Genocide Blog 41 – Of Floods and Student Rebellions and Israeli War Crimes Unearthed
28.04.2024
The Israeli killing in cold blood continues. The Israeli state slaughters Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank including East Jerusalem. The USA at the same time sends off billions of dollars of brand new armaments to enable Israel all the better to continue the massacres. Even when the ICJ has pronounced a prima facie genocide is being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, President Biden does not flinch.
The Israeli Defense Force or IDF, now called the Israeli Occupying Force or the Israeli Offense Force or IOF, has been exposed for war crimes by its killing of 400 Palestinians inside the Nasser Hospital and burying them in fos kominn. Some Palestinian dead had their hands tied behind their backs with zip-ties, and had been shot at close range. Some of the dead people had intra-venous drips still attached to them, meaning they were hospital patients, and are suspected of having been buried alive. This macabre behavior was then covered up. The IOF bulldozed the bodies underground into deep holes acting as mass graves. All the while, the USA sends new arms supplies to this IOF.
This bizarre horror was not one-off, either. Only a few weeks earlier, at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, another 400 or so bodies had been similarly buried. The USA continues to send arms to Israel.
A hospital, a place of care and healing, turned into a butcher’s shop by the Israeli army. And then, another hospital turned into one. It is policy. It is genocide. It must stop. The Mauritian Prime Minister, Pravind Jugnauth must add Mauritius’ name to the list of countries supporting the South Africa case against Israel for genocide at the ICJ, and do it fast. We must distance ourselves from these crimes, and do all in our power to stop them.
Israel refuses an independent inquiry into these massacres, even when the UN now calls for one, and the European union calls for one. The USA, as usual, fails to call even for an independent inquiry into any crime Israel commits, however heinous. The USA is so deep into supporting Israel that even when South Africa took Israel to the ICJ, the USA said the case was baseless. When all the judges said there was a prima facie case, Biden did not apologize for his frivolity. He still has not apologized for spreading rumours about decapitated babies, which were lies all along, or about mass rape, also lies that were spread in order to attempt to justify the genocide.
So appalling is the USA’s role in supporting the genocide that Israel is perpetrating that the youth in the USA have risen in rebellion against their own government, camping in tents on campuses in solidarity with Palestine.
Over the past one week, thousands of students all over the USA – from one coast to another, and from north to south – have risen up with revolutionary verve, putting out clear demands for the end of the genocide and the end of the collusion of their own Universities with the Israeli State’s occupation of Palestine. When the police are called in to arrest students – sometimes over 100 students get arrested in one go – then more students, sometimes twice as many, replace those arrested.
This is what makes it a “movement”. So, we are at a crucial point in history. We must support these students.
When organizations of “the state” (of part of the state apparatus in its broad sense) resort to repression, this brings in a new layer of instantly politicized students, who now oppose the repression, and when they join in, they learn about the Nakba in 1948, and about the role of the USA’s leaders in the ongoing genocide today, and the role of their own University management in colluding with the Israeli state, and everything inbetween. All the separation walls of our lives and in our minds fall, at moments like this. The students, all young people, easily “see” how the whole of the capitalist empire has always functioned – in one bright moment of vision. The lies we have believed for decades suddenly evaporate and expose the truth.
This protest movement began on 17 April at Columbia University in New York City, echoing the way it was this very Columbia University that sparked the 1968 immense protest movement in all universities in the USA against their Government’s war against Vietnam. Those protests then spread like wild-fire and brought an end to that war.
But, the Israeli plots continue.
The peace flotilla due to leave Turkey for Gaza with 500 pro-Palestine activists from 40 countries on board so as to bring tons of aid, has had the “flags” of two of their three main ships removed. The Israeli President recently met with the Guinea Bissau President, and then the latter suddenly withdrew his country’s “flag” from their two ships, thus grounding them in Turkey. The “flag” means the country where the ship is registered – often for reasons of tax levels being low, wage levels being low, and workers’ protection minimum – so that it can sail on the open seas. The flotilla has had to postpone the visit. Ann Wright, who is a retired US colonel and one of the leaders of the peace flotilla, and who LALIT member Ragini Kistnasamy met during her attempted visit to Gaza, said that before actually withdrawing their flags, the Guinea Bissau authorities had insisted on further “inspections”, although Turkey had carried out all the necessary checks. No problems were found in either inspection. So the delaying tactics hardened, and the flags, themselves, were withdrawn without pretext.
The Israeli government meanwhile is in panic mode, trying to prevent international arrest warrants it expects to be issued against its top leadership, including Netanyahu, Hertzog and Chief of Staff Halevi, by the International Criminal Court. So far, the ICC has dragged its feet in a shameful manner. It seems the mass graves in Nasser and Al Shifa Hospitals have made it impossible for the corrupt prosecutors to drag their feet any more without, themselves, being guilty of collusion with genocide. These prosecutors, just to be clear, are corrupted by the corrupters-in-chief, the USA and Israel. Israel, remember, has totally corrupted many, if not most, US Congressmen and Senators via organizations like AIPAC, and corrupted the UK’s Parliament via organizations like the “Labour Friends of Israel” that overthrew Jeremy Corbyn and the “Conservative Friends of Israel” that controls over half of the MPs of the Conservative Party. This same corrupt UK state apparatus actually stole Chagos from Mauritius, and then rented part of its stolen goods, Diego Garcia, to the receiver of stolen goods, the USA, for its military base, on and from which in turn commits further crimes. The ICJ found that Chagos, including Diego Garcia is part of Mauritius, and told the UK to decolonize at once, and to get out of the whole of Chagos, including Diego Garcia, at once, and this means taking its illegal tenants, the USA, with it.
In all this, we in LALIT and at the Ledikasyon pu Travayer have had to spend the past week getting first water, then mud, out of our offices in Grand River North West. We, like many in Port Louis, have suffered two devastating flash floods just this year. The floods in our area are worsened by the government having built a 4-metre high reinforced concrete wall around what is effectively a prison for young girls, called OASIS, and supposed to be a “shelter”, effectively damming the water from the Royal Road, and blocking the pathway that floods usually took to the nearby sea.
Our plight, awful as it is, is nothing like the suffering that is being inflicted intentionally by Israel and the USA and UK, on the people of Gaza, and of the whole of Palestine.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
*Place where Columbia University is was corrected on 29 April 2024
