Genocide Blog 25 – New Year Cleaning in Gaza and What a Hospital is
02.01.2024
Over the New Year, Ragoo Lane has been full of the sounds of a new Karscher cleaning a verandah here and a new sound system blaring music there, while neighbours going past, see me sweeping up leaves from avocado, atemoya and breadfruit trees, and ask for a little pile of old newspapers – people must wonder how we have so many old newspapers, what on earth do we do with the new ones, anyway? I have this year often wondered myself. Or they stop to discuss end-of-year cleaning, a big must in Mauritian culture, and to chat about this and that, as well as for outlining what myriad uses they have for old newspapers, the absorbent pages for shining windows and the glossy ones for lining shelves, during end-of-the-year cleaning. Once, as if to signify what “culture” is, when Ram was up on a ladder busy cleaning a hardly noticed side “zinpos” window, a group of women neighbours loaded with beach mats and bags full of picnic-ware, with children trailing after, went past in Ragoo Lane, and one called out, “Cleaning windows, then, Doc?” and Ram, with the air of a housewife moaning, replied “Luvraz zame fini”, “Housework’s never over”, from atop the ladder, and then went on to the punch-line, “Ki pu fer? Gangasnan, non?” The whole picnic-ful of women stopped, put their bags down, put their hands on their hips, threw their heads back and laughed out loud. You clean windows for the New Year. Or Divali. And no-one in their right mind cleans windows for Gangasnan. But everyone needed to share all that knowledge to enjoy the joke. Such is culture. A shared knowledge of how day-to-day things run, and of how to make fun of ourselves. All this to say that, before the New Year, everyone in Ragoo Lane was involved, as every year, in compulsory spring-cleaning, only it’s done in the mid-summer’s heat of 31 December. And this cleaning has persisted, this year, until after New Year. As if to mean something.
Something like, perhaps, “imagine trying to put your house in order for the New Year when you live in Gaza”.
The mind boggles.
I get dizzy even thinking about it. One little girl in Gaza, shown on Al Jazeera, in all the rubble of their house when they went back in the “humanitarian pause”, found to her utter joy her favourite doll, and one or two of her school-books – just as her mother lamented how everything else had been ransacked by the force of the explosion. How to put order in that, so as to welcome the New Year? No amount of compulsory cleaning will touch the surface of that devastation.
One man, also on Al Jazeera, when he went back to the Jabalia refugee camp that the Israeli Defense Force has bombed so many times you can’t count, couldn’t find the place where his house had been. Not only was his house gone but all the geographic features that indicated where it had been were lost, too. That, too, signifies what culture is. What culture was.
How could he and his family do New Year’s cleaning in his house?
And since I have an appointment at the skins section at the Jeetoo hospital on Friday, I am disturbed by the images of the IDF bombing hospitals on purpose. And the images of them then shelling them from tanks, and then using snipers against hospital workers who come out of the front entrance, and then bulldozing the yard, and then bombing the hospital again. First we heard the IDF vehemently denying bombing a hospital at all. “It was not us,” the IDF said, and Biden repeated it, “We would never dream of it. It was Hamas.” Then the IDF just went on to bomb three-quarters of the 39 hospitals in Gaza, kumsi-ryin-ete.
What does the IDF destroy when it bombs a hospital? It kills patients. Already sick or injured, it kills them. Or it injures them further. How can we even get our heads around that? It kills hospital doctors, nurses, attendants, helpers, para-medics, even as they care for patients. Or it injures them. It kills the people sheltering on the verandahs because their houses have already been bombed to smithereens, or injures them, adding further woe to a displaced family, a family already living, since 1948 in a refugee camp in Gaza, displaced by a terror campaign then. Imagine that for the New Year.
More injured people are rushed to this same bombed hospital, even as it fails, having been bombed. How could medical supplies even get there? Or staff, for that matter? In that intentionally inflicted pandemonium?
Bombing breaks open the hospital roof. It ruins the operating theatre and destroys the oxygen-concentrating machines. It cuts out the electricity. All the medicines that need refrigeration expire. The hospital pharmacy takes a direct hit. The clean shelves of surgeons’ implements badly needed for dealing with all the intentionally inflicted injuries, and that need to be sterilized for use, are smashed, the sterilizing machine, itself, bombed.
That is all physical. Physical death and maiming, destruction and putting out of order. A bombed public hospital, like say Jeetoo where I will be going this week, is the destruction, too, of a slowly-constructed – over years and years – social reality. As patients like me arrive at the free hospital, someone who works there welcomes us – knowing what to ask of us, and where to advise us to go within the hospital. Other patients, especially those following regular treatment, also help new-comers. That is part and parcel of social reality, of Mauritian culture, as of Palestinian culture. “Go there to get a ‘card’ first,” one person might advise, “There stand behind that queue of four people.” All this works smoothly. Once destroyed, even this reception point is not easy to reconstruct because it has been conceptualized and has grown organically over years and years. When directed where to go, the patient is guided along a very specific itinerary, within an intricate social reality – inter-acting departments of X-ray staff, and of orthopedic staff, of gynecology and skins staff, a flu clinic, the Ear, Nose and Throat section, the blood bank, the eye department, the children’s section, the STDs section, where they do scanning, and radio-therapy, all the different wards, the physiotherapy department, and the psychology department and the pharmacy once you get a prescription. All free. All for everyone. And patients’ dossiers follow them around, as if by magic: the magic of culture, of social reality. All this, in a hospital, makes for a big, living, social organism.
I remember once, many years ago, in LALIT we had a low-key handing out of leaflets, daringly, within the main hospitals – against privatization. We all trained at how to give out leaflets only to people not in stress – patients and staff alike, but gently – with a one-sentence invitation to read the leaflet later. And we could paste up one or two, discreetly just before leaving. One of my mates in the group at Jeetoo, called Mario, did as we had decided together. He went to sit in a queue, as if taking his place, discreetly, and then would decide who to give a leaflet to, later. No sooner had he sat down, than he caused a bit of a stir. The women all around him, who he noticed each had a little jar of pee in their hands, ready for testing, informed him that he was in the “maternity” section for pregnant young women! All that to say that a hospital is not just individuals and buildings and equipment. It is a highly organized social organism. Mario was in the wrong queue. Everybody knew that.
Even beyond the walls of the hospital, its social organism lives and breathes. The driver and helper in each regular ambulance or van that go out to pick up the dialysis patients twice a week, know where to go, in what order, on which days to go where, and they all get to be close friends – staff and patients alike – from their regular outings together. All this is part of hospital culture.
So, when an Israeli airplane or drone targets a hospital, it is bombing Palestinian culture. The health care service that Gazans are so proud of, including its culture of care, is just simply pulverized. It is a massive act of genocide. An action that aims to make it impossible to live there anymore.
To summarize, each time the Israeli state drops a bomb on a hospital, the aim is, like it or not, to kill staff and patients and family members visiting, even those refugees taking shelter in the corridors. All are assassinated or maimed or badly traumatized. This is genocide. The absurdity, as a Palestinian comedian put it, of the USA military bringing down the Empire State building because it has information a terrorist is somewhere in it. When the IDF bombs a hospital, the building and all its equipment is destroyed. And the social reality, a living organism, is annihilated. The culture is shattered, splintered, fractured, broken. On purpose. And for good measure, the IDF then bulldozes the cemetery, too. The culture of the final resting place, that too, desecrated.
All this is why, for this New Year, we need to tell the Mauritian Government to support the South African case at the International Court of Justice at The Hague against Israel for genocide. For killing Palestinians, injuring them, destroying their culture. We must hold the Israeli State responsible. And blame the USA leaders for being the ones to arm, to finance, to give political cover knowingly for the genocide, and to abuse its veto to prevent UN resolutions to stop the genocide. That must be our New Year’s Resolution – act to get our government to act to isolate Israel.
Lindsey Collen for LALIT
