Two words for what Israel intends in Gaza: Concentration Camps
Published
by
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
JVL Introduction
Israel has plans for the population of Gaza which can be summed up in two words: concentration camps. Camps like the one to which writer and lawyer Selma Dabbagh’s grandfather was assigned when arrested by the British in Jaffa in October 1937.
We are grateful for her permission to publish below her latest blog for London Review of Books.
NWI
This article was originally published by London Review of Books Blog on Wed 23 Apr 2025. Read the original here.
"You can read the writing on them"
I asked Raji Sourani of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights if it was true that Gazans can hear the difference between a British drone and other drones. ‘Hear the difference?’ he replied. ‘You can read the writing on them.’
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I dread that what this Israeli government and its backers intend isn’t constructing concentration camps, it’s the extermination of the whole population of Gaza and the West Bank.
If you look at what they’ve already done – and are now doing – then I can’t see they’ve any other aims in mind.
Leading members of the Knesset and Netanyahu`s fascist cabinet have become more and more brazen and arrogant in recent months, about gaza being subject to the “Final Solution”. Smotrich, this week, has openly bragged about levelling the whole of Gazza, forcing all Palestinians out [to where?] and annexing the West Bank. This genocide, extermination and expellation of the Palestinians, mirrors the Nazi holocaust, but with drones and American jet-launched bombs, replacing the gas chambers and their chimneys. I note today that drones attacked a Freedom flotilla ship heading to Gaza with aid, causing it to be holed beneath the waterline, in International Waters, off Malta. The Zionists haven’t yet claimed responsibility, but if they can sink the SS Liberty “by mistake”, what’s a few activists with humanitarian intents? Every morning we wake up to the live-streamed horror of yet more murders across Gazza, the West Bank, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, should give us strength to fight the Palestinian cause and oppose Western Fascism, like the International Brigades did in the Spanish Civil War. Whilst our brothers and sisters in Palestine and beyond are being massacred, we have to step up resistance and civil disobedience. All is not lost, as many of the parents, grandparents and others found strength during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War.
Palästinenser-rein [machen] (as in “Juden-rein”) is the only valid, single-word terminology for the key-objective of (political) Zionism from the word go in the 19th century.
And this evenly single as simple word, does still encapsulate on this very day the key objective of Zionism for its followers from all over the world.
Followers of Zionism, be it Zionist Jew-supremacists and/or be it Zionist Christian-supremacists.
In his (then still unpublished) diaries – different from his public statements and blue-prints on Palestine in “der Judenstaat” (*) – Herzl spoke very explicitly of :
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us.
We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side.
Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly … It goes without saying that we shall respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honour, and their freedom with the harshest means of coercion.
This is another area in which we shall set the entire world a wonderful example …
Should there be many such immovable owners in individual areas [who would not sell their property to us], we shall simply leave them there and develop our commerce in the direction of other areas which belong to us,”
Please do note, that the manipulation and deception of the public had already been built-in from the very beginning.
(*) “Der Judenstaat”, with its sub-tithe : “Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage” / “Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question”.