Blog 14 – Of Children in times of Genocide
03.12.2023
We received the blessing of 55 mm of rain overnight in Ragoo Lane, and then some more in the morning. So I don’t need my recently-ordered pair of watering cans. Which is a good thing because although the Bambous tin-smith said “they will be ready Saturday”, which is one up on the usual “they will be ready next week”, I didn’t go and pick them up. Of course, I doubt they would be ready. But, it does not matter, because we are getting plenty of rain.
So, anyway, being at home this morning, in between rain showers, Ram and I went and picked one big Dauphiné mango, which is bright green on the outside and bright orange on the inside and has a texture not unlike an apple and tastes utterly divine. One of our two dogs, “Down” has learnt to stand on her back legs, meanwhile, so as to pick ripe Maison Rouge mangoes that are on a low branch or two this year. “Lock” will eat ripe mangoes, but can’t muster the enthusiasm to hunt one off a tree.
And then Ram and I, between showers of rain, quickly pull down a huge big bread-fruit to boil and serve with vinnday tonight. And a ripe “frisiter”, which I don’t know what its name is in English, to add to fruit for breakfast tomorrow.
And just after that feeling of, “Oh, what glories the earth can offer up to us, humankind”, I remember – the genocide recedes from my mind only for a while – last night on Al Jazeera seeing two gentle Palestinian men whose work it is to plant food crops, tend them, and then to offer them up to the people of Gaza for sustenance. They stand pointing at their bombarded water-pipes, intentionally bombed irrigation water-pipes. They stand pleading with the heavens above, “Are these water-pipes the ‘terrorists’ the Israelis vow to annihilate?” “Is this the only water the people can now drink, untreated, irrigation water?”
Yes, the Israeli state continues its colonial genocide. Even as here we get the blessing of rain. Even as we pick a Mangues Verts Doux, whose name has been given to a Street just up from Ragoo Lane. Now, the genocide takes the form of wiping out future crops in Gaza. As usual, the genocide of the colonial Israeli State is accomplished with the weapons “Made in the USA”. Wiping out irrigation for food crops, while bombing and cutting off imported food, and even the fuel needed to desalinate the water to drink. Every day I try to get my head around what we see before our very eyes? What kind of a State is this? And why does the USA still arm it? I can’t understand. Am I going mad to believe that this is happening? That, once again, the Israeli air force is back to killing newborn babies and infants, children and pregnant women, old men and the infirm along with the fit and healthy, and even all their animals, and the whole Gaza Zoo, while the IDF is about it.
Another clip from this morning’s TV screen comes back into my mind. There were perhaps six little boys – two of them, at most 8-years-old, mixing a bit of flour with water in a tin can with a bit of metal for a tool, and then cooking a kind of chapati on a bit of metal balancing upon the little fire they had managed to kindle, all alone in a whole world of bombardment rubble everywhere. This is Gaza. The two bigger boys are sharing that one little chapati with the four littler boys, about four-years-old. It is enough to break your heart.
And then, a LALIT member – what a blessing to be in a political party – alerts me to something I didn’t know. There is a strange indoctrination going on right now of the little children of Israel. Little ones made to sing songs for genocide. Their video-clip was even on the Israeli State-run network, KAN, until it caused outrage and was removed, at least from the Government-run KAN. Yes, Israeli children, displaced from a Kibbutz near Gaza, have been taught to sing a song called, of all cruel names, “The Friendship Song 2023”. The lyrics call for the annihilation of Palestinians living in Gaza. This has all been fact-checked by EuroNews. Here are some of the words of the song the little girls are made to sing:
“In another year,
“there will be nothing there,
“and we will safely return to our homes.
“Within a year
“we will annihilate everyone
“and then we will return to plow our fields.”
The people responsible for this genocidal ballad go by the name of the “Civil Front”. I suppose “friendship” song and “civil” front have different meanings today in an Israeli State where extreme-right fascists are in Government – even if not in the actual War Cabinet – and busy doing a genocide.
But, is this song an isolated incident?
No. The big newspaper, The Times of Israel, ran a headline two weeks ago that a “Hip-hop war anthem reaches number one in Israel”. This second song also calls for genocide against Palestinians, calling them “sons of Amalek”, meaning they must be wiped out to the last man, woman, child and domestic animal. It calls for the Israeli military to “kill terrorists” and the song manages to name as targets three celebrities, all women as it often happens in witch-hunts, three different women who, over the years, have taken a stand with the Palestinian people: Bella Hadid [the famous model of Palestinian descent], Dua Lipa [an Albanian singer]and Mia Khalifa [Lebanese actress and TV personality] – as if warning people what’s coming if they support Palestinians.
This reference to “Amalek” was used by Netanyahu himself, expressing overt genocidal intent, as he launched the genocide being perpetrated by the State of Israel. He needed to make clear to Joe Biden what his intent was. His words are repeated in the lyrics of this hideous militarist, genocidal song. And the song is “Number One” in the “Hit Parade”.
These are the macabre accompaniments of the State of Israel’s genocide.
Just in case you are wondering what this “Amalek” talk is about, here is one of the worst quotes from the Bible, where God supposedly gives Samuel instructions to say to Saul that he must wipe out the Amalek people: “Now go and smite [the people of] Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (Received Version of the Holy Bible: Samuel 1:15:3). “Utterly destroy” all that they have and “slay” the lot of them, even the sucklings. Even their domestic animals. God no doubt included cutting down mango and bread-fruit trees in his phrase “utterly destroy all that they have”.
The Bible story goes on, if you care to look it up, and the narrative goes from bad to worse, about how wrong Saul was to allow some sheep to be spared. Lordy!
Where is humanity going, if we cannot stop the State of Israel doing this? And why does the USA still pay and arm the State of Israel to do this?
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
