Genocide Blog 27– Of the Change in the Balance of Power
29.01.2024
Everything changes both slowly and quickly. Sometimes slowly and then quickly, other times both at the same time. Rain falls in tiny drops during Cyclone Belal a fortnight ago, as if slow change drop-by-drop, while water builds up behind a constructed wall here and there, which in turn bursts and causes a flood that fills the natural and man-made drains and bursts their banks as torrents race to the sea, pouring into and through houses, offices, factories, car parks, Caudan Waterfront. What built up slowly, was suddenly a dangerous flood. At the LALIT offices the water rose five foot high inside the ground floor, as the wall of the Assembly of God next door was turned over, and the water was prevented from escape by the huge, wall built by the Government around the Oasis shelter behind the LPT building where LALIT is. And all that water, before it caused a flood, fell drop by drop. So, even before the global warming caused by the capitalists’ industrial pollution of the planet, there are problems from the blocking of natural waterways, or “kur-do”, as they are so aptly called in Kreol. They exist when the water wants to run through them. Our society cannot block them up.
But, slow change and sudden change work together, as we have seen in the floods.
So it is, at times in the history of politics, too.
In the world right now we are in such times. The Palestinian people have been hounded off their land, sometimes fast and by the hundreds of thousands as in 1948 and 1967, and then slowly, constantly until today – by Zionist colonization and the Israeli State with its Western capitalist backing. And for three months, since the 7 October Al Aqsa Flood, the slow attack on the Palestinians has again speeded up. Gazan Palestinians, already three-quarters of them are families of refugees from 1948 onwards, have been displaced, twice or three times, even more, to one tiny little patch of the South of Gaza, and are about to be killed en masse because the IDF drops bombs on them, or expelled into the Sinai desert in Egypt. It has happened before. West Bank and East Jerusalem Palestinians have been deprived of their land, their lives, their freedom at a vastly accelerated pace since 7 October. The IDF raids their homes, blows them up, pulls them down, imprisons families as a whole, bulldozes roads so as to cut off water and electricity, and colonizes further and further into Palestine, displacing people, forcing them out. Rampant colonialism, still being sanctified by the USA and Europe until now, the year 2024. Yes, we are living through a genocide perpetrated with the money, the weapons and the political will of the Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz and the arms dealers behind them.
We must stop it. We each have a political role in stopping it.
At least now, we are all learning about it. All of us. It is hard to deny now. It is hard to turn our heads away now from the orphans, those buried in shallow graves, and those shaking with terror even as their bodies cry out for the food and water the Israeli State deprives them of.
Gaza, the part of Palestine under a 17-year-long state of siege imposed by the Israeli State, has seen Palestinians suffering and struggling on throughout these 17 long years. Gaza has become a concentration camp, in the true meaning of the word. Israel concentrated Palestinians there, and is now further concentrating them into the Rafah region of Gaza. This rounding up of people by the tens of thousand, by the hundreds of thousand, by the million, is genocide before our eyes. Rounding up, closing in, bombarding, and starving. Can a State do worse than the Israeli State? Yes, maybe those who bank-roll it, arm it, defend it, give it cover, and use their Veto at the UN Security Council are worse?
When Hamas broke the siege wall around Gaza that the Israeli Defense Force manned with the most sophisticated and automated electronic equipment in the world, and broke it open in 40 places, we now learn it is 40 breaches in the wall and not the 29 we thought it was, suddenly it was like a dam burst.
And we can all see the sudden change.
The Israeli State’s defenses were overrun. The IDF army did not know what was happening. Their communications were down. All their electronic equipment was taken out. A few thousand Hamas men defeated the eleven Israeli military bases that man the siege-wall, including the main military base at Er’es. They killed a few hundred soldiers and took dozens prisoner, to be used in order to get Palestinians released from illegal Israeli detention. That was their war aim. Civilians were also killed during the incursion, the Israeli Authorities put their revised figure at just over one thousand – soldiers and civilians. Hundreds were killed, it is now known and admitted by the Israeli Defense Force – using Apache Helicopters and their hell-fire missiles against the Er’es base and against vehicles hijacked from the concert and taking civilian Israeli prisoners back to Gaza, as well as using tanks and firing into houses, killing all inside Israelis and Palestinians – as it re-took back control of the part of Israel that had been invaded on 7 October.
And in response, the Israeli State went berserk. It lashed out in deranged rage and revenge. It put out lies and propaganda that there had been “decapitation of 40 babies”. No baby was decapitated, they now admit. They put out lies about mass rape. No rape has been substantiated, or even seriously mentioned. The “burning alive” propaganda has died down because it was likely the IDF’s hellfire missiles that roasted all those cars we saw in the pictures from the concert. But, the IDF had whipped up genocidal language, and in its wake, has killed over 25,000 Palestinian people in a genocidal frenzy, mainly women and children. The IDF has wounded over 50,000 and left perhaps 10,000 under the rubble. Now, on purpose, the Israeli State has literally coraled, or herded, almost 90% of all the people of Gaza, into a tiny patch of land near the Rafah Crossing into Egypt. The Israeli State intends to drive the Palestinians out. And it has publicly threatened to starve them out, to make them die of epidemics to speed up the process. Everyone knows about the on-going genocide, even as it worsens. Denying it is difficult now, even though the USA and Europe still try.
But the case that the South African government brought before the ICJ has won a near-unanimous judgment. This makes denial sound like farce. The ICJ says soberly and in unison that it is plausible that the Israelis are committing genocide against the people of Gaza. The Court says there is an urgent and imminent risk of a genocide. The Court roundly summons the Israeli State to stop killing palestinians, stop injuring Palestinians, and to stop destroying their means of survival and to refrain from damaging their means of reproducing their society. The Israeli State has also been called upon to punish genocidal rhetoric, which the judges quoted, amongst its leaders and everywhere in its society. The Court drew attention to the crime of “complicity” with genocide. So, the USA leaders – as well as those in France, Britain and Germany – that supply the Israeli state with weapons and arms are on notice to stop being “complicit” with genocide. Biden, Blinken and Austin are already being brought to trial in USA’s courts for this complicity. Now they have the added weight of the ICJ judgment.
Everything has changed. The West is now reeling. The old colonial project, as we look at its past now, is exposed for its genocide for centuries, as we watch this one in the 21st Century.
Israel and the West is inventing counter-attacks, even as it reels.
Israel carefully sat on an allegation that it published just after the ICJ judgment, that some 12 people of the 30,000 UN employees in Gaza (at UNRWA) were somehow involved in the Hamas 7 October incursion, and this has been pretext for a dozen Western governments to participate in the genocide by suspending their contributions to this UN fund. How weird a reaction! And now the USA has the whole world weeping crocodile tears on the TV stations it controls over the deaths of three American soldiers, three – yes, we can be sad for their deaths, even if they are adult soldiers – but these same TV stations shed not a tear as children and youngsters are busy burying Palestinian children and babies by the dozen a day in shallow graves, digging in the sandy earth with their bare hands, children and babes in arms slaughtered in cold blood by Israel using USA weaponry.
There had been slow changes, meanwhile, world-wide as people have, small group by small group, including LALIT and Mauritian Trade unions and the “Solidarite Morisyin Avek Lepep Palestinn”, taken up the struggle of the Palestinian people. Ragini Kistnasamy and Alain Ah Vee went and worked alongside Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, helping out and bearing witness. This permitted us to understand the reality on the ground.
And now, the balance of power has begun to change drastically. Everyone now knows. Knowledge is a liberating thing. Now we have the duty to make our Government cut ties with the Israeli Government. We cannot keep any diplomatic or commercial ties with a country which is “plausibly” committing genocide, as the ICJ judges put it. We have an obligation, a legal obligation, to “prevent” genocide. The bit we need to do is to get our government to suspend all ties. Let us work on that. Even as we recover from the cyclone and the floods. We have to isolate Israel, and the USA.
Amongst the people of Israel, there are allies of the Palestinians. We are with them. Amongst the people of the USA, there are now 67% who are in favour of a ceasefire (Harvard CAPS survey) even as their Government supplies arms to Israel.
Young Americans support the Palestinians. This change has been despite the huge lobby that has gathered capitalist money of all ilk into a monstrosity called “AIPAC”, the “American Israeli Public Affairs Committee”. This is the main Zionist organization in the USA, and it organizes visits to Israel for Democrat and Republican Congressmen by the dozen, for example. The social base of US Zionism is mainly, and counter-intuitively, Evangelical Christians, who believe bizarrely that Christ will return when the Jews take over all of Palestine, and also, as one would expect, some Jewish groups that work towards Jewish colonization of Palestine, a movement over 100 years old. But AIPAC’s money is American capital. It is in particular capital from the arms industry and “security” industry. This kind of massive fund, illegal previously, became legal in 2010 after a Supreme Court judgment in the Citizens United case, allowing capitalists to bribe congressmen and women, and politicians at all levels, and on a massive scale without it being illegal. The lobby system – already morally dubious – thus in 2010 went wild. All the lobbies – the oil lobby, the armaments lobby, the pharmaceuticals lobby, the pesticides lobby -- all went wild, and the US political institutions went into much deeper rot than before. AIPAC is part of this, and has so far been able to keep a close rein on the quasi totality of mainstream politics by means including paid trips, through educational groups and funding candidates to defeat anyone with left-wing ideas. In December a media outlet in the USA, The Intercept, published the tax deduction documents of many of the secret donors who fund trips for Congressmen in exchange for “vwayaz” as NGOs and unions call it. Anyway, all this has been going on for years.
Now it is time for us all to force the Government to break all links with the Israeli State, starting with all diplomatic ties, and any contracts with government or parastatals. Otherwise the leaders in Government and the rest of the State might find themselves breaking the law.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
