LALIT holds Meeting on History of Israeli Genocide in Gaza
17.03.2024
Saturday 16 March saw a well-attended FREE PALESTINE gathering organized by LALIT at the LPT Hall in Grand River North West, where behind the speakers was a banner reading “ISRAEL + USA STOP ZENOSID”.
The theme was “Gaza/Palestine: The History of the Genocide: Testimony from Palestine, Analysis and Open Debate”. The session was a veritable requisitory against the Israeli State and its USA arms supplier, bonk-roller and political backing. The issue of Palestine was linked to the anti-apartheid struggle world-wide, and to the struggle to end the USA-UK occupation of Chagos, including closing down the US Diego Garcia military base. (Watch the live-stream of the meeting on Facebook by scrolling down, or on our site lalitmauritius.org in the video section.) The session is part of a build-up by SOMALP organizations to a march to be held in April in Rose-Hill.
Lindsey Collen presided, and she presented a historical analysis, as an introduction to the eye-witnesses’ testimony presented by other LALIT leading members Ragini Kistnasamy and Alain Ah Vee. Lindsey described the situation now in Palestine in general, with more detail on Gaza. Then she analyzed what happened on 7 October last year. From that date she told of the 17 years until that day, during which Gaza had already been in a State-of-Siege. Before that, there had been 56 years of military occupation over the whole of Palestine, and this military occupation coincides neatly with 56 years of UK-USA military occupation of the Republic of Mauritius since our Independence. Finally, she told of the 75 years of genocide from the Nakba at the time of Israel’s manufacture as a European settler state in 1948, set up by Britain and the UN when the UN was totally controlled by the West. She said how 1948, the year of her birth, coincided with both the de-colonization of the world (what are now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and next-door to Palestine, Syria) and also coincided, in the opposite direction, with the beginning of “Apartheid” in settler colony South Africa, where she was born, and with the creation of the State of Israel, as a new settler colony. This way she showed the intimate historical three-way links between South Africa, Palestine and Mauritius relative to Western imperialism, which were the leitmotiv of her talk.
Ragini Kistnasamy gave hands-on testimony of her work together with Palestinian and Israeli activists to protect children from the Israeli Defense Force at army checkpoints and after arrests by the IDF, and also during olive harvesting that the IDF uses force to prevent. The daily life under military occupation in the West-Bank including East Jerusalem became, as she spoke, visible before our eyes, became comprehensible, in all its horror. She volunteered in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, on two occasions, under the auspices of the International Women’s Peace Service. She also told of the attempt of over a thousand international activists, she being one of them, to go on the “Gaza Freedom March” organized by Code Pink, aiming to go through the Rafah Crossing to protest against the state of siege, and the refusal of the Mubarak regime to let them into Gaza. That was one year before the Arab Spring.
Alain Ah Vee told of the International Freedom March from Jenin to Jerusalem along the Apartheid Wall, a wall that has nothing to do with the Green Line frontier of 1967, but that breaks the West Bank and East Jerusalem into tiny bits. Every day, just to visit the small villages one after another, 45 villages or towns in all, all along the ins-and-outs of the Wall, they had to confront the IDF, again and again, using non-violent tactics, facing attacks by dozens of tear-gas canisters in one volley, then sound bombs, then rubber bullets – just to get through the military checkpoint between one remote village and another. He and the others had training sessions in Bethlehem before this tough protest march. Every day they had to go through these checkpoints, sometimes they would be allowed through, but most often not before a hard confrontation. Then they would challenge the IDF physically. The Freedom March was organized by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). He saw, he said, the worst of humanity – domination of a military occupation -- and the best of humanity – the calm constant resistance by the Palestinian families of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Then, there were some six or seven questions – all profound ones – which the three panelists responded to briefly. There was also testimony by an attendee, a story that was touching, informative and brave, of how he had visited the West Bank.
The questions were on the following:
- How can we encourage people to participate in protests against the Israeli-USA genocide. Reply included: There is a relationship between understanding what is happening, and how, as an individual and in organizations, and in common fronts, and also via our own government, we can take action.
- How can we participate in boycotting Israel, and how does a boycott operate? -- Reply included the need to single out products or a product that will mobilize people, like say McDonalds, and also understand and work politically on the relationship between boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions?
- Are there dock workers refusing to load arms to Israel as a form of sanction, as there were dockers in the anti-apartheid movement days? – Yes, examples were given in European countries, the USA and in Australia.
- What is the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? -- Zionism is a political movement, a communalist movement that organizes for people of the Jewish communities world-wide to colonize Palestine and thus build Israel in what was Palestine. Most Zionists are in the USA, and most of these are, curiously, Christian Zionists. Anti-Semitism is, by contrast, a pernicious form of communalism or racism that was for centuries, and is, endemic in majority Christian societies, and which produced the Holocaust, or Nazi extermination of Jews, that was built up by fascists in the 1930s and came to a hideous head in the 1940s, leading to the killing of over six million Jewish people, men, women and children, as well as millions of others.
- How can we make a broader front against Israel, and on Chagos-Diego Garcia, Agalega and all forms of military occupation? -- There is already SOMALP. It is necessary to win people, and organizations, over to the ideas that unite us in a common front. For example, for the closure of the military base on Diego Garcia, as part of the international struggle against the USA’s warmongering in general.
- Could the panelists respond to the Pramila Patten UN Report? – Reading just her Report, you could say that this Mauritian barrister had fallen into the trap of the Israeli State. But listening to her statement to the UN Security Council, it seems she has a role worse than that. She directly supports the State of Israel. It is shocking.
Conclusion
The session took place in a warm, gentle atmosphere, the first public event after the floods ruined the ground floor of the LALIT premises at the LPT building in January. After the session, some people stayed on, chatting. There have been over 700 “views” on our Facebook page of the live-stream up to Sunday 14.30.
We would like to note that the Women’s Peace March, organized by another SOMALP member the Muvman Liberasyon Fam, and which was live-streamed by Defi Media group, has had over 100,000 views.
We mention these high numbers of “views” because they are proof of a growing support for the Palestinian people, in a country where well-nigh no-one publicly supports the Israeli State – other than the odd sorti by L’Express newspaper. This does not mean there are not crypto-Zionists in Mauritius in the upper echelons of society. There are. And they need to be constantly criticized as they are in influential class positions – in the press including the MBC, in the upper echelons of the hierarchy of the Church, amongst the capitalist bosses, and at the top of some para-statals. Do read LALIT’s Open Letters to some of these forces that have been hosting the US Navy Band, on our Facebook page and website.
