Mauritius is one of the more than 50 states that is backing a case by the Palestinians asking for the International Court of Justice’s opinion on Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territories. Here is why Mauritius has lent its support and how Mauritius became a firm ally of the Palestinians at the UN.

1) The case at the ICJ

Mauritius is one of the 57 countries so far to have put in written submissions backing Palestine’s bid to get the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) to give an opinion on the continuing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. The motion to send the case to the ICJ was first brought up at the UN’s Special Political and Decolonization Committee in November 2022 where it passed by a vote of 98-17 with 52 abstentions, before being passed at the UN’s General Assembly on 30 December 2022 by a vote of 87-24 with 53 abstentions. 

The Palestinian case at the ICJ draws a clear parallel with a twin set of previous ICJ cases: an ICJ opinion in 1971 that ruled that South Africa’s occupation of Namibia was illegal and another in 2019 that ruled that the UK’s occupation of the Chagos islands was “unlawful” and demanding that London return the territory to Mauritius. “The Palestinian authorities are using the UN system to get their point across,” says Alain Ah-Vee of Lalit, which is a member of the SOMALP – a grouping of civil society organizations pressing for the Palestinian cause in Mauritius. “They followed the Chagos case closely and referred to it in a number of their statements.” 

The ICJ decision over the Chagos, Vijay Makhan, Mauritius’ former Foreign secretary argues, “is now making international jurisprudence and obviously many states will use that precedent to boost their own cases, not just Palestine but even Belize in its own territorial dispute with the UK”. Nevertheless, argues Jean Marie Richard, a longtime observer of the issue, “the ICJ advisory opinion is important because it will give its view on the persistent human rights violations and the discriminatory measures and legislation directed against the Palestinian people under occupation”. 

It’s not hard to see why Mauritius has decided to back Palestine at the ICJ. For one thing, things are getting worse with the UN stating that 2022 was the “deadliest year” for Palestinians in the occupied territories since 2006, fuelled by Israeli politics becoming increasingly right-wing and increasingly identifying itself with a violent brand of illegal Israeli settlement of the occupied Palestinian territories and increasing attacks on Palestinians themselves by the Israeli military with no diplomatic end in sight. 

On 3 July, when Israel unleashed a ferocious attack on the Jenin refugee camp, Foreign minister Alan Ganoo made a statement in parliament on 11 July stating that the Mauritian government “unreservedly condemns such acts of violence.Mauritius has consistently reiterated its support to the two-state solution with Israel and Palestine existing side by side and has called for renewed international efforts in accordance with all the relevant United Nations Resolutions”.

2) Turning from Tel Aviv

The roots of Mauritian support for Palestine go back to the 1970s and paradoxically had less to do with what was happening in the Middle East than Mauritius’ ambitions in Africa. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel attempted to break out of its diplomatic isolation by reaching out to African states. In return for diplomatic support, Tel Aviv offered development and agricultural technology (just as today it offers arms, surveillance and cyber tech). By the 1960s, more than 1,800 Israeli experts were involved in development projects on the African continent and by 1972, Tel Aviv boasted of more African embassies than the UK. 

Things soon soured. The 1967 war with Egypt that ended up with Israeli occupation of the Sinai transformed Tel Aviv from a development partner into an occupier of territory of one of the founding members of the Organization of African Unity (OAU – the precursor to today’s African Union). The 1973 Yom Kippur war with Egypt only further buried Tel Aviv diplomatically on the continent, leaving Israel with ties to just four states in Africa: Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mauritius. Israel had to watch as a 1975 OAU session in Kampala branded its founding ideology, Zionism, as a form of racism. 

This plunged Mauritius into a quandary: at a November 1973 session of parliament, thenPrime Minister Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam clarified the Mauritian position which “called upon Israel to withdraw from territories occupied by force” while refusing to break relations with Tel Aviv. But with Ramgoolam looking to boost ties with Africa and becoming the chairman of the OAU, Mauritius realistically calculated that maintaining an awkward relationship with Tel Aviv that did not bring much benefit either politically or economically was simply not worth jeopardizing ties on the continent. And so in 1976, Mauritius broke off diplomatic relations with Israel until the Oslo Accords in 1993. 

But ditching Israel did not yet mean embracing Palestine. While it had no official relations with Tel Aviv, Mauritius was still hesitant about taking up positions against it at the UN. When Egypt and Israel signed a peace deal in 1978, Mauritius instructed its diplomats not to support any UN resolution condemning either Egypt, Israel or their peace deal which was opposed by the Palestinians and much of the Middle East and Africa. What was holding Mauritius back was a twin set of considerations; firstly says Makhan: “there was the geopolitics of the period where Mauritius had put itself into the camp of the West” and secondly, Mauritius just could not afford to punch that much over its head. “Things were really difficult then, we were in a dire economic situation and needed economic aid,” Makhan points out. Embracing the Palestinians openly and potentially angering the Americans who were already warning of “Mauritian flirtations” with the Palestinians could complicate the flow of much-needed economic aid from the West or from the IMF. 

And so, when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) finally came knocking in 1979 to establish official relations and be allowed to set up a presence in Mauritius – just as it had at the time in neighbouring Madagascar –, the reaction from Mauritius was to drag its feet and delay official recognition for as long as it could.

3) The embrace

The real embrace of the Palestinian cause by the Mauritian state internationally was not to come until a change in government in 1982. And it had a lot to do with the MMM, which in the 1970s and 1980s was rather peculiar as far as traditionally insular Mauritian political parties go. “Right from the start, the MMM was the single party that had an outspoken view on international relations and championed international causes,” insists Makhan. “And so right from when it entered parliament in 1976, it started bringing up questions not just about Palestine but about East Timor, Papua New Guinea and the Western Sahara as well. At its party congresses, we would either have delegates from Palestine attend or send messages.” 

When the MMM found itself in a short-lived government with the PSM in 1982, one of the initial steps it took was to officially recognize a host of organisations such as the PLO, the African National Congress and the Southwest African People’s Organization. The PLO now found itself welcome in Mauritius and Port Louis could now take more forceful stands at multilateral settings, such as the UN, the Non-Aligned Movement or the OAU. “After this decision, I went to interview Gaetan Duval on behalf of the RFI,” recalls Richard, “and his reaction was simply ‘they are looking for trouble.’” 

One thing the brief nine-month-long MMM-PSM government managed to do was set the stage for a consensus in Mauritian foreign policy when it came to Palestine. “It was continued after another government came in in 1983. Mauritius’ espousal of the two-state solution has never changed since then,” Makhan points out, even when Mauritius re-established ties with Tel Aviv in 1993 following the Oslo accords. In 2009, it briefly suspended ties once again over the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians. In November 2012, Mauritius backed Palestine’s admission into the UN as a ‘non-member observer state’ and since 2015, had voted in favour of Palestine on no less than 137 resolutions put forward within the UN system and its agencies. 

But there is a limit to Port Louis’ engagement on Palestine. “Mauritian support for the Palestinians has always remained at the state and institutional level within the UN,” says Ah Vee. “For example, Mauritius has never taken a clear position on boycott, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel while at the same time Mauritius remains vulnerable to Israeli promises of investments in things like cyber security and IT.” 

For Richard, this stems from two things: first the limited interactions between Mauritius and Palestine when it comes to things like trade or people to people contacts, and misunderstandings within Mauritius about what the Palestine issue is all about. “Most politicians and people look at it as a religious rather than a national conflict about human rights. There is a total ignorance about the nature and history of the conflict.” He suggests that the time has come for the Mauritian foreign policy establishment to focus on the Middle East as well with political parties returning to the practice of having clear stands on international issues and proposing what they plan to do about them to voters as part of their election pitch.

4) Why Mauritius won’t change its mind?

But just because there are barriers to popular identification with Palestine within the general Mauritian public, that does not mean that the Mauritian state will be changing its stands at the UN anytime soon. For one thing, the parallels between the Chagos and Palestine are too uncomfortable for Mauritius to ignore. When the Chagossians in Mauritius began protesting in the late 1970s and 1980s, “they referred to themselves as the Palestinians of the Indian Ocean,” Richard recalls. It is a parallel that Mauritian diplomats arguing in the UN themselves draw. If anything, Palestine is worse: “The scale of the tragedy is much bigger with Palestinians still scattered in camps in the occupied territories, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt without any compensation, right of return and those in Palestine still subjected to a quasi-apartheid regime and an ongoing system of constructing illegal settlements to modify the demographics of those territories,” says Richard. While Mauritius’ Chagos fight is about righting past wrongs, such as the excision of the islands from Mauritius or the expulsion of the Chagossians, the ICJ case brought by Palestine is about their treatment under an ongoing occupation. 

And Mauritius is also familiar with the tactics being used; Tel Aviv does not want to internationalize the Palestine issue through the UN just as London did not want the Chagos to appear at the UN, and just as London ignored the 2019 ICJ judgement and a UNGA resolution demanding that London vacate the Chagos, Tel Aviv has a storied history of ignoring UN resolutions and a 2004 ICJ decision that criticized a wall constructed by Tel Aviv to ring the occupied Palestinian territories and East Jerusalem. But most importantly, Africa and organizations such as the AU (where Palestine gained observer status in 2002), that were the reason for Mauritius to snub Tel Aviv and eventually end up backing the Palestinians in the first place, remain largely immune to approaches by Tel Aviv to ditch their traditional pro-Palestine stance. In February this year, an Israeli delegate was ejected from an AU summit causing a fresh diplomatic row with Israel. “Many of these states remember apartheid and see a similarity of histories between them and the Palestinians,” says Makhan. “All of this is why when called to be counted, Mauritius will still stand up.”