Genocide Blog 26 – Cyclone Belal And the Tide Turning Against Israeli Impunity
14.01.2024
Cyclone Belal approaches in Mauritius via a devious route, dirtying the skies, and threatening mayhem.
But the tide is meanwhile turning, for the first time, against the Israeli State and its impunity.
All over the world this weekend there have been huge demonstrations calling for an end to the Israeli-inflicted genocide.
In Mauritius, even as Belal approaches, there were actions. In Rose-Hill, one organized by the SOMALP, near five Metro stations five demonstrations organized by SIM, and in front of the US Embassy organized by RA. The women’s organization, the MLF, wrote an Open Letter to the Prime Minister to support the South African case. Mauritian Writers published a common declaration for an end to Israel’s genocide.
And on Thursday and Friday, we heard the riveting case of South Africa against Israel at the ICJ, the very UN top Court where the Mauritian state won against the UK only five years ago. Israel had to reply to a formal accusation in Court for committing genocide, with intention, on the people of Palestine living in Gaza. Their rebuttal was legally and morally weak.
It is Day 100 of this Israeli bombardment of Gaza. The South African case has outlined a sustained, intentional genocidalbombing of Palestinian families living in Gaza. It has shown how the Israeli state continues to corral or herd the Palestinian people further and further south, into smaller and smaller areas – as if the Palestinians are indeed “human animals” that the Israeli Defense Minister publicly calls them – preparing to force them to “emigrate voluntarily” as hunger, thirst and illness all bite in.
But, the game is up for Israel. Its actions are now out in the open. Israeli impunity begins to end.
The Israeli pretense that their aim is merely “against Hamas” is exposed as infantile self-delusion. Top state men publicly call for genocide, as the South African case shows. The association Law for Palestine on its site has a database of over 500 genocidal statements by Ministers, army men and Members of the Israeli national assembly. And, in any case, the Israeli State perpetrates 40 raids per day killing Palestinians of the West Bank by the hundreds when Hamas is not in power there, as if to prove its own bad faith.
As we write, and as Belal approaches, Israeli impunity is at the beginning of its end.
And in any case, we are sick of the same old excuses of the USA killing a whole people because of one named individual enemy. It is becoming patently ridiculous. How can the US kill Iraqi people by the hundreds of thousands – over one million “excess deaths” recorded – because Bush and Blair wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein? It is mad. Who are they to decide the ruler of Iraq. A ruler they supported only a short time before. How can Obama and Hilary Clinton explode the whole country of Libya to get rid of Khadaafi? Or try to grab its oil reserves? Now we see Biden and Netanyahu killing 25,000 Palestinians in three months “to get rid of Hamas”.
And now the same old trick against the whole country of Yemen. The Yemen’s Houthi government has said it will bar any Israeli-related shipping from going through its waters until the genocide stops, as part of its duty to prevent genocide, under the UN Treaty for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Instead of the USA and UK stopping Israel’s genocide and thus bringing an end to the genocide and also bringing peace, what has Biden gone and done? He has bombarded Yemeni targets 35 times.
Is this dying Western empire going to go on and on inflicting even more criminal wars on the world in its death throes than in its 400 previous years of conquest?
And, even in all this, as Belal approaches, we are given Mang Blan, the kind of mangoes known to be used by Gujarat families for special whole mango pickles, and we boil breadfruit from the garden and eat it with mango pickle and mashed avocado pear, also from the garden. And we have had to cut off branches from all the trees, in preparation for Belal, as it nears.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
