"An Operational Plan for a Crime Against Humanity."

We cannot stay silent and let this happen.

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Britannica defines a concentration camp as an “internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial.”

On a totally separate note, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has instructed the IDF to prepare a plan to move all Palestinians in Gaza into a “camp” in the south of the territory. Initially, this will only have a600,000 capacity, but it will eventually expand to house the entire 2.1 million population of Gaza, with a view of eventually “resettling” all of them in Egypt or Jordan.

Hang on…

That isn’t a camp. It’s a concentration camp.

Oh, and by the way, before the war, Gaza’s population was 2.1 million. That isn’t the case now, and citing this number is deeply misleading. Many official figures state the number of Palestinians killed from October 7th to this January at over 80,000, but these are only the dead that have been verified. Because Gaza is essentially a demolition site, many bodies are still trapped under rubble, so the death toll is likely far higher. And it’s not like Trump or Netanyahu don’t know this — when they talk about resetting the entire population of Gaza, they talk about moving 1.5 to 1.8 million people.

Okay, but why is the vast majority of the population of Gaza now homeless and living in dire conditions? Well, the IDF has used their expertly trained and highly equipped military to explicitly target Hamas and reduce civilian casualties. Oh no, sorry, they actually dropped the equivalent of over six Hiroshima bombs on Gaza… You know, a method of war renowned for minimising mass civilian casualties.

But wait, the Hiroshima atomic bomb killed 140,000, and 1940s Hiroshima was far less densely populated than present-day Gaza. Are we sure only 80,000 have died?

Anyway, the Palestinian people need to be taken care of. Surely providing them with a safe place to live isn’t a bad thing? It’s not like the IDF has a long systemic history of violence against detained Palestinians.

Aw. Shucks. The IDF has a long and highly documented history of systemic violence, including mass torture, rape and murder, against detained Palestinians. They have also repeatedly bombed refugee camps in Gaza, set up in areas they designated as “safe zones”.

This is starting to look like the kind of thing you picture when someone says concentration camp.

And before you go accusing me of antisemitism, this is a criticism of the Israeli government and Zionism, not Judaism; they are different things. In fact, conflating the two would insinuate that the wonderful Jewish people are violent maniacs, which would be pretty antisemitic. In reality, there are millions of Jews inside and outside Israel who are vehemently against these barbaric actions and are crying out for them to stop.

Michael Sfard, a leading Israeli human rights lawyer, is one of them. He told the Guardian that this camp is “an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that.” He went on to say, “When you drive someone out of their homeland, that would be a war crime in the context of a war. If it’s done on a massive scale like he [Katz] plans, it becomes a crime against humanity.” Even the UN has warned that deportation or forcible transfer of an occupied territory’s civilian population is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law and “tantamount to ethnic cleansing”.

Sadly, the UN and Sfard are a little late to the party, as many genocide scholars and organisations consider killing a vast portion of the population of an occupied and displaced people through indiscriminate carpet bombings as genocide and ethnic cleansing. But, better late than never, I suppose…

And let’s not forget history here. Dachau and Auschwitz were not created to be extermination camps. They started out as concentration camps to detain Jews, minorities and political prisoners, with plans to deport and “resettle” them away from the Third Reich down the line. But that never happened. It’s not surprising why. If you are willing to dehumanise someone to the point of putting them into an inhumane concentration camp based on their religion, race or nationality, you aren’t going to magically find the empathy to undergo the incredibly arduous task of resettling them. No, you just wait until they resist the inhumane conditions, ambiguously label the entire group as terrorists or a threat to the state, and kill them all.

It wasn’t just the Nazis that did this. The US’s treatment of the Native Americans and their “reservations” mirrors the exact same process — as did Britain’s treatment of the Aboriginal Australians and Canada’s treatment of its indigenous peoples. Each of those periods in history is now considered a horrific genocide. We know where this rhetoric and these actions lead. We have been here before, many times, and every time was one of the darkest moments in human history.

We must stop history from repeating itself yet again, not only for the suffering Palestinians but for all the people who have died from genocide. This is a pattern we must break.

Yet, despite my prime minister being a literal human rights lawyer, I could face 14 years in prison for doing just that. Palestinian Action, one of the most prominent activist groups in the UK against this genocide, has been at the forefront of protesting the UK government’s ongoing arming of Israel and capitulating to Israel’s bullying. But, after a member from the group spray-painted a military plane, an action that didn’t even damage the craft and is relatively mildn compared to the actions of other protest groups, the UK government labelled them a terrorist organisation. As such, even voicing support for them could land you a 14-year prison sentence. And that threat is not hollow — the police have arrested an 83-year-old priest for showing solidarity with the group, which basically meant she agreed with the notion that the government should stop arming Israel. As such, there is a risk this article could get me in serious trouble, because I completely agree. We need to stop arming Israel and hold Netanyahu and his thugs accountable for the crimes they have already committed and are still planning to commit. Sadly, the circumstances for protesting this genocide are no better across the channel or the Atlantic.

But what choice do we have? I can’t sit idly by while our governments enable this horror. It is crystal clear what is happening, and we must loudly call for it to end, or the blood will be on our hands too.

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Sources: BBC, The Guardian, The Guardian, Haaretz, BBC, The Guardian, The Guardian, AA, Britannica, CBC, Nature, University of Bradford, ICAN, BBC, Amnesty International, BBC, Yadvashem, BBC, BBC