New Dangers Expand from Israel-USA crimes in Palestine outwards - Genocide Blog 82
02.04.2026
A few days before my life-partner Ram Seegobin died on 28 January, I had drafted the following for the 82nd Genocide Blog: “I wait until I understand a new moment before I write up a new ‘genocide blog’. And this new moment has confounded me as it has unfurled. It is more devastating than I had dreaded.”
And now more than two months later, as I collect myself with a bit of help from my friends, my neighbours in Ragoo Lane, and my comrades in LALIT, our friends and acquaintances all over the world, I do not even know precisely what exactly I found so devastating at that moment.
So, today I draft a new “new genocide blog”, as usual with the help of friends – it is a group effort, I remind readers, that I draft personally because I am a writer I guess – but the person who used to discuss ideas before I drafted, and then read and check every one of the draft blogs up until this one is not alongside me now.
So, here goes at picking up from where we left off on 26 December, at a moment “more devastating than I had dreaded”.
I, like you, can guess that the devastation I was referring to had, in the background, the looming spectre of Trump and Netanyahu preparing for the definitive round of bombing Iran. And knowing how devastating that would be, and also knowing how prepared Iran was to retaliate against Israel and against the US military bases housed by the Gulf States so as to threaten Iran.
And all the while knowing that the genocide against the Palestinians continued by the Israeli strangulation of Gaza, the continued killing, and the hounding out of Palestinians from their West Bank and East Jerusalem homes, while torturing went on in the Israeli jails.
And it was against the background of knowing all this that I had watched the apparent signing-away of international law by Trump setting up the outlandish, dangerous “Board of Peace” in Egypt, at a ghoulish ceremony of obsequiousness and overt destruction of international law and tradition.
What an empire will not do as it fails and falls! It will “obliterate”, “rain down death and destruction,” “bomb you back to the stone age”. It will even torpedo an Iranian ship near Sri Lanka on its way home after having been the guest of India for a military exhibition. What kind of barbarism have we not seen. It is Israel and the USA against Gaza all over again, but on a huge scale. And even against Hamas, the USA and Israel did not win.
And what Trump lackeys will not say about an Emperor’s New Clothes! How handsome his hair is. How well he is commanding the war! How beautiful his ballroom plans for the White House are. And they give him “presents”. Secret ones. Oil. Huge private jets.
Both what the empire does and what its lackeys say and do are both truly devastating.
And indeed Trump set up his new bombing campaign by first organizing negotiations with Iran. This time the talks were fruitful. They were in Geneva, and through Omani leaders and, once the Iranians had again been deceived by this new American treachery, the USA and its hit-man Israel, then proceeded to drop the bombs, starting on 28 February, a month after my first lines for this Blog, on Teheran.
First they killed the Ayatollah and his family. A war crime. Or rather two war crimes. It is a war crime to assassinate the leader of another country. Killing his family and close associates around him, civilians, is another war crime. Then an hour or two later, they killed 180 people in a primary school, nearly all being little children. When those who survived the first bomb, by the way, were assembled in the prayer room, the USA dropped a second bomb. Tiny graves for over a hundred children 7-12 years old. This was a war crime, too. One of a particularly despicable nature. Words now fail us. As they have done throughout the genocide.
But, taken together, this USA-Israeli attack of another country is not just a war crime, but under international law it has, since Nuremberg, been classified as “the supreme international crime”. From this, all the other crimes flow.
Using deceit, in order to attack a country during peace negotiations, is a war crime; it is called “the crime of perfidy”.
Destroying civilian infrastructure is a war crime. The USA and Israel have bombed some 600 schools and 300 hospitals or health facilities. In all 85,000 civilian infrastructures have been damaged or destroyed. And the numbers of civilians killed in Iran is huge.
So, the genocide that the USA and Israel were perpetrating, and still are at a slower rate, is what we have again and again called “the crime of crimes” under international law. And now the same two war criminals, having been unchecked by the rest of us, have turned to a war of aggression, “the supreme crime” of international law.
The USA, the strong-arm of the tandem, has, however, along with its henchman Israel, been bravely opposed by all the resistance armies in Palestine, by the Hezbollah in the Lebanon, by the Houthis or Ansar Allah in the Yemen, the Iraqi Resistance, and now by the Iranian people and State. And also by people world-wide opposing the USA and Israel’s war of aggression in demonstrations, petitions, actions of all kinds. Israel has been beaten to a pulp already.
And the USA, relying on its military bases housed by the Gulf States, has had to retreat from its military bases altogether. The Americans from the bases were moved to hotels and camps in the different Gulf States, that were then, as they became active targets as part of a State that had become a belligerent, bombed by Iran.
Our Ramgoolam-MMM-Duval-Subron Government has simply put the Republic of Mauritius into the same subservient and dangerous place as the Gulf States. Particularly abject of the six Gulf States are Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and, most tainted of all the UAE (including its Dubai and Abu Dhabi) that have become pawns of the Israelis. Mauritius should not compete for the role of housing a US military base on our land. Mauritius should simply tell the USA and the UK to close the base down. Under international law, a country that houses the base of another country guilty of a war of aggression, the supreme crime, is itself equally guilty of this war crime.
Meanwhile, the USA’s armada has had to retreat to over 800 kilometers out into the Indian Ocean, just to avoid Iranian missiles. And yes, Iran has hypersonic missiles, which the USA hasn’t yet got.
The desperation of the USA and Israel, in this war with different war aims each, are both on the edge of a military precipice. It is humiliation for the great world supposed “super-power” and the destruction of the Israeli “invincible military” that is on the agenda right now.
And this brings the spectre of nuclear war ever closer.
So, the Mauritian Government has to be very careful. Ramgoolam and Glover have shown complicity with this terrible war USA-Israeli machine, even as it begins its total disintegration, as its empire fails.
We all know that Iran, as it promised, simple closed the Straits of Ormuz to all vessels of enemy countries (like those with military base and no clear command for the USA not to use them). This is pushing oil prices up sharply, because one-fifth of the world’s oil goes through them. Iran now takes a toll for any ship that wants to pass. This toll, which is already operational, has to be paid in Chinese Yuan, not the US Dollar.
When the Houthis again close the Straits at the mouth of the Red Sea i.e. on the way to the Suez Canal, oil prices will have another reason to rise. One-third of the world’s oil goes through that Strait, the Bab-el-Mandab. The other half of the world’s oil is the USA’s. But prices will cause the American people to turn against its Government, because so many of them have to drive a vehicle to work.
One-third of the world’s fertilizer, by the way, passes through the same Straits of Ormuz. As well as a good deal of the helium necessary for chips for the big AI revolution that the West is already making a “bubble” out of. It is not for nothing that, as early as 1977, in the Lalit de Klas monthly magazine, we were already, at the time of the Shah of Iran, talking about these Straits being a choke-point.
In Mauritius, we will need, together with all the trade unions, to come up with further strategic demands for peace and food security. And once we all agree on these, then on more immediate demands, like closing our harbours and airspace to aggressor countries and those who perpetrate genocide, as well as demands for price controls on all foods, and stricter controls over capitalists that stock food and other essentials in their warehouses.
These are extremely challenging times. We all need cool heads, warm hearts and a lot more strategic thinking.
We have to save ourselves from our capitalists and pro-capitalist leaders. We have to help save Palestine, the Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. And international law. Save what was best, and do away with the colonial part that was always there, and that is now so cruelly exposed. We are at a major point of change: from Western capitalist hegemony to a multi-nodal world. If this round is won by the USA and Israel, we will be in for dark times for yet another while. If Iran and its allies – including the people of all the countries of the globe – win, then we will have to work at reconstructing a new form of co-operation taking the best of the past with us. And if it is a draw of some kind, we will have to keep our stamina, and fight on. Knowing all the while, that mad male machos may blow up the planet, finishing off human civilization whose Western leaders never were civilized, in an all-out nuclear war.
To conclude, I have been able to keep going, despite my loss and the heaviness of my heart, not just knowing the losses of the people of Gaza, the rest of Palestine, and now the Lebanon, and Iran, too, but because of other people around me. A couple, who live next door, just the day after Ram’s funeral, came around with their new-born child. So, alongside death, is life. Our 102-year-old cousin, Didi Daneshwaree, rang on Ram’s phone a few days after Ram’s death to apologize for not being at the funeral, and to ask me to visit her. So Kisna and I went to visit her the very next day. She was, literally for well over half a century, a stalwart of Mauritius’ feisty women’s movement.
And to all those who came to the funeral, or who have phoned, written, sent WhatsApp messages, visited me, and consoled me and consoled all of us, his family, friends and comrades, for the loss of Ram, just to end by saying that it is this that has made it easier for me, and for all of us. Not that we don’t still miss Ram. But, his contribution lives on. And his sense of humour, as we recall his jokes and repartee, still makes us laugh out loud.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
