Genocide Blog 39 – From Ragoo Lane with love
18.04.2024
As we all see the spectacle of Biden, Sunak and Macron with, in tow, their tame Jordanian and Saudi monarchies that buy their countries’ armaments, all banding together in an unholy alliance to support the genocidal state of Israel even as it tightens its siege of Gaza, even as it bombs, shoots, and starves the people of Palestine, killing children and/or their mothers and grannies, turning their neighbourhoods into Dante’s Inferno, and even as the IDF purchases 40,000 tents as if readying for a ground invasion of Rafah, where over a million Palestinian refugees eke out life, already in tents, waiting for this promised annihilation, even as we see this whole spectacle of incomprehensible cruelty, of Western savagery and of American barbarity playing out live, our own lives – yours and mine – have to go on. Even as we protest, march, raise our voices. We watch with horror as the German State sends in gundas, armed to the teeth, to physically close down a Palestine Conference in Berlin, at the moment that an 86 year old Nakba survivor Salman Abu Sitta, was speaking. The German State has outright banned this event, an event that links Jewish and Palestinian people in the quest for justice and peace, and has, as speakers, people as famous as the Greek former Minister of Finance. The German State has banned the event from ever happening afterwards, even by Zoom. So, not satisfied with genocide against the Herero in Namibia, nor against Jews and Romani in Germany and Poland, this same German State colludes with and eggs on this genocide of the Palestinian people.
And, we take strength from the people of Palestine, and the people of America who block bridges with their own bodies, to cause economic pressure on their out-of-democratic-control ruling class, or from the workers at Google who protest in work-place demonstrations against their own bosses for their complicity with Israel’s genocide, and the artist and curators of the Israeli stand at the Venice Bienniale who kept the shutters down, and pinned up a notice that reads: “The artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”
And, all the while, our lives go on. In Ragoo Lane, a of 17-year-old neighbour – we share a back yard fence – came all the way round to Ragoo Lane and informed me that our dogs, Lock and Down, had attacked a cat, unknown to him, in the night. And it was injured but alive on our side of the fence. So, I ushered the two guilty dogs into the front yard, and together my young neighbour and I went and rescued the cat. He should be a vet, this young man. He asked for a bit of cloth to protect his arms from scratches, and gained the confidence of the injured cat, and inspected it. He then made very professional little temporary splints for two legs that seem broken, and he put gentian violet he had brought along on two teeth-holes on the cat’s tummy. I thought of all the families in Gaza with traumatized cats. One man who had lost everyone else in his family, went back to the rubble that was his home, set up a tent, and lived with his cat in it. Or Yousef Khalid Saeed Naji, the little boy in Deir al-Balah, who when he returned desolated to his rubble-home, found his cat, picked her up and said how he felt happy.
I went and called all the neighbours in Ragoo Lane I could find home to see if they could identify the injured cat. They came around but didn’t know the cat. One brought along a petsay for me to cook that evening from his garden. And I gave another one a bag of Indian guavas from our tree that Kisna had kept in the fridge for him. But, as for the cat, we still did not know whose it was. We wondered if maybe it was a stray that begged here and there? So, the young neighbour and I didn’t know what to do. We decided that he would take care of the cat until the next day in his bedroom – taking it home on a plastic basket I had found -- to see if it would survive until the next day, when together we would take it to see a vet. So, next day I went to the back fence for news, and he said he had found the owner – a family up in Larut Vaudagne – who had taken over care of the cat from him, and therefore me. She, the cat, had two baby kittens to feed at home, he said. What a happy story, in times of genocide.
And I have meanwhile encouraged the young man, since he is unemployed, to enroll to study biology O-levels – not for the certificate – but for his love of animals – and at the same time look for a job – even a menial one – with one of the NGOs that look after animals.
Lindsey Collen for LALIT.
