Genocide Blog 62 - A Ceasefire in the Air as Biden Genocide Regime Closes Down
17.01.2025
A ceasefire agreement has been reached between Israel and Hamas. This one phrase means that Israel’s war aim of finishing off Hamas has not been won.
And the children of Gaza, in their wisdom know it. They celebrate, singing and dancing, in the bombed out ruins of the cities they live in. The children know it. They know that their survival means Israel failed. And Israel’s failure means they taste victory. We share their celebrations. Though with trepidation for the near future.
After 15 months of genocide, there is now due to be a ceasefire in place from Sunday.
All adults in the world ought to know, and most Palestinian children probably do know, that this is not a quick game with a quick victory. No. No. No. It is a battle for position.
It is a long struggle, over time, since 1948 and even before. This struggle has been, and still is, a series of battles for a better position. Politics and war (war being the ultimately destructive extension of politics) are activities that depend on a constant change of positions. It is a question of who comes out, after each action, stronger – however slightly – or weaker – however slightly. And the children sure know who has been isolated, exposed, condemned, vilified, self-destroyed: the Israeli State and its armed forces.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is, as usual, busy trying to delay actually signing the joint agreement. It is hard for him to sign. He has to sign alongside the very Hamas he pretended he was “wiping off the map”, while in fact being exposed as aiming on purpose to kill, and actually killing, well over 50,000 people – mainly women, children, babes-in-arms and the old and the infirm, in a genocide lasting 15 months in its accelerated form. And the agreement Netanyahu is procrastinating about signing is the very same one US President Joe Biden, who ran the genocide from Washington, put on the table as “Israel’s proposal” a full eight months ago. Remember that Israel then refused to sign its own proposal? Talk about the spectacle of a falling US empire! And Biden and Blinken and Sullivan and Miller and Austin, over the next eight months, just went on and on with supplying a constant flow of deadly bombs to Israel for their joint genocide. This was exposed yesterday. Go watch on YouTube! Talk about losing positional strength.
Grayzone reporter Max Blumenthall that in our last Blog we asked people to follow, alongside top journalist Sam Husseini, who writes in the mainstream media, managed to accuse Secretary Blinken during his “swan’s song” to the totality of the world media gathered at his feet as he exited the piloting of the genocide he has so efficiently run. First Max Blumenthall accused Blinken of killing his friends, meaning the people of Gaza, and of killing amongst them 300 of his colleagues in the Press. He said Blinken was “compromised by Israel”, implying he was acting not in the interests of the USA, but of Zionists in Israel. He ended by asking loudly and proudly, “How does it feel to have genocide as your legacy?” Sam Husseini, a 59-year-old journalist, was then subjected to a brutal ejection from his seat, after he had interrupted Blinken with question. He said out aloud, as they forced him out of his chair and carried him off in pain, what the whole world, outside the Zionist colonizers’ propaganda circle, thinks, "Criminal! … Why aren't you in The Hague?" Indeed there ought to be a warrant against this man, just as the ICC has already issued a warrant against his counterpart, Netanyahu. As President Biden lost his mental capacities, it was indeed Secretary Blinken who ran the genocide from Washington.
So, where are Israel and Palestine now?
Remember, on 7 October 2023, what Hamas and the other ten armed groups did was to remind the world that Palestinians exist. That was the change in position on that day. The Palestinians exist in Gaza in a 17-year Israeli-imposed siege. They exist in the West Bank including East Jerusalem under Israeli-imposed Apartheid. They exist as recognized refugees in countries mainly in the Middle East. They exist. This is the victory, in the battle for positions. “We, Palestinians, have not been wiped off the map!”
Remember, that just ten days before the 7 October 2023, Netanyahu had stood up in the UN General Assembly with a map showing Israel alongside all the Arab States without so much as a sliver of Palestine left? Remember? Palestine had been “removed” from the face of the earth.
Then ten days later, Hamas and the other fighters broke the siege, pulled down the iron fencing that kept them off the land stolen from their grandparents in 1948, knocked out the Israeli Occupying Army, killing 300 soldiers. The Palestinians managed, through their fighters, to oppose their occupation physically. It is true 700 civilians were killed – many by the Israeli forces when they had to drive the fighters out, using the “Hannibal Doctrine”, which means the Israeli army giving orders for soldiers to kill Israelis to prevent them being taken hostage, but also many by the Palestinian fighters, and it is true that killing civilians is a war crime. But, international law permits armed struggle against illegal occupation.
And, by a stroke of serendipity, the judgment of the ICJ on the Israeli occupation, when Israel and the USA were in full genocide mode, came in July 2024, and declared the Israel’s occupation of Gaza and that whole of Palestine as “unlawful”. The ICJ called for Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories, Israel to pay reparations, and for the right of return of all refugees. Another strengthening in the war for position for the Palestinian people. One in which the state of Mauritius had an important role: we supported the case, employed lawyers to help the Palestinian case.
Before that, when South Africa put in a case at the ICJ for an opinion on whether Israel was committing genocide, three preliminary judgments have been handed down, judging that there was “plausible” Israeli genocide against the Palestinians, and that Israel must stop the killing and let food in, and other States must stop supplying arms and instead pressure Israel to stop the genocide. Remember the Convention is for the “Prevention of Genocide”, which means states and individuals have the duty to decide whether there is a risk of genocide and to act to prevent it, and do not have to wait for 15 judges to decide, when it is too late, that there was “genocide”. States and individuals have to call “genocide” when we see it, or even the risk of it. These preliminary judgments have changed the balance of forces considerably, putting the USA in the position of breaking its own federal laws by funding, arming and condoning the plausible genocide. The Mauritian State must now join into the South Africa case against Israel for genocide. It is late. But not too late.
All countries in the world, except the USA, have been calling for a ceasefire. Even Israel’s staunchest allies like the shameful Germany and complicit UK, have called for a ceasefire. Both Israel and the USA’s standing in the world have fallen to their all-time lows. The reputations of both states are in tatters. That, too, changes the balance of forces against Israel and against the USA. Their position is weaker.
Hamas is not yet defeated. Nor are the other 10 groups. Their members were with the children singing and dancing in the streets of Gaza. Just to say “We are still here!”
Hezbollah, which attacked Israel to help take pressure off Hamas, is weakened, it is true. But it is not defeated. It is still there. Lebanon’s politics, however, are now closely controlled by the USA, it is true. And Israel has troops inside Lebanon, and constantly defies the ceasefire it signed with Hezbollah.
Syria, who’s Assad regime gave some support to Palestine and Hamas, has been overthrown by the USA, Turkey and Israel, who have jointly put the HTS (Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders) in power, while Israel has expanded its occupation of part of Syria, the USA has kept 2,000 troops to maintain control over the oil-rich and agriculture-rich part of Syria, and Turkey works to control the part of Syria where the Kurdish people live. So, this geo-political ruin of Syria, already ravaged by the Assad dictatorship, is a change for the worse for the people of Palestine, at least in the short and medium term. But, Israel and the USA and Turkey cannot be proud of their roles in the destruction of Syria, so how can they believe they are in a “better position”. Their destructiveness has been exposed.
The Houthi fighters in Yemen have remained steadfast in their support for the Palestinians. They keep Israeli and US ships from using their part of the sea. The USA and Israel then bomb cities in Yemen, until now. More slaughter by the falling US empire. This means more shame to the USA and Israel, who are committing the genocide while Yemen is trying to prevent the genocide.
And now, in addition to the genocide, Israel is trying to draw the USA into a war against Iran.
Remember, and though hidden, it has become “viral” now – after Trump re-tweeted Prof Jeffrey Sachs recent Cambridge University talk that referenced this – that in 2001, after 9/11, Israel gave the USA a list of the seven countries it wanted the USA to invade to impose regime change. It was called the “Clean Break” in 1996 when Netanyahu became Prime Minister and invented it. They wanted the USA to “take out” any country that supports the Palestinians, because they decided that it was too difficult for Israel to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah. Six of the seven countries on the list have already been “taken out”, to use their language, by the USA, the sixth one being Syria: they were: Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria. The only one left on Netanyahu’s list, and it is the central support for the Palestians .... Iran.
So, in the short term, the Palestinians have difficult times ahead, with enemies so powerful, so unscrupulous, and in such moral and geo-political free fall. These are times when we must follow closely. And we must realize what our role is in helping the people of Palestine, in this battle for “position”. We, in Mauritius, as a people, must mobilize to get the USA-UK military base on Diego Garcia closed down. This is how we can help weaken this falling empire. Its fall will be erratic, sometimes a slide, then a fall – over days, months, years – but it is inexorable. We must help to create the will for socialism in the future – everywhere – and this means weakening this Western empire, its NATO and avoid, in any way, being tied to the falling empire. With the Chagos negotiations, it is a time of all dangers.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
