WARNING: Israel Tightens Siege on Gaza, accelerates Corralling, drops more Bombs on Civilians
24.04.2025
Some intellectuals are real dupes for Zionist propaganda. And their stupidity has dangerous consequences. And they should know better.
Israel is now, right now, acting as if it has a “window of opportunity” it can open and attack Iran, drawing the US armed forces into a huge war. Israel’s aim, during the ensuing disorder and mayhem is to “complete its genocide” against the people of Palestine, while people are aghast at “the war” against Iran. The Israeli and US propagandists call it, in their disgusting language, “finishing the job”. In fact, “the job”, to continue with their language, began in earnest in around 1947. “The job” is genocide.
Yes, the Israeli State intends, their leaders openly say so, to drive all the Palestinians, starting with those from Gaza, out of Palestine completely, or kill them. And now, they see, is the time. The Hezbollah, they argue, is weakened. The USA’s secret services, the CIA, planned and carried out their “Operation Timber Sycamore” successfully, ousting Syria’s Assad regime that, harshly repressive as it was, supported Palestine, and replaced it with their allies, a pro-Israeli band of Al Qaeda operatives. In the Lebanon, the USA and France have imposed a new Government that they intend to make keep Hezbollah down. Now, they believe, is the time for the final act in the genocide.
Israel’s main ally, President Trump, himself, had conveniently “suggested” that the people of Gaza be removed to some place else to make way for a real estate project, pied dans l’eau, that America would own. This bizarre action, too, helped open the window of opportunity the Israeli state needs.
The Palestinians, of course, did not just get up and leave. Instead, Gazans went on pilgrimages to their destroyed houses, in their tens of thousands, when the January ceasefire first began. In fact, the Israeli State has them “kept in”, in any case. We all know that the Israeli State is inflicting a violent Medieval state-of-siege on the Palestinians of Gaza. No food, no water, no energy, just as the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant threatened immediately after the 7 October attack on the Israeli armed forces surrounding Gaza, and as new defense minister Israel Katz has repeated, saying “No humanitarian aid will enter Gaza”. The time has now come, the Israeli government thinks, to force the Palestinians out of all Gaza, to starve and strangle them, while exterminating them.
So, Israel decided to, and is going ahead to, force Palestinians out of Gaza by corralling them more and more within the confines of an increasingly small concentration camp, all the while killing them and making the place uninhabitable. Concentration camps are called “concentration camps” because an army “concentrates” families into smaller and smaller enclosures, with the aim of moving them out and/or killing them. It is an old colonial method of extermination.
Israel will go ahead with its genocide, as we see before our eyes, at the cost of any amount of cruelty, illegality, immorality, any amount of barbarity, any amount of obscenity or wanton violence. The only way they can do this is by attempting to get the whole world to see what is genocide as merely “a war”. We must by some kind of sorcery not see what they are doing as “genocide” at all.
But, the whole world, except for increasingly isolated Western leaders, sees genocide as genocide. Israel holds on only because Western leaders and their pliant media propagandists can still pretend that the “genocide” is not a “genocide” but a mere “war”.
Now they think that, if there is an actual violent war against Iran, this will provide a shock so horrible and so dangerous as to supply a “veil of deceit” thick enough to hoodwink Western leaders and their media slaves even for what they see as “the final solution”, the Nazi term, after transportation, forced labour and concentration camps, for ultimate extermination. This, the Israelis think will distract the attention of the world long enough for Israel to “finish the job” of getting rid of the Palestinian people altogether, one way or another. They hope that no Western government or western media will admit there is genocide or report on it. They will all focus, instead, only on the real mayhem of the Israeli, or Israeli-US attack on Iran. This attack will provoke a truly dangerous war that could blow up not just the Middle East, i.e. West Asia, but the whole world.
In fact, “the whole world”, other than Western leaders and their media puppets, can already see that what Israel and its allies are doing is genocide. The ICJ, the highest UN Court says it is “plausible” that it is genocide. The ICC has charged Israeli leaders with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The UN General Assembly has called for Israel to stop its bombing and siege. The ICJ has found Israel guilty of unlawful “occupation” of Palestine, and told Israel to withdraw, to pay damages and to permit the return of refugees. The reason the Western World’s spokespeople pretend to see no more than “a war” – we refer here to European and American political parties and leaders, most university bosses and their mainstream academics, all mainstream media outlets – is not understood yet. It seems like, at best, madness or, at worst, gross evil.
Some Mauritian intellectuals, mainly in the Press, who pretend to see not Israel committing genocide against Palestinians, but no more than “a war” between “Israel and Hamas”, have an additional reason to their Western counterparts, a more simple reason: they merely follow their Western counterparts’ into these extreme positions of denial of the undeniable. The MBC and Radio Plus, to name just two, and almost all the newspapers, regurgitate the lies of the Western media. They ignore the Mauritian official Government’s position, in order to follow the mainstream outlets in France, the US and UK. But, as in all former colonies, only a minority regurgitate this view. And they do it anonymously, for the main.
In fact, we must praise all the Mauritian poets and writers who have taken a stand against the genocide, and named it in public. We praise the artists and musicians who have stood up to be counted as opposing the genocide. We praise the handful of brave journalists, including Sedley Assonne, Patrick Michel, Husna Ramjanally, and Jean-Claude Antoine, who have taken a stand.
We praise all the political leaders in Mauritius, who have over the past few years taken stands, in their parties, women’s wings, or as leaders, against Israel’s genocide. Their stands may be too timid*, indeed they are, but they at least do take them.
But all those intellectuals in the West, how on earth do they not see the genocide on their screens before their very eyes? Or do they merely pretend not to see it? Or do they think it is all a game? And why refer to it as “war”, when it is not war.
Either way, “intellectuals” or not, they are acting uninformed enough, or prejudiced, enough to fall into Israeli and Zionist propaganda. This, in turn, means, “intellectuals” or not, they are acting plain stupid. And stupidity can be dangerous.
This pretense that what is, in fact, genocide is merely a war like any war, with all its “unfortunate” and “tragic” consequences, is the main plank of the Israeli and US-European Zionist platform. The main plank.
It is a lie.
It is propaganda. We have to oppose these lies and this propaganda.
The way to do it is by exposing it for what it is. Lies. The “hasbara” or propaganda goes like this:
What is (supposedly) happening is Israel’s “war against Hamas”. It is compulsory to see it like this. If you call the genocide “genocide”, you are threatened with social punishment of some sort.
What is actually happening is that the Israeli state and its Western “masters-slaves” are conducting a campaign to get rid of the Palestinian people altogether, and create a “Greater Israel, a Jewish State from the River to the Sea”, with Palestinians expelled, if not killed and, if not killed, expelled from their land. Sometimes “Greater Israel” is even greater still, grabbing parts of the Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Egypt! This is what they actually claim as “Israel”, given by god.
So, that is what Israel is fighting for: to get rid of any Palestinians who get in the way of a “Jewish State”, a State whose borders are expanding.
And, on the other side, there is resistance against this oppression. It is organized by the oppressed people, themselves, the Palestinians. The Palestinians resist by remaining in Palestine for over 75 years of being hounded out by violent means. They resist by joining political parties and volunteer organizations, and they resist by becoming citizen-journalists, since Israel forbids the presence of any international journalist in Gaza. They also form the armed resistance groups like, earlier on, Fatah and today including Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Islamic Jihad, 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. We seldom hear what the resistance actually is on the mainstream Western media.
Yet, the resistance to genocide exists. And it has the right to resist. It has the right to resist by armed struggle. Why? Because their land, as decided now by the ICJ last year, is militarily occupied by Israeli occupation forces.
Israel’s aim is to get rid of the Palestinian people from the whole of Palestine, and for Israel’s Jewish State to impose its power over the entire territory that was supposed, in the 1948 UN resolution, to be divided into two states, and over more than that, too. The Israeli state, to do this, is perpetrating genocide. It is clear that this is what is happening.
This is not a war. Just as it was never “a war” by the German State against the Jews of Europe. It was genocide then. What the Israeli state is doing now is genocide.
Anyone who calls this genocide a “war” instead of what it is, genocide, colludes with the genocide.
How Strong Western Propaganda Can Be
The Israeli propaganda and Zionist propaganda is so strong that even people who are against the genocide can, and do, fall under its sway. Even in Mauritius where every single political party is against the genocide, individual genuine political activists, who attended our demonstration in Port Louis against the genocide, who are genuinely against the genocide, in good faith, carried a pancarte that refers to the genocide as a “war”.
It is important to realize the effect of our slogans. The hundreds of people going by in the streets of Port Louis stop as the march passes them, and they read the slogans on the pancartes. They think about them. They are the ones supposed to read the slogans, not just the leaders in the USA and Israel, via their embassies and informers. The thousands of people watching the videos of the demonstration afterwards, on WhatsApp and YouTube and Facebook posts, put the video on hold to read the slogans. People judge the demonstration by the slogans called out and written down on pancartes prepared in advance. And they might adopt the slogan that someone chooses to display in a march around the centre of Port Louis as their own. This is why we, in LALIT, call attention to the importance of politically clear slogans. What we say has an effect. Words sometimes have the power of actions. They are not always “just hot air”.
An Example
When one of our members asked one man afterwards, when she saw him passing by in the streets of Quatre Bornes, what was on the pancarte he was carrying that day, he denied he had ever carried a pancarte at all. Clearly, he knew he had done something he might not be able to defend. We say this because, he did carry a pancarte. He, together with another man, carried a pancarte with a slogan conflating genocide with “war”. He said it was not him that thought the slogan up either. Nor did he paint it. It was “bann la”, who did so. So, we deduce that some people, who we are sure are against the genocide, as he clearly is, prepared the pancarte, and others, like him and another man also clearly present because he is against the genocide, carried it, not knowing what was on it, or what it meant, or having forgotten they carried it. Remember that the demonstration was called, and the public was invited, on the basis of a very carefully worded and coherent, quite long, “common declaration”. It was called by as many as 20 organizations and its content was widely published before the march. The march was then held in Port Louis on 4 April. Literally dozens, if not hundreds, of possible slogans could be thought up, which would fall into the general ambit of this carefully chosen theme. In fact, there were two interlinked themes: Close the military base on Diego Garcia, and stop the genocide against the Palestinians.
But, the Zionist propaganda is so ubiquitous that some activists came to the demonstration against genocide, calling for the following on their pancarte: “Trump, f... ur War” (abbreviation for the f... word is ours; the abbreviation “ur” for “your” is theirs in the original). We agree with the assumption in the slogan that the USA, not just Israel, is responsible, too, for the genocide. Leaving aside the need to avoid the use, in public spaces, of such foul language that might defeat the purpose of winning people over to the cause of the Palestinian people, and leaving aside whether the slogan even makes sense at all, the content of the slogan, assuming it is on the subject of the march, implies that Trump is waging “a war”. Since the march was against Israel’s genocide, aided and abetted by the USA, we assume they refer to the genocide. The march was not, for example, about Ukraine, where the USA is directly involved in a “war”. Trump follows in Biden’s footsteps, so it is not just “Trump’s war” nor is it just his own genocide. The main point is this: Does the slogan refer to the genocide? And if it does, those who carry it portray themselves as having been duped by Israeli and Zionist propaganda. In addition, the meaning of the slogan is not what we believe the militants carrying it would want it to mean: “F... your .... (whatever)”, means simply, “We couldn’t care less about your .... (whatever), “We don’t give a damn about your ....(whatever)”. We think the two men who came to the demonstration do care about the genocide against the people of Palestine. They do care about any Trump war or genocide they might be referring to. Otherwise, they would not have attended the demonstration. They would have stayed home that day.
So, the mind boggles.
The powerful pull of the propaganda
The main point is that it is truly amazing that people who are genuinely against the genocide still fall into the mainpropaganda trap set by pro-Israeli forces, i.e. to refer at all to what Israel is doing as “a war”. Israel and the USA are very careful, as are all the Western media (BBC, CNN, all the mainstream French channels you can think of), to refer, again and again, to only “the war”, or the “war against Hamas” or this being “a war against terrorists.” But, they are wrong. It is NOT a war. It is not a war at all. It is something else. It is genocide against the people of Palestine.
A war is conflict between two armies, usually with similar weapons, like warplanes used to bomb military targets, like weapons depots, on the other side. Or it means tanks ranged against each other, or soldiers ranged against enemy soldiers. War implies battles. A war is not a Medieval siege against families, like that which Trump is supporting Israel imposing on the Palestinians in Gaza right now, starving these families to death. A war is not the locking up of families into a concentration camp area, and then bombing them wherever they go within the camp. It is not corralling people, like what Trump is supporting, from one place to another, before slaughtering them anyway. It is not killing civilians with explosives dropped from on high in the safety of the clouds, as only cowards would do, on to babes in arms, that they kill by the tens of thousands, while leaving others buried in the rubble, slowly suffocating to death, while Israel prevents any machinery from going in to Gaza to try to save them. War is not eliminating hospitals, by their meticulous destruction. It is not targeting hospital workers by the thousand. By the thousand. It is not eradicating journalists, one by one, to cover up the truth of what you are perpetrating. Killing the messenger by the hundred. It is not destroying civil status records, land deeds, museums and other forms of human memory. The Israeli army’s attack on Palestinians is not a “war”. It is large scale murder, also called genocide.
In any case, both Trump, and Biden before him, support the genocide in the name of both big American political parties – with the tax money of US citizens, American-assured armaments and intelligence, as well as geo-political cover at places like the UN General Assembly and the Security Council, as well as at the ICC. In the USA, there have been huge protests by the people. Just last week, but no major newspapers covered it, in California 12 people were arrested for physically blocking bombs being sent to Israel at the Travis Air Force Base. The 12 were quickly released so as to keep the story quiet. Google it, and you will see a report in a local newspaper in the Bay Area. The level of protests, on university campuses in cities and on work sites, is one of the reasons why most Americans (53% earlier this month) now have an “unfavourable opinion” of Israel, and less than one-third have confidence in Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister. This is why we said above that the “Western leaders” and their “media” puppets are increasingly the only people who believe Israel’s propaganda.
Can important people, like most academics, most journalists, most intellectuals in the Western World not know, not see, the difference between a war, on the one hand, and the wholesale slaughter of civilians, on the other? That is the difference between war and genocide. A majority of the people in the USA are beginning to see the truth despite the elite’s cover-up.
Words count. They mean something. Referring to genocide as “war” is a way to obscure the truth. It is harmful.
And as Israel is pushing the USA into bombing Iran, this new war will be used to distract from the genocide.
In LALIT, we would suggest any readers of our article, who want to be able to resist this Western propaganda, go on to YouTube, or some other social media, and listen to, say, Norman Finkelstein’s recent exposé on The Chris Hedges Report, uploaded last week, titled “Emptying Gaza”, and Ilan Pappé’s public talk with Aaron Bastani over the weekend titled, “How Israel became a fascist State”. Both deal with the issue of “seeing” genocide for what it is i.e. genocide, and having the courage to call the genocide “genocide”. And not call it a war. It is not a war we are witnessing. It is not a war that we are protesting against when we hold marches here, either. So we call on all people who are “angaze”, to avoid falling into the language of those perpetrating the genocide. We call on everyone to say, in slogans, what they mean, and to say it in a way that will make the people in public places feel respected, and to use words, and put forward demands, that ordinary people will be able to support, if they agree. Like “Ferm Baz Diego!”, or “Stop Zenosid!” Either of these could be expressed in a long thesis, or reduced to the precise slogans we quote. The meaning is clear. The demand is precise. There is no bowing down to Israeli or US propaganda. The moment is too important for us to make mistakes, to play games, or to “not care” about things as important as genocide.
Now is the time for us all to take a firm stand. We call on all organizations, and all intellectuals and academics, to find a way, individually or collectively, to take a public stand against the genocide that the Israeli State, with US backing, and general European backing, is perpetrating against the people of Palestine. People need to have the courage to call the genocide “genocide”. Our Government needs to be pressured by us all to isolate Israel, to join into the South African ICJ case against Israel for genocide, to issue guidelines for a total boycott of Israel, to end all diplomatic links with Israel, to call for a UN arms embargo against Israel, and to call on the UN General Assembly to lift the siege, and impose a ceasefire involving a “no-fly zone” that countries with armies offer to enforce, over all of Palestine. Then all the Palestinian resistance movements, together – as they have already started doing in the Beijing meeting of July last year – negotiate how to move forward in a way that ensures no more displacement, no more colonial violence, and in order to find a way forward in which Palestinians are free and all refugees can return.
We need to stop the genocide. We need to prevent future war by Israel and the USA against any more Middle Eastern countries. Enough illegal and immoral wars is enough. The situation is serious. It is the worst moment of a lifetime for the whole world and for nearly all of us alive today.
LALIT
*[Edited on 26 April, so that the reference to timidity of stands clearly refers only to the political party leaders of Mauritius, not to the others praised for speaking up.]
