Genocide Blog 58 -Unbearable Slowness of Change in Balance of Forces until a Sudden Fall at Tipping Point
24.11.2024
The scales are not yet tipped. The Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people goes on and on. But the scales get ever-nearer to tipping point. What happens in Palestine now will affect the whole world. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has at long last issued its arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, Netanyahu and Gallant. Three of us in LALIT were amongst those who put in the complaint to the ICC: Alain Ah Vee, Ragini Kistnasamy and me. The warrants are one more weight in the scales against Israel’s genocide.
The slowness in adding little weights one and then another, until the scales against Israel tip is just too unbearably slow. It hurts. It hurts the Palestinians most. But, it hurts everyone else, too. In the medium and long-term, it will hurt Israel, too. Israel is busy fatally wounding itself, as a state, as it degenerates and falls apart under the weight of its own crimes.
Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, Palestinians in Israel itself, and Palestinians living as refugees all over the world, continue to suffer now. We see, indeed we feel, the suffering every day. On our screens. In our minds, even as we sleep, the images haunt us. The suffering of being hounded around by strangely sadistic “orders” given via phone messages or dropped from the air by leaflet: “Leave this zone, and go to this zone. Immediately.” A nightmare dystopia organized by Netanyahu’s army. Palestinians are hounded off their own land, out of their own houses, and this has gone on for 76 years. Seventy-six whole years. People’s great granddads and great grannies, all the way down to the newborns today, have suffered, and still suffer, this constant aggression. It is why two-thirds of families in Gaza are in Gaza. They were already refugees driven out of Palestine. But the hounding out is worse now than ever before. The Israelis inflict displacement, then bombing and tank shelling, and they inflict starvation on families, the poorer the family the more desperate the hunger. Israel just goes assassinates Palestinian leaders anywhere it wishes. Israel is so mad, it shoots even the Palestinian negotiator it is negotiating with. All this would stop on a dime, if the USA did not actively support it – day in, day out – with money, arms, geo-political cover, and spreading lies in the Western media. And this hideous American politics harms not just the Palestinians, but maims the Israeli State, itself, and even causes the USA to go into self-destruct mode.
All the while, Palestinians in Gaza are made to survive, on and on, in a wasteland, in devastation created on purpose by Israel’s endless-seeming stock of destructive US bombs and US canon-balls, US bullets and US-backed blockades. Then the Palestinians are made to starve. Then made to suffer thirst. Then made to see their hospitals destroyed by bombs dropped on them on purpose before their eyes. And if, say, a scanner or X-ray machine survives the bombing, the Palestinians are made to see it destroyed after the bombing, by sledge-hammer, as one doctor described.
But, right now, the scales are getting near to tipping point. Too slowly, far too slowly. But the tipping point nears. Israel will lose everything: dignity, honour, men, tanks, support, money, the lot.
Israel now has its Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, officially charged with war crimes, with crimes against humanity, including inflicting starvation on the Palestinian people. The International Criminal Court has issued, at last, a warrant for his arrest, and one for the arrest of his former Minister of Defense, Gallant. 125 countries must arrest either man if he so much sets foot on their land. They are Treaty-bound to do so. Many countries have already announced they will do so. The count-down is now on.
It is not just the ICC warrants for arrest that constitute the count-down to Israel’s fall. No. Not at all.
The Israeli army is worn out. Not enough soldiers. Perhaps 1,000 killed. Some 15,000 injured. Not enough tanks. Not enough spare parts. Israel has not achieved any of its stated war aims in Gaza – even after a whole year of insane annihilation. It has instead, succeeded in its un-avowed war aim of hounding out Palestinians, or alternatively, when they could not be driven into the Sinai Desert, slaughtering them – women, men and children, the sick and the aged, new-borns and the bed-ridden alike – indiscriminately. And this is part of Israel’s 76-year colonial process of “getting rid of” the people who live in Palestine so as to take their land.
But now, Israel’s army is tired out. It is bedraggled. It festers in its own immorality. Its soldiers post genocidal videos, glorify the use of rape as a weapon of war, and thus condemn themselves to future humiliation for such shameful acts and words. Its officers have been injured and killed by resistance fighters, who do not have a single airplane, not a single tank, but instead lie in wait, and then use home-made weapons, and rely on not much beyond their own courage and dedication.
Israeli soldiers now become reluctant to go back to Gaza. Many are maimed and unable to return to the army. Others suffer shell-shock from their own shells and shock-tactics. Israeli tanks are out-of-service, attacked every day as they are by the resistance fighters that Israel lied about having depleted, if not defeated. The war against Hamas and the other resistance fighters is not just un-won, but is un-winnable.
Now Israel is bogged down in another war it cannot win, at its border with the Lebanon. Israel made headlines with a act of mass terrorism, causing injuries by exploding mobile phones called “pagers” inside the Lebanon. Now, there too, instead of fighting Hezbollah soldiers, Israel bombs residential areas of Beirut, again killing civilians mercilessly, not fighting a war, just slaughtering the innocent. And the Hezbollah fights against million-dollar US weapons, with a cocktail of elementary light-weight rockets, mini-low-flying drones, and a few retro-engineered precision guided missiles, based on ones they have brought down, studied and duplicated. Sometimes Hezbollah uses cheap drones as decoys for a guided missile to get through. Sometimes it uses cheap rockets as decoys, instead. Then Israel’s expensive Iron Dome, and fancy David’s Sling, Arrow 2 and Arrow 3, and Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) get expended on two-a-penny decoys, and then do not have enough time to re-load, while Hezbollah threads a guided missile through. On the ground, meanwhile Israeli tanks have only just got into the first couple of miles of Lebanon, and have lost 49 soldiers already on this border.
Meanwhile, the Israeli economy is in the ICU. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens have fled the country. The Israeli army, being made up essentially of conscripted soldiers and reservists, constantly draws people out of their ordinary jobs in the Israeli economy to go serve in the military. Israel has also fired 160,000 workers, who are Palestinians they fired, and this adds to the shortage of workers. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have had to leave the areas near Gaza and near the Lebanon, to avoid constant rocket-fire. Small enterprises have collapsed. The tourism industry is nearing nil. Who visits a war zone? Who wants to spend a holiday scurrying down into a bomb shelter every time Hezbollah sends a rocket or drone over?
And meanwhile, world-wide the calls for boycott and embargo against Israeli goods grow more vociferous every day. Israel’s economy is going to be stifled.
International organizations unify gradually against Israel because it is committing genocide, because it is unlawfully occupying Palestine, because it is practicing of Apartheid, and because of its disrespect for the UN system. Israel is getting weakened and isolated. The scales begin to tip against it.
This week, the USA was left, once again, to stand there like a pariah, using its veto so as to prevent an enforceable ceasefire. The vote was 14 in favour of a ceasefire, and one against. The poor man representing the USA at the UN Security Council meeting sat there sounding like the thief claiming “the stolen item fell off the back of a lorry”. And everyone else at the UN Security Council felt their stomach turn at his apparent disregard for Palestinian life and at his clear disregard for even trying to make sense, when he tied himself up trying to justify the unjustifiable on behalf of his Master, Joe Biden.
The Security Council was trying to get a ceasefire, just at the very moment in history that the ICC Arrest Warrants were being issued against Israeli leaders for the serious crimes they have committed. The USA, as empires about to fall tend to do, ends up acting to further its own downfall. By using its veto, the USA has taken one step further to its own downfall. By denouncing the ICC, it takes another.
The ICJ, the world’s top Court, had already found an Israeli genocide “plausible” in January this year. On this basis, it issued three different “Provisional Measures” in January, March and May, aiming to prevent genocide, or stop it. Each state has to play a role in this. In Mauritius, earlier this week, LALIT hand-delivered a message to newly appointed Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam to become part of the case at the ICJ that South Africa has put against Israel for genocide.
Another separate ICJ case against Israel for unlawful occupation has inflicted a severe defeat on Israel earlier this year. Mauritius is part of this case against Israel. The ICJ judgment was a resounding defeat for the USA and Israel. Israeli occupation is judged illegal, and Israel has been ordered to leave all the occupied territories. Now, the UN system will try its best to enforce this.
UN Special Rapporteurs have for years, if not decades, been finding Israel guilty of illegal occupation, and of Apartheid.
Each action by broad masses of people all over the world, by small groups all over the world, by students and trade unions, by universities and artists, all add to hasten the tipping of the scales. We effect the tipping both directly by our actions, and through pressurizing our governments – as we force them to stand up and be counted by, themselves, acting.
Meanwhile, the resistance fighters on the ground exhaust the Israeli army.
And for too long now, the Palestinian people have had to carry far too heavy a load in this struggle. But their struggle is heroic, and their endurance a miracle of humanity.
May the scales tip soon.
It depends on us all.
So, join in. Act! For now, do come to LALIT member Ragini Kistnasamy’s “Report Back from Palestine” on Friday 29 November. She is just back from the West Bank, where she was involved in “protective presence” for Palestinian families, who are being hounded out by violent settlers and a violent Israeli military. The Report Back is from 4.30 pm to 6:00 pm in the Municipal Chamber of the Municipality of Port Louis. It is a rare honour to hear from a witness who has had her feet on the ground. You can stand up and be counted by being present.
