those who survive the bombing of their homes, and even survive the bombing of the hospital they are in, then face having to be starved to death or to die of thirst or from infection setting in to their bomb wounds. Ten days ago, the WHO says, 46 of the 72 dispensaries in Gaza were already forced to shut down because of attacks. More will have been bombed by now.
So, I am left imagining if an Army came and bombed Jeetoo, Rosebelle, Candos, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Port Mathurin (the IDF surrounded the Sina hospital in the West Bank four days ago), Lopital Dinor and Moka Eye hospital, and more than half the dispensaries and community health centres in the Republic. What would that feel like? To all of us? I would no doubt not have had either the Bambous Dispensary or the Petite Rivière Health Centre to go to – even if our house was one of the 6 out of 10 houses bombed, leaving us living in, say, “Bambous A” primary school. And then the IDF might bomb “Bambous A” School, too, while we camped there, homeless. And without so much as a dispensary.
And some psychopaths and sociopaths still remain silent as the world’s peoples cry out “CEASEFIRE NOW!”
How can people turn their backs on a method of psychological warfare that bombs hospitals? What kind of a supposed “civilization” is this “Western” one? How can people be against a ceasefire until as many as 6,000 children have been killed, and another thousand or two left under the rubble the bombs are leaving?
We, the people of the world, are crying for a ceasefire – we cry in the streets, at football matches, inside the US Congress building, in trade union actions to block ports that send arms to Israel, and to close arms factories down, and to close US military bases from which it supports the Israeli genocide, and we act all over the world. Go to YouTube and tap in “MC Abdul, Shouting At the Wall”. Listen to child rapper in Gaza during the last IDF bombing of 2021. It could break your heart.
Words matter.
From this very morning Al Jazeera has taken the notable step of changing its heading from “War on Gaza” to “GAZA GENOCIDE”. Words matter.
Soon, hopefully, no-one in the media will want to be found stranded on the wrong side of this genocide. Even as the right-wing Wall Street Journal does its part in supporting the genocide by echoing the calls, not for a CEASEFIRE, no, but calls by Netanyahu’s fascist partners in Government for western countries to take in Palestinian refugees. So, the plan is to drive every Palestinian in Gaza, everyone, that is, who survives the bombs and the lack of health care, down southwards, out into tents in Egypt’s Sinai desert, and simultaneously bulldoze the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem out of their houses, too, then re-distribute Palestinians everywhere on earth but Palestine. That, forcibly removing people, is a hallmark of genocide. The Wall Street Journal supports this?
Words matter. They make acts. Acts matter. Acts, when they are bombs and sieges, are a matter of life and death. Anyone who does not call loud and clear for a ceasefire now has blood on their hands. We must make our Government suspend all diplomatic relations with the perpetrator of this genocide. The USA must stop funding this genocide, stop creating diplomatic cover for this genocide, and most of all, stop providing the weapons for this genocide. Stop the genocide now!
Yesterday, even L’Express Editor-in-Chief, Nad Sivaramen, who has avoided publishing locally written articles that expose the Gaza genocide or even challenge the lies of the IDF or Israel’s crooked legal argument of “self-defense”, has finally published the resignation letter of Anne Boyer from the faraway New York Times Magazine in his own editorial. She refuses to be responsible for poetry printed alongside what she calls out, with piercing truth, the “ghoulish euphemisms” and “warmongering lies” of the press. Before him, on 13 November, Patrick Michel in a Le Mauricieneditorial quoted poets and lyricists from Prevert to John Lennon via Moustaki, as a way to take a stand against the bosses of the western armaments factories that rake the money into their “palto” pockets. Are these two men signaling to us that their bosses have all but muzzled them?
Anyway, on Sunday, “Together For Palestine”, a collective of organizations, has invited me and three others to speak up and speak out at a Forum on Palestine at Bell Village at the SNIT Hall that is in the World Islamic Mission centre, next door to the Rajiv Gandhi Science Centre. The exact theme was well chosen: “Penalizing the Genocide in Palestine” or “Sanctionner le génocide en Palestine”. The Forum, itself is from 11:00 am to 12:00 midday, and there will also be a day of fund-raising stalls and the auctioning of some 50 Mauritian artists’ work given for fund-raising – the proceeds to be sent to the people of Gaza.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
