In an opinion piece just published on its website, leftist party Lalit has called Israel’s actions in Gaza as amounting to genocide, calling for an immediate ceasefire, along with an end to the siege and negotiations.

According to Al-Arabiya newspaper, at least 5,087 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since October 7, including 2,055 children, Gaza’s health ministry said on Monday, adding that 15,273 were wounded.

The ministry said 436 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes in the past 24 hours, including 182 children, with most of the fatalities in the southern Gaza Strip.

Lalit also hit at the international community, particularly the USA, for supporting Israel, while highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people.

It emphasizes the need for global action and outlines a 10-point plan, including calls for a UN protection for Palestinians, an arms embargo on Israel, and the suspension of diplomatic and commercial relations between Mauritius and Israel.

Additionally, it has advocated for the closure of the US military base on Diego Garcia and outlines various demands, such as dismantling illegal settler colonies and ensuring the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The passage urges for an end to Israeli apartheid and the occupation and siege of Palestine.

NewsMoris hereunder reproduces this insightful piece by Lalit Mauritius on its website.

UNDERSTANDING THE ISRAELI GENOCIDE ON GAZA AND ITS USA BACKING

Today, we are witnessing the Israeli State committing genocide in Gaza. We, in LALIT, recognize it as genocide and condemn it outright. The Israeli scholar, Raz Segal, has written an outstanding article that shows in what precise way the Israeli military action in Gaza is “genocide”. It was published on 13 October in Jewish Currents.

We, in LALIT, call for an immediate ceasefire and for an end to the siege. Israel must let in supplies of food, water, electricity at once. 

This way negotiations can begin.

It is not just a “war”. There are not two sides that are comparable. One is a state, a nuclear state, with $3.8 billion annual military aid from the USA. Whereas Gaza is 2.3 million people, more than half children, living ordinary lives and without a government at all. Living under occupation and siege.

To understand where this terrible situation for the Palestinians began, we need to look long before 7 October, the day Hamas broke the defenses of the Israeli Army. 

When colonialism was at its height, Mauritius still a British colony, Britain ruled Palestine as a kind of colony, too. Its “Balfour Declaration” of 1917 promised Zionists they could settle in the British colony of Palestine.

The British official declared this  as if Palestine were a land without a people. This colonial mind-set has remained until today – not just in Britain, but now in the USA and much of the European union.  Any opposition to Israel is generally branded “barbarism”, while the real barbarism remains the old colonization, itself.

This “Balfour Declaration” caused a slow immigration of Jewish people over the next years to settle there. Everything remained, however, much as it had always been: Palestinians of many cultures living side by side in thriving cities, towns and villages in what was basically a British colony. 

Before that, Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire. During World War I this Empire was carved up, giving Britain control, inter alia, over Palestine, as a “mandate”. All this to say Palestine’s colonization never ended. It just metamorphosed instead. It changed its nature at the very time other countries like India, and Pakistan, were getting their independence. 

Let us first, however, turn to another aspect of the West’s history that had worsened just prior to this.

Each country in “Europe” had had an internal communalo-religious problem of anti-Semitism – from the Spanish inquisition in the South to the Russian pogroms in the North; from prejudice in Britain in the West, and even across the Atlantic to the USA and Canada, to discrimination in Eastern countries of Europe.

This was over centuries. But the worst, by far, of all this anti-Semitism was in its truly hideous form in Nazi Germany’s fascism in the 1930’s, and on to the Holocaust, itself during World War II.

This crime against humanity was perpetrated in German-controlled areas, too, from Poland to the Ukraine, from France to Austria. 

In Mauritius, the British Colonial State, when faced with a boat-load of Jewish refugee families fleeing persecution, chose not to let them settle here. Instead it chose to imprison them in the Beau Bassin Prison.     

Instead of resolving the internal problem of anti-Semitism, Europe and the West got the United Nations, on its foundation, to set up the State of Israel. The West effectively exported its internal problem of anti-Semitism.

This, in turn, turned out to mean the partition of Palestine – one half for the new Israeli Jewish State, the other to continue as a Palestinian secular state. This partition was never respected by the Israeli state. 

On the contrary, at the declaration of the creation of the state of Israel as a Jewish State in 1948, Zionist terrorists forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in what was called the Nakba, or great catastrophe. The Zionist militia used sheer terror. 

The present bombing of Gaza by the Israeli army is like a modern repeat of the 1948 terror campaign. Today it is the Israeli state trying to get Palestinians to flee in their millions, believing, once again, that it is just for a few days. 

All this to say that, even before the recent flare-up following the 7 October Hamas-led breach of the Israeli wall around Gaza and attack on Israeli military installations and the killing of civilians, over two-thirds of people living in Gaza were already refugees. Some 6,000,000 Palestinians are refugees in neighbouring countries, like Jordan, Syria and the Lebanon.   

Since 1948, the Israeli State has encouraged colonization by Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. Today, Palestinians live not in “their State” originally partitioned by colonial powers, but in ever-smaller enclaves, under a reign worse than South African Apartheid: worse because the aim of the Israeli State, announced by the Netanyahu government, is to banish all Palestinians.

The language itself if genocidal: “get rid of”, “finish”, and “eradicate”. They say they aim at just “Hamas”, but they attack all Gazans. Hamas is a political party, mainstream in Palestine. By the USA and Israel calling it “terrorist” does not change this.

So, this conflation means that we have seen, and are still seeing, a slow, strangling of the whole of the people of Gaza, and indeed of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well, with acceleration in 1948 and the 1967 war and now, again, in this 2023 atrocity. 

The Palestinians live in three different kinds of daily life from before the present genocide crisis. 

In the West Bank, they live in daily terror of the occupying Israeli Army and armed settlers that steal their land and shoot them, while their “Government”, the Palestine Liberation Organization, has been driven by Israel into collapse and open collaboration with the occupying Israeli Army. 

In East Jerusalem, Palestinians live as second-class Israeli citizens, losing their land daily. 

In Gaza, Palestinians have lived for 17 years, under a state of siege with Israel Army controlling all its borders. Living in Gaza has meant living in a cage. And now being starved out and bombed at once. This is what is “the textbook case of genocide”, to quote Raz Segal, once again. 

The Israeli military apparatus is now totally supported by the USA. Just as with part of Mauritius, Diego Garcia, the British have effectively “handed over” colonial rule to the USA. All along, the West has used Israel to guard its own sources of fossil fuels. It has also become the main recipient of military contracts that the USA State also subsidizes well-nigh completely.

That is why it is President Biden that bank-rolls the entire Israeli army. It bank-rolls it, even as this Israeli army commits the war crimes of Apartheid, collective punishment, and genocide. 

The Palestinians have for decades opposed this colonization.  The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) tried co-operating with the West, and even with Israel. The occupation and the exactions continued. And continue even today, as Gaza is strangled and bombed, starved and bombarded. Colonization just went on and on. Just goes on and on. 

Two Intifadas have seen little children in T-shirts throwing stones at Israeli tanks and being arrested for it. Little Davids against the huge Israeli Goliaths. There are 5,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. Of these 5,000 there are 1,200 held in “administrative detention” another name for “kidnapped and kept hostage”. Another 800 to 1,000 Palestinians have been kidnapped this way in the West Bank since 7 October.

Presaging the Hamas breach of the Israeli wall on 7 October, in the 2018-19 a popular movement called the “Great March of Return”, we saw tens of thousands of Gazans marching, broad masses of the people, towards this Israeli wall, the most impenetrable wall in all history. They did not get through into the land that used to be the land of their grannies and granddads. They were met instead with Israeli teargas, sound bombs and bullets. 

The Hamas-led incursion of 7 October breached the wall. 

It did so in 24 places. 

Their intention, a New Yorker interview with a Hamas political leader informs us, was to attack the military bases behind the wall, and then take hostages. The aim: to show that 2.3 million Gazans are Israeli hostages.

The Israeli army seems to have, however, been easily overwhelmed. It simply scattered. 

Hamas soldiers took more some 200 hostages, who they hold in Gaza – as indeed the whole of the population of Gaza is held hostage. 

Some Hamas men, or others not in Hamas who got through the breached wall – then killed civilians, as we know from the TV, and as everyone has denounced. Killing civilians is a war crime. It should at all costs be avoided.

The Israeli State responded by tightening the siege on Gaza – as if we are still in the Dark Ages – and cutting off water, food, and electricity from all the people, while dropping bombs by the thousand upon civilians, and killing already over 1,000 children in Gaza. What kind of State would do that? The aim is to either inflict a second Nakba, forcing people to flee their homes never to return, or to literally exterminate them in genocide. 

What kind of State would continue to supply arms to that State? Even as it starves 2.3 million people to death? Even as it gives orders to everyone, say, living in Port Louis and the north to evacuate below the GRNW? And then bomb them when they get across the River? What kind of leader is President Joe Biden to supply arms for this?

The bombing of the Baptist Hospital run by the Anglican Church in Gaza – most likely by the Israeli state that always tells lies, as does the US state about their own civilian massacres – is the cruelest outrage we have yet seen. It ought not to shock people: the Israeli state openly gave formal warnings for hospitals in Gaza to be evacuated before the bombing. Why? To bomb them. On the same day, the Israeli army bombed a UN School? So, why do they then deny it?  Because the bombing of the hospital was so grotesque that it exposes Israel’s genocide for what it is: genocide. Anyway, the next day, to prove its bad faith, Israel warned the biggest hospital in Gaza to evacuate in preparation for bombardment. The cynicism defies words.

Israel has gone over the red line ever since 1948. But starving 2.2 million people, while bombing them, while holding them in a siege, is beyond all previous red lines. It is now genocide.

Not only does Israel refuse a ceasefire, it refuses to let food and water in, even as it bombs. For days, the USA has pretended they are organizing food, but food is not enough, we need a ceasefire. A ceasefire and food and water and electricity. 

Worse in a way than Israel is the USA. This country – alone in the whole world – has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution for even something as minimally kind as an “humanitarian pause” – whatever that is. It was supposed to be a “ceasefire”, which everyone knows the meaning of, but the USA did not agree. So they watered it down. The US vetoed it. In any case. 

The UN system is only as strong as the countries that make it up. The USA is one of the five countries that can veto a resolution, and it has done so. We need to blame Biden.

It is also a time of all dangers. The conflict may cause a regional or an international conflagration

Biden has a right wing, like Netanyahu has, that is ready for a war on Iran. The USA and Israel may not find the timing propitious when they are trying to free hostages in Gaza, and when the West Bank is in rebellion supporting Gaza, and when demonstrations are being held world-wide against Israel. But remember the USA is run by what President Eisenhower warned of: “the military industrial complex”. This is a tightly organized union of Pentagon bosses, arms factory owners, military contractors, 800 foreign military base economies, including our Diego Garcia that runs many of the elected Congressmen as well as the White House. 

The situation on the Lebanese border with Israel has been fraught since 1967. The Lebanese Hezbollah is well armed and influential, though Lebanon is in economic and political crisis. The Syrian border with Israel is unstable, what with the Israeli State still occupying the Golan Heights.  

Iran is, of course, a major power, and is close both to the Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran is, as we all know, suffering crippling USA sanctions. The attempt by Obama to regularize relations was totally ruined by the Donald Trump presidency. Trump rescinded the Joint Comprehensive Nuclear Agreement – unilaterally – even though it was a multi-lateral treaty. Europe no longer has an independent position. Its countries are all subservient to the USA, well-nigh US colonies bristling with US and NATO bases.  

We must also remember that the Israeli state has dozens of atomic bombs, ready and waiting. The USA pretends that this known fact is not true. It lives this lie so that it can continue to give Israel military aid. In addition, the USA is the only power in the world ever to have dropped an atomic bomb. It dropped not one but two. And it dropped them on civilian cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   

So, we cannot talk lightly about a war, regional or worldwide. It threatens the end of the world.

The Mauritian Government has brought out two communiqués – the second of which clearly, and rightly, calls for a ceasefire. In LALIT, we think that the Prime Minister himself should take a stand in public and call loudly for a ceasefire and for food and water and electricity to be renewed. He should suspend all diplomatic and relations and other ties with Israel. Gone should be the contracts for electricity or water.

Gone should be the prison surveillance contracts. Gone all the export of primates. Gone all imports and exports from Israel. Instead the Prime Minister should work in the African union for a united opposition to Israel’s genocide.  

It is important for us to remember to attack the State of Israel, and not “les Israeliens” as a people. You will notice that, in LALIT, we began this article with a quote from an Israeli, an academic living in the USA, because his analysis of the Israeli State’s genocide is so true. LALIT has had two members who have been to live in Palestine on three occasions to participate in daily actions defending Palestinians against the Israeli Defense Force and armed settlers. 

Alongside them were also Israelis doing the same kind of support work alongside Palestinians. One of our members tried to enter Gaza, but there were no crossings open. That was over 10 years ago. We need to blame the State of Israel and its arms supplier, the USA, for all of this. 

One way to help the Palestinian people, in the long term, is to get the USA’s military base on Diego Garcia closed down. 

Urgent Action required

LALIT proposes an emergency 10-Point Plan:

1. We call for an immediate ceasefire.

2. We call for an immediate lifting of the siege to allow humanitarian aid in at once. 

3. We call for United Nations protection for Palestinians in Gaza now!

Moving forward, here are the stands that need to be taken by all of our organizations in Mauritius:

4. We call for opening of negotiations for a prisoner exchange.

5. We demand a total arms embargo on Israel, and the whole of the Middle East.

6. We call for the Mauritian Government to suspend all diplomatic and commercial relations between Mauritius and Israel, as mentioned, and the beginning of an African union initiative to isolate Israel from Africa. This should continue until these demands are all met.

7. A call for the total dismantling of all illegal settler colonies in Palestine.

8. An immediate end to Israeli Apartheid, just as there was an end to South African Apartheid, and equal rights for all the people living under Israeli Occupation. Apartheid is a war crime.

9. The right of return of all Palestinian Refugees. 

10. An end to Israeli occupation and siege.

LALIT 

Original article at: Lalit Mauritius