Genocide Blog 53 – The point of the genocide – and the point of our genocide blog
14.09.2024
This blog exists so as “to help us through the night” of the genocide. Who is “us”? “Us” includes we five who write, edit, translate, verify and translate the blog and all the 100s who read it on our site and on our social media and via our emails, and discuss it. And what “help” is the blog perhaps? It helps us live our “normal” lives as sanely as possible while never turning away from the genocide, and even perhaps find ways to act to end it. Of course, when it comes to actions, they are mainly through our organizations, and for us, in LALIT this includes through our party, and through the common front it is part of: Solidarite Morisyin ar Lepep Palestinn.
One such action is planned for Thursday 19 September – called “Poem pu Palestinn”, hosted by SOMALP member, Ledikasyon pu Travayer. 25 poets who have contributed short poems will read them. Some are original poems in Kreol, others are translated from Palestinian poems into Kreol. Former President of the Republic, Mr. Cassam Uteem, will deliver a speech, after a welcoming note to be given by the Port Louis Lord Mayor Mr. M.I. Nujuraully, while Alain Ah Vee, presides. Many of Mauritius’ most well-known poets have contributed poems, as well as young people perhaps not yet known.
So even as we take actions to end the genocide – even as we get our Government and our Parliamentary Opposition to take actions, too – we also live our usual lives. We in Ragoo Lane go on visiting each other, sharing fruit as it ripens, or some cooked delicacy, or old newspapers – an increasingly sought-after staple that we all recycle for a million uses – and we still pop in for advice on a sick parent, or a son who the police have arrested, or to give the good news of a daughter now living in Canada who has just had a baby. And I am cooking cross-sections of a cabbage “byin pome” – with spices from the garden, beaten egg, grated cheddar cheese and an anchovy on each slice, taken altogether pretending to be steaks – cooked in the oven alongside baked potatoes.
Even as Israel has, for eleven months and continuing this week, bombed whole families – killing 40 people living in tents in one go. They had pitched tents precisely where the Israeli army told them to go shelter safely, as if the instructions were all part of some cruel game. This Israeli army goes on shelling adults and kids alike from tanks, while snipers shoot pensioners fetching water, and all the while these bizarre orders are given, herding hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from one place to another, as if it, the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF), were busy corralling animals. This all constitutes “Genocide” personified. And what is the point? The point is, of course, for Israel to complete what it started in 1948. The Israeli State intends to drive the Palestinian people off their land, if necessary by killing them or starving them, if not by making the land uninhabitable, or by tiring them out so they leave Palestine altogether, joining the six million refugees they have already displaced – and the point then is to grab their land. That is the point. The point is to colonize their land, taking as much of the land as possible with as few Palestinians on it as possible, as Israel has done for 76 years, the length of my whole life. And then those Palestinians who stay are reduced to living under Apartheid, a version of Apartheid universally deemed worse than that of South Africa, and also introduced there in the very same year Israel perpetrated the Nakba, or original genocide against the Palestinians -- 1948. All this is fact. The only reason Israel can persist with these crimes – in full view of the whole world – is that the USA wants Israel to go on with the genocide until “the job is done”, as Netanyahu puts it. The American State desires it, thus enables it.
And this time, this new onslaught against the Palestinians, after 75 years of on-and-off outright attacks, at long last has seen the people of the world – of nearly all the countries of the world, well over three-quarters of the people on the planet – slowly beginning to put their feet down and tell Israel: “No!” “Stop it!” Not fast enough to stop over 40,000 Palestinian people having being slaughtered, mostly children, and over 3,000 children getting their limbs blown off, and still being slaughtered and amputated daily, but at least now denounced by everyone except Israel and its “backers”, arms suppliers, funders and propagandists. These “backers” are, essentially, the United States of America and its hangers-on. The USA has used its veto, its lone veto, to prevent military action against Israel. This is why there is no UN security Council “No Fly Zone” imposed over Palestine. On the contrary, the USA just goes on actually supplying the armaments, the ammunition, the know-how, the intelligence, the propaganda on its tame television channels, and the political justification for the entire colonial project. The USA invents the justification of “Israel has the right to defend itself”, a claim that does not even hold up grammatically speaking, let alone as a strategy. Since when can an occupying power plead self-defense? It is impossible. In the USA, it is not just President Biden and his V.P. Harris, but the Congress, itself, as a whole, that is now controlled by the American-Israeli Zionist lobby, in particular AIPAC. They are a set of capitalist backers that depend on the social bases of Christian Zionists (they claim to be 50 million) and a shrinking number of Jewish Zionists (a handful of million left) in the USA, who finance and “run” candidates, who are ethically-speaking supposed to answer to the American people who elected them, but who, in fact, answer to these puppet-masters that finance and control them. The Congressmen-puppets refer to their bank-rollers as “my AIPAC man” – and these men are what, in the secret service, are called “minders”. They each run a Congressman.
But now, there is resistance. And it is on all fronts, including in the USA.
First and foremost, we must have respect for the people fighting to defend the Palestinians physically. Here I refer to the resistance fighters in Gaza, who defied the Israeli siege and defeated Israeli defenses, and now newly recruited fighters increasingly mobilizing in the West Bank, as well – as the Palestinian Authority folds into its corrupt role as proxy for the Israeli State – and then there are the Houthis in Yemen, who block arms and oil shipping to Israel and will go on doing so until the genocide ends, as well as the Hezbollah in the Lebanon, who have vowed to support Palestine militarily until Israel stops the genocide. There are also groups in both Syria and Iraq who support Palestine. All of these have some logistical and political support from Iran. It is important that we follow, as best we can, the military aspects of this confrontation – otherwise we will not understand the whole picture.
And the resistance to Israel’s colonization has now spread to Governments all over the world, and to the people, themselves, world-wide, and there are huge demonstrations – particularly immense in terms of numbers, in Yemen, Istanbul, Iran, London – and port workers are increasingly refusing to handle armaments shipped to Israel, while direct action has closed down some arms factories that supply the genocidal Israeli state, even in the UK. Students world-wide, but particularly in the USA have, and still are, organizing divestment, sanctions and boycotts from their educational institutions.
China and Russia have come together to organize a united front of all the Palestinian organizations, i.e. Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP), the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF), the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), the Palestine Democratic union (FIDA), the Palestine Liberation Front, the Arab Liberation Front, the Palestinian Arab Front, and the Thunderbolt Forces. The factions said in a statement quoted in Middle East Monitor of 23 July: “The national factions agreed during their meetings in China to reach a comprehensive Palestinian national unity that includes all Palestinian forces and factions within the framework of the PLO, and to commit to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, in accordance with UN resolutions, and to guarantee the right of return in accordance with Resolution 194.”
The International Court of Justice at The Hague, the world’s top court, has declared it “plausible” that Israel is perpetrating genocide. Israel persists. The USA acquiesces. The International Criminal Court is still “seeking” arrest warrants against the Israeli leaders but these attempts are being thwarted – no doubt by the Israel-US secret services combined efforts at blackmail of different kinds, much already exposed publicly. Israel’s colonization of the West Bank including Jerusalm and Gaza has been declared illegal by the ICJ. All the different organs of the UN system have gradually been given official reports that Israel has become an Apartheid state.
Now, it is now time for countries to get together to expel the State of Israel from the UN General Assembly and all UN organizations completely – just as South Africa was, when declared an Apartheid State. The UN General Assembly has this power. This power came from a resolution at the UN in 1974. It was called the “Bouteflika Ruling” - named after Algerian representative at the UN who proposed it. What happened was, when the US, UK and France vetoed the expulsion of South Africa at the Security Council, the General Assembly then relied upon Article 6 of the UN Charter, which states: “A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” This was how South Africa was expelled. Then arms sales to South Africa became illegal internationally and then in almost every country in the world. Boycotts and divestment gradually forced South Africa to set up a new Constitution that outlawed Apartheid. This is what the UN General Assembly now needs to do. Perhaps Mauritius could and should support, or even initiate, such a measure at the General Assembly.
Lindsey Collen for LALIT
