The Israeli government has proposed a plan to move Gaza’s civilians to a so-called humanitarian city near Rafah. Critics have outrageously labelled this proposal a ‘concentration camp’.
Comparing Israel’s emergency relocation scheme to the extermination camps of the Second World War is not just wrong, it is also a grotesque distortion of reality. The Holocaust’s concentration camps were death factories, designed to systematically murder or work people to death because of who they were.
In stark contrast, Israel’s new plan aims (however imperfectly) to protect Gaza’s civilians from ongoing fighting, with provisions for food, medical aid and security. Calling this plan a ‘concentration camp’ is not valid criticism. When people draw comparisons between Israel’s actions and Nazi genocide, such as calling these camps another Auschwitz, that is anti-Semitic demonisation.
Of course, those calling this plan a ‘concentration camp’ go beyond the usual suspects who you’d find at an anti-Israel demo. But the loudest voices certainly belong to those with axes to grind. Ehud Olmert, who invoked Holocaust imagery to condemn the proposal, is a disgraced former prime minister of Israel who served prison time for bribery. Yair Lapid, another former PM and now opposition leader, said he would rather not use the term, but if people are forbidden from leaving this camp, ‘then it is a concentration camp’.
Both men are fervent critics of the current Netanyahu government. Their rhetoric clearly aims to serve political goals – to portray the sitting leadership as morally corrupt and to rally international pressure against it. They join the ranks of the highly discredited UNRWA, whose commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini warned that the relocation plan could create ‘massive concentration camps’ and a ‘second Nakba’ of ethnic cleansing.
All these comparisons go beyond good-faith concern. They are deliberate, politicised, cheap shots equating the Jewish State’s wartime decisions with the genocide that almost destroyed the Jewish people.
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Author: Ruth King
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