Genocide Blog 34 – During Tropical Storm Eleanor
22.02.2024
During the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, we have had the time to be visited by two cyclones, Belal and Eleanor. And we still haven’t been able to put a stop to the genocide.
So, let us, people all over the world, go on working at it. We need to keep informed – on Al Jazeera and, say, the Electronic Intifada on-line – and catch up on history – watch talks with Ilan Pappé or Norman Finkelstein.
And then, tonight we can listen to Jagdish Koonjul, the much-respected Mauritius UN Permanent Representative and a barrister take the floor at the ICJ hearing on the illegality of the Israeli occupation. We can learn from them, and also judge our own government’s stand. We can go back and listen to the Monday’s Palestinian arguments put by, inter alia, the two same lawyers who helped Mauritius win, only a few years ago, at the ICJ for the decolonization of Chagos including Diego Garcia, Philippe Sands and Paul Reichler.
We can also join the SOMALP and LALIT calls for the Jugnauth Government to support the South African ICJ case. Speak out, in your own name! Raise the question in your organization, and get it to publish a communiqué! President Lula of Brazil has recalled his Ambassador to Israel. The Mauritian Government, too, must halt relations and cut economic ties. Just this past week, LALIT and SOMALP members have protested to Winners management about selling Israeli oranges in little nets in two of their branches, Victoria and Vacoas. The importers must at once cancel future orders. McDonalds, too, gives support to the genocide. We must begin to boycott it. In January the Palestinian BDS national committee wrote: “McDonald’s Israeli franchisee has supported the Israeli occupation forces with free McDonald’s meals during the ongoing genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, prompting the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest Palestinian coalition that leads the global BDS movement, to endorse the organic, grassroots-led worldwide boycott campaigns targeting McDonald’s to end complicity in apartheid Israel’s crimes.”
And women amongst us can March next Friday 1 March at the Women’s Peace march in the streets of Port Louis to protest against the genocide and call for an immediate unconditional permanent ceasefire. Yesterday, the USA’s Ms Thomas Greenfield once again shamefully raised her hand at the UN Security Council against the vote for a ceasefire. She vetoed it in cold blood. Now she proposes to “pause” Israel’s killing for a while, let food in, while the USA continues sending arms and money, and then Israel can resume the slaughter of the innocents thereafter. It is cruelty that only colonialist projects, like Israel and the USA, can stomach. In the USA a majority of people are in favour of an immediate ceasefire, but their representatives have been “bought” by corrupt big businesses funding their campaigns while they rely for dwindling popular support from religious groups, mainly Christian Zionists (most of America’s Zionists) and a smaller number of Jewish Zionists.
For years now, LALIT members have made Israeli occupation and the need for Palestine freedom an essential part of our program and action. Now, since the Hamas breaking open of the Israeli siege wall in 40 places all at once, the whole world has put Palestine centre-stage. At long last. But with a terrible price being paid by Palestinians living in Gaza: the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is “coralling” them into a death camp near Rafah and intends to drive them out into the Egyptian desert, and/or kill as many as possible in the process. The Israeli State cynically calls this sporadic bombing and extermination conducted in Gaza over the past 16 years “mowing the lawn”, killing especially children, women, the injured and sick, but basically all those living in Gaza. This process has reached its hideous end-game today. Israel is intentionally starving the people of Gaza in order to kill them. They are intended to be mown down by thirst, hunger, preventable illness, or lack of treatment for injuries. The USA-supplied bombs have not killed enough Palestinians, or is not killing them fast enough, so Israel lays Gaza waste. On purpose. As part of its intentionally stated genocide.
Since 1978, Lalit de Klas, which later became LALIT, began taking a public stand. The Muvman Liberasyon Fam, too, took a position from then. And then from 2004, two of our members went to the West Bank three times to stand alongside Palestinians in their daily struggle against the IDF. Alain Ah Vee went on the international “Palestine Freedom March: Jenin to Jerusalem” against the Apartheid Wall that Israel built illegally inside Palestine. It was a tough daily confrontation with the IDF. Ragini Kistnasamy (also called Kisna) went twice to the town of Haris (in 2004 and 2007 – read her book Dayeri Palestinn on her experience) in the West Bank to confront the IDF, particularly in cases when the IDF arrests Palestinian children. In all three visits, our members protested alongside Palestinians, and were also accompanied by those brave Israelis who support the Palestinian struggle. Kisna later tried to get to Gaza with an international brigade in 2009-10, but the Mubarak regime would not let them all through the Rafah Crossing into Gaza. Alain and Kisna made us understand enough to set up the BDS (Mauritius) to organize boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions. Later this became SOMALP (Solidarite Morisyin Avek Lepep Palestine) which has militated, with success, to make the Mauritian Government take a stand on the international stage.
Today, as the cyclone Eleanor heads over us, it is worth thinking of the scale of the death and destruction that Israel is inflicting on Palestine, in particular on Gaza. Let us look back to the 7 October Hamas-led incursion into Israel, when the cruel Israeli siege was, for the first time in its 16 year existence, completely breached – by land in 40 places, by air on para-gliders, and in tunnels under the Israeli Apartheid Siege Wall.
During this attack, which aimed first at the Israeli military, in fact 373 IDF and other security forces were killed. 71 people from abroad, mainly contract workers, were killed. There were 695 Israeli civilians killed. Of these 36 were under 18, i.e. children. One of them, Millie Cohen, was a baby hit by a bullet in crossfire between the IDF and Hamas. These figures are from the Israeli official Social Security figures published by Haaretz Newspaper in Israel. The IDF has also admitted that its forces killed many Israelis when taking back control over the area attacked by Hamas and other groups. But, let us take the figure of 695 as Israeli civilian deaths, even though hundreds may have been through Israeli Hellfire missiles sent from Helicopters, and causing the fire deaths, and shelling of a Kibbutz by tanks as they re-took control.
Since then, the IDF, relying on lurid inventions and far-fetched allegations of beheadings of children, now debunked, on the supposed “cooking” of children in ovens (now exposed as totally invented lies), and of cutting a pregnant woman open to remove her foetus (also exposed as a lie), as well as continued allegations of mass rape without any evidence produced, and relying also on leaders like Joe Biden and Von der Leyen as well as the Western media, including supposed “respected” outlets like the New York Times, to repeat the lies, in order to attempt to justify the unjustifiable: a genocide.
While 695 Israeli civilians were killed (including those now known to have been killed by the IDF), there have now been at least 29,200 Palestinian civilians killed. That is over 40 times more slaughter by the Israelis. While 36 Israeli children were killed on 7 October, 12,500 Palestinian children have been killed by the IDF since then. That is about 350 times as many as the Israeli children killed. Note that, importantly, before 7 October, the Israeli forces had already killed at least 2,287 Palestinian children since the year 2000. This is what shows that the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians – by killing, maiming, driving off their land, exploding their houses, besieging them, occupying them militarily, arresting them without charge or trial (kidnapping them), refusing to let them return home after being driven away by force – has been going on for years. In fact, since 1948.
It must stop. Like all evils conducted in the cover of the dark of secrecy, this colonial evil, now exposed, must be stopped. Let us all do our bit. Not just now. But until victory against the colonial occupation of Palestine.
Lindsey Collen for LALIT
