Watching the Fall of the Western Empire and the Lull in the Genocide – Blog 78
17.10.2025
When I am at ease, just dusting surfaces in our house – it being that time of year – I am suddenly consumed by an image of the dust in Gaza covering everything in smothering grey. It is more vivid, this image, for a long while, than what I am actually seeing on the table in front of my eyes.
On my way anywhere near the coast, when I look out at the beautiful blue sea, I am suddenly overcome by a memory of the “vaporized-for-screen-viewing” film of blue sea just like what I am watching when suddenly there is live video showing the assassination of all the men on-board little speed boats near Venezuela that Trump boasts about having made disappear. In six such cases, he is the accuser, the policeman, the prosecutor, the judge and jury, and the executioner. He brags about this extra-judicial killing. And then, a Venezuelan woman, a Zionist, who also happens to support this kind of extra-judicial killing that the Israeli State is so notorious for, is at the same time awarded none other than the Nobel Peace Prize. Peace! For blowing up international law and basic human decency. A Peace Prize not for Francesca Albanese, not Greta Thunberg, nor Judge Navi Pillay, nor the gentle Palestinian ambulance drivers of Gaza. Instead this woman, who supports the Israeli State and supports Trump, the same Trump nominated for the same Prize by none other than the genocideur-in-chief, one Bibi Netanyahu.
When I feel irritation at a neighbour playing music too loud, I wonder what it is like having a neighbour that sends two kinds of drones over your head, buzzing and buzzing in that menacing sound that returns to pierce your nightmares: surveillance drones and killer drones. And you have to try to learn the difference in the sound? And When a minivan’s brakes shriek because the lazy street dogs outside in Raghoo Lane don’t get up in time, I jump. Had I heard, instead, yet another American two-thousand-pound bomb explode up our ally, how would my body react? This thought, the thought of the sound of the bomb that exists only in my memory of a screen is more real, for a long while too, than the sound of the shrieking brakes right in front of my house.
We live in two realities. That is what it means to live our lives, when there is a genocide being perpetrated. Even when it is on “pause”, on punctuated pause. But, pause nonetheless. Even as an Israeli armed forces sniper murders an eleven year old little boy. Even as the people of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are being hounded off their land in record numbers. The Israeli occupation is still intact.
In case readers think it’s a typo when I wrote “Raghoo Lane” this new way. I have just adopted the latest spelling of the alley where we live, now painted on a wall at the beginning of our cul-de-sac. That then makes me ponder whether, with its street name completely obliterated, along with the rest of the neighbourhood being annihilated, I would find even our street let alone our house, had the whole of this part of the village of Bambous been bombed, shelled, burnt, and then re-bombed. How can I notice the spelling of the name of our alley being different? In times like these? And where do the returning Palestinians begin with the dusting? And how do the children learn not to jump at the slightest bang, even when the bombs have gone, for this glorious moment, silent?
And in this lull in the genocide – we must recognize it as a mere lull, however much we hope it lasts forever – I take stock of where Israel stands today after its two-year’s of waking its soldiers up every day to go commit genocide full-time in Gaza, and also in the West Bank that includes East Jerusalem, and also to go slaughter and decapitate people in the entire neighbourhood, I mean Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. Israel now not just “mows the lawn” every few years – as Israeli leaders and soldiers refer to their wiping out of parts of Gaza, culminating in this last slaughter in Gaza – but Israel now begins to wipe out the whole garden, itself, all the way from the Garden of Eden down to Aden. With the USA alongside, the partner in crime, the senior partner in crime.
The destructive nihilism of this kind of nationalist fascism – just as in Nazi Germany – ends up destroying not only what is outside of its definition of “self”, but also at the same time, what is inside. It destroys itself. Israel is on self-destruct.
This is what is happening. The entire country – that never had borders fixed in 1948 or ever, nor had a population fixed then or ever, which makes it hard even to call it a “country” – is now in full self-destruct mode.
Israel is a pariah state. Its Prime Minister a war criminal. There is a warrant out for his arrest. When he spoke at the UN General Assembly, all self-respecting countries’ delegations did a walk-out. It is rumoured (I refer to what Radio Plus journalist Nawaaz Noorbux said publicly) that our Ramgoolam-Bérenger-Duval-Subron Government engineered not to be at the General Assembly at the time, so as not to have to muster courage enough to walk out while at the same time not being able to face the eternal dishonour of sitting there listening to the war criminal speak, alongside other accomplices. Ramgoolam has not yet explained why exactly Mauritius is not on the list of countries that did a walk-out. Just as he has given no satisfactory explanation for why he withdrew the already-paid for Mauritian “oral submissions” prepared for delivery in person in the ICJ case against Israel for intentionally starving the Palestinians.
Israel has for two years sent its soldiers – reservists almost all – to kill children. To drop bombs on them. To aim at them with snipers’ rifles. To shell them from tanks. To bomb their homes and hospitals and schools to smithereens. And then to starve them to death. What moral fibre can be left in a nation that does that?
Israel has for two years hounded Palestinian men, women and children – those who are fit and those who are infirm, the well like the sick, the strong like the weak – from one part of Gaza to another, corralling them as if they were so many animals, from one place to another. And Israeli leaders actually call Palestinians “animals”. Or, if human, “Amalek”, thus targets for extermination by the order of some god. The worst crimes are often committed it seems under the order of some god or other. What moral fibre can there be left in a nation that treats others as animals? A nation that kills children?
Israel is guilty, too, of having invented lies in order to hide its shame at the mighty “Israeli Defense Force” being outwitted and defeated militarily on 7 October 2023. It lies in order, at the same time, to pre-emptively “justify” the ensuing unjustifiable Israeli genocide in Gaza. Israel invented crimes that Palestinian men had supposedly committed: the beheading of babies, for example. There were NONE. Not one. Let alone 40. It was all intentionally made-up propaganda. It has a name: “Atrocity propaganda”. The fact that there were no, repeat NO, beheaded babies comes from Israeli sources. The Israeli propaganda made up the killing of babies in ovens. There was none. This denial, too, comes from Israeli sources. One baby girl was killed, according to Israeli sources, in cross-fire. No baby was burnt in any oven. This was an intentionally spread falsehood. Then it was repeated by American Presidents and other leaders, and spread widely by the entire mainstream media of the USA and the whole of the West. Never an apology from any of them for the lies they spread. For the rumours that were used to fuel the genocide. The German Foreign Minister at the time, now sitting there presiding over the UN General Assembly, repeated the lies. She has never apologized either. Then the Israeli propaganda machine made up the story about Palestinian men cutting off of an Israeli woman’s breast, of all sadistic things to make up, and throwing it, the breast, around “like a ball”. That never happened. The supposed witness was a confabulator. But the Israeli propaganda machinery churned it out. The western media broadcasts it far and wide. What kind of a society produces lies like this, or spreads them, or gets them spread? Then there were the supposed “mass rapes” by Hamas men, rapes that never happened. Supposedly these rapes were filmed by the perpetrators, and this, too, is pure invention. There is no witness, no survivor, no evidence of any kind of even one rape, let alone mass rape, and there is, to date, no forensic evidence at all, either. It is so much colonial confabulation. As we in the women’s movement in former colonies know, there are two crimes possible concerning rape: the rape itself is the first, and lynching men amongst the oppressed people, second. The lie about rape becomes the attempted justification for the oppressor to kill men amongst the oppressed.
However, there is evidence of Israelis decapitating Palestinians children, killing thousands of babies and children, burning them alive. We all know all this. There is evidence of Israelis raping and sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners. This, too, we know.
So, Israel accuses Palestinians of what it is guilty of. What degree of moral turpitude is that?
And meanwhile, the entire world has turned against Israel.
Every state on earth – except Israel and the USA and a pitiful cluster of other misguided countries – recognizes the right of Palestinians to a state. And within the USA, Israel’s co-perpetrator of genocide, Israel is now despised by a majority of people, and a vast majority of young people. Even within the Republican base, half now see Israel as repugnant: I refer to leaders of this right-wing base, like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Green, Steve Bannon and also the assassinated young leader, Charlie Kirk. So unpopular is Israel that Netanyahu, in person, had to say publicly more than once that Israel was NOT involved in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
When Israel brags about its own “decapitation” of whole countries, meaning it kills their leaders on purpose in unlawful killings, while inventing lies about Palestinians carrying out literal decapitation of babies, this “double-bind” has a terrible effect on Israel’s reputation.
Israel has assassinated Hasan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of the Hezbollah, a party in Government then and even now in the Lebanon, and a much-respected regional leader known for his philosophic outlook. Israel assassinated many other individual leaders of Hezbollah, maimed literally hundreds of its cadres, including civil cadres. Israel is the terrorist. It used the terrorist weapon of exploding pagers – maiming anyone – a child, a granny, someone in a street market – who picked up a ringing pager. What kind of moral fibre is that?
Israel brags that it “decapitated” Hamas, too. It assassinated its leaders Yahya Sinwar and his brother Mohummad Sinwar, then Saleh al-Arouri, Mohammed Deif, Rafa’a Salameh and Ismail Haniyeh.
Israel then “decapitated” Iran: Iranian leaders Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, Gholamali Rashid, Amir Ali Hajizadeh and Fereydoon Abbasi were all killed. It also decapitated civilian scientists – and killed their wives and children, too. The scientists were civilians, as obviously were their wives and children. Again, what kind of moral degradation is Israel suffering from? This is not merely illegal, it is immoral. It goes against the history of human civilization planet-wide.
The Israelis “decapitated” the leadership in the Yemen. It assassinated the Prime Minister of the Houthi Ansrallah government, Ahmed al-Rahawi and half his cabinet. Just like that.
And then, in parallel and overlapping the above incomplete list, Israel began its worst deviation from human decency, its worst betrayal of all historic traditions of how to live with other human beings. It began to assassinate the mediators. It began to use “perfidy”. “Perfidy” is not just a war crime. It is against all human conventions. It is when you intentionally set up a meeting to discuss something like peace, but it turns out to be nothing but “entrapment”. This is what “perfidy” is. It is a war crime. Look it up in the Geneva Convention.*
The point here is that President of the USA, Donald Trump, pretends that he is not an enabler of the genocide. He pretends he is neutral. So far gone is the moral compass of the USA that not only does it vaporize boats on the sea near Venezuela killing nobody-even-knows-who, but now the USA is invading its own cities. Trump has commandeered the army into attacking the people of its cities. Immigration raids are now conducted all over the USA by masked men, armed and violent. People are just kidnapped off the streets. The Government is shut down. The civil service is in ruins. The US economy is near bankrupt. And its production is out-dated and slow. And remember that Trump participated in Netanyahu’s war crime of “perfidy” against Iran, and then in another instance of perfidy against the leaders of Hamas gathering in Qatar. All this is more proof of how violent and perfidious a falling empire is. The regional power Israel that has willfully got away with bullying the Middle East is now failing, and is falling through “self-destruct” and moral collapse, just as the USA, with its aim at “full-spectrum dominance” veers into a vertiginous fall, including a total breakdown in all agreed human decency, from vaporizing international law to vaporizing the USA’s own Constitution.
And we in Raghoo Lane, just like neighbours all over the world, would never set up a meeting based on mutual confidence in order to betray this confidence and attack them. Any neighbour who did do this would be criticized and made to apologize and pay some kind of reparations. This is ordinary human morality.
The Israeli State has gone beyond the boundaries. It must eventually be held responsible. Meanwhile, the task before us is to make our Governments isolate Israel to the extent that it ends the occupation of Palestine. Israel must withdraw from the Occupied Territories. The State of Mauritius gave oral submissions in the case on Israeli Occupation. Now the State of Mauritius must make Israel respect the judgment, and respect the UN General Assembly resolution that called for the judgment to be respected. The dead-line was 18 September 2025. Israel’s occupation is now, for the first time, known to be unlawful, and it has been given one year to stop it. We must make Israel accept international law NOW!
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
* “Section 37. 1. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy.”
