Genocide Blog 55- Israeli genocide deepens - American boots hit the ground in Israel
15.10.2024
All parties standing for general elections in Mauritius, or Presidential elections in the USA for that matter, should put the Americano-Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people bang in the middle of their electoral agenda. People should see this as a programmatic issue in each country of the world. LALIT does, and we are the only party in Mauritius to do so.
The genocide is the single event that will mark humanity’s future. People will ask you, for generations, “Where did you stand then?”
Did you take a stand, did you act in favour of the Palestinian people, and now Lebanese civilians, too, being slaughtered live on TV by a deranged Israeli State egged on by an arms-pumping USA?
The USA contenders for the Presidency, Harris and Trump, when they even mention it, both vow to continue arming the perpetrator to the teeth, resorting to the UN Security Council veto – even just to recognize a Palestinian State – while turning a deaf ear to the screams of the American people for an immediate ceasefire and end to arms sales. Yesterday a demonstration against the finance capitalists that gather at the UN stock exchange, just where the bull statue is, was organized by mainly Jewish groups against the US capitalists role in the genocide.
And here in Mauritius, contenders for Prime Minister Jugnauth and Ramgoolam – both the centre of an array of smaller parties – and Roshi Badhain for that matter with an array of even more parties – pretend that they do not need to put the genocide on the agenda for the elections.
Only LALIT has the genocide in its electoral “Platform in 12 Points”, and it is Point Number One. I quote (in translation): “Free Palestine! Stop the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians! The Mauritian State must immediately propose the suspension of Israel from the UN! This will help stop the genocide! This will prevent the constant spread of Israel’s killing!” And in our background program, a book called “LALIT’s Philosophy”, as well as in our “LALIT’s Strategy” booklet, we analyze the importance of this issue.
From now on, the question you will be asked for the rest of your life will be, “And where did you stand during the genocide?” Did you raise your voice against it? Did you participate in a demonstration, a vigil, sign a petition, help organize your worksite to take a stand, write an article, even a poem? Braver possibilities are there, too. Did you go to Palestine in October 2024 to stand by Palestinians to mark the moment the genocide would begin, like a LALIT member did? Our member is there, in Palestine, right now, standing alongside Palestinian families and neighbourhood organizations against the Israeli Occupying Forces.
Or, did you act in favour of those perpetrating the genocide? Are you guilty of currying favour with the USA embassy in Port Louis? Did you, or will you, accept its blood money? Or go on one of its scholarships? Or tours, organized by the State Department? Did you write articles tele-guided by the Israeli propaganda machinery, or publish articles just lifted from the genocidal mainstream US and European media that frames Israel as the “victim”?
Or, did you choose to remain silent? To avoid signing a petition? To make sure you don’t decrease your chances of some US scholarship? Or some job in the capitalist sector? Or did you worry about promotion at work, instead of standing up and speaking out? Or did you worry more about paying for your own child’s studies than for the killing of 12,000 Palestinian children?
New and more heinous developments
Meanwhile, the genocide deepens and broadens.
In the Northern part of Gaza, the actual elimination of Palestinians living in Jabalia has begun in earnest. The genocide deepens there. The Israeli army is shooting at the Press on purpose, aiming at hospitals again, and starving the whole of the civilian populace to death, while bombing them from the air.
It is so bad in the North that even the USA’s immoral, cold-hearted UN representative had to warn Israel not to starve people there to death. We say she is immoral because she supplies arms by the billion dollars at the same time, and cold-hearted because she vetoed every binding UN Security Council Resolution, except one watered-down – supposedly just so that the US might not veto it – and then she afterwards declared, by the equivalent of an American “Royal Decree”, that it was “not binding” anyway!
Anyone who still thinks it is difficult to define “genocide” and anyone who can’t bring themselves to accuse Israel of genocide, should just Google the simple definition in the short document, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. Anyone educated to the 4th grade, or even now in the 4th grade, can get an idea what “genocide” means. Then they can judge for themselves what both Israel and the USA are doing, and whether both are committing genocide, by just sitting like a potato in front of their TV or computer or mobile phone screens.
And Israel’s genocide continues apace in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well.
The Israel-USA attack is genocide against the whole of the Palestinian people. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands in truth, have been killed or maimed in just one year, adding to the killings since the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe when the colonial project began in earnest. In the past year, over 11,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned – or to be more accurate in my language, they have been taken hostage. They are simply abducted and sequestrated by the Israeli Occupying Forces without any charge, or any due process. In one year over 700 Palestinian children have been taken hostage this way.
A new UN Report by famous South African judge, Navi Pillay, condemns Israel for acts of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. She says, inter alia, putting important emphasis on the torture of male Palestinians, “The Commission finds that such persecutory acts continued [against Palestinians] in detention in the form of sexualized torture. Male detainees were subjected to attacks on their sexuality and reproductive organs, including violence to their genitals and anus, and were forced to perform humiliating and strenuous acts naked or stripped as a form of punishment or intimidation, with a view to extract information from them. Male detainees were subjected to rape, which is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Such acts of sexual violence, causing severe physical and mental suffering, also amount to torture.”
In the Lebanon, Israel is now bombing civilians with the same genocidal intent it announced for the people of Gaza. So, the genocide is broadening into the whole region. To kill supposedly one Hezbollah military man, the Israelis can kill 500 civilians and think this both normal and proportional. The USA just smiles. Meanwhile, until now, whether it is Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian armed forces, none of them have intentionally targeted civilians as a strategy in the way Israel does day-in-day-out.
The USA has now ordered 100 American soldiers to go to Israel, boots on the ground, to man the brand new “defense” weapons it is providing Israel with called THAAD. (We put the word “defense” in inverted commas because this kind of weapon gives Israel the impunity to attack countries beyond its boundaries, assassinate people at will, in the knowledge that the American people are paying for their efficient defense. So, it allows “attack” while pretending to be “defense”.)
So, the USA is intent on standing with Israel and heading for war with Iran, as well as with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Yemen forces, and the militias in Iraq and Syria that stand by the Palestinian people – as indeed we all should. And as ordinary working people all over the world, in greater and greater numbers, are already doing. Including many of us in Mauritius.
In Mauritius, though no-one is openly pro-Israel in public – except L’Express newspaper in a few articles – there are Zionist forces in two places – in some parts of the pro-western capitalist class, but they keep their views to themselves, and amongst the Evangelical churches that have sprung up all over the country in the past decades, and they too, tend to keep their views within their particular sects.
No political party is behind Israel and the USA. That is for sure.
But, then again, their stands they do take against Israel, even against the genocide, or their stands against the USA, even its arming of a genocide, their stands in favour of the Palestinian people, are all sadly far too timid. And they all shy away from putting the issue firmly on the electoral agenda.
Roshi Bhadain and Bruneau Laurette’s utter silence on the issue – as far as I have ever read or heard – makes them suspect. They may be crypto-Zionists. Laurette, we know, because he brags about how he was trained by the worst bit of the Israeli state – its special forces. Roshi Bhadain is silent not only on Israel but even on the USA-UK’s continued military occupation and refusal to properly decolonize Chagos, including Diego Garcia.
We end by calling on all political parties to stand by the Palestinian people, in particular by taking the following undertakings:
-- We call for the Mauritian State to join the South African case against Israel at the ICJ for genocide.
-- We call for an immediate embargo on Israel, on arms and on technology.
-- We call for the suspension of Israel’s UN membership and for all States to cut diplomatic ties with Israel, until it stops the genocides, ends its apartheid system, and withdraws its occupation.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
