This “Gaza Concentration Camp” page documents the opinions of expert observers who correctly apply the descriptive “Gaza Concentration Camp” and like descriptives such as "blockaded Gaza", "siege on Gaza" and "open air prison" to the Gaza Strip that is surrounded and cruelly blockaded by war criminal, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and grossly human rights–abusing Apartheid Israel and by similarly war criminal, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and grossly human rights–abusing Fascist Egypt.
To put the Gaza Concentration Camp into the wider context of the genocidal crimes of Apartheid Israel below is a 2017 update on Israeli Apartheid and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide:
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) and National Population Committee. The International Population Day 11/07/2017: “The Estimated Population of Palestine by mid-2017 was about 4.95 Million. Based on estimates prepared by PCBS according to the results of the Population, Housing and Establishments Census of 2007, the total population of Palestine by mid-2017 was about 4.95 million; 2.52 million males and 2.43 million females. The estimated population of West Bank was 3.01 million of which 1.53 million males and 1.48 million females, while the estimated population of Gaza Strip totaled 1.94 million of which 988 thousand males and 956 thousand females”.
The population of Apartheid Israel proper in 2017 was 8.7 million, this comprising 6.6 million Jews, 1.8 million Indigenous Palestinians and 0.4 million non-Jews and non-Arabs (see “Vital statistics: latest population statistics for Israel”, Jewish Virtual Library: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/latest-population-statistics-for-israel ).
Thus the total Palestinian population of 6.8 million in Greater Apartheid Israel is 6.8 million x 100/13.7 million = 50% of the population of Greater Apartheid Israel, but 5.0 million Occupied Palestinians or 74% of the Palestinian subjects of neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel are excluded by the neo-Nazi Zionists from voting for the government ruling them.
The GDP per capita is US$2,800 for Occupied Palestinians as compared to US$39,000 for Apartheid Israel and Apartheid Israel deliberately kills about 5,000 Occupied Palestinians each year, 10% through violence and 90% through imposed deprivation. About 90% of the land of Palestine has now been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinians by nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel in a Nazi-style process involving invasion, occupation, gross mendacity, racism, intimidation, gross human rights abuse, mass abuse of women, mass child abuse, blackmail, ethnic cleansing, theft, illegality, torture, violence, killing, home destruction, land seizure, concentration camps, ghettoes, highly abusive military rule, and Jews-only segregation in gross violation of International Law, the UN Genocide Convention, the Geneva Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the UN Charter, numerous International Court of Justice decisions, General Assembly motions and Resolution 2334 of the UN Security Council that was passed unanimously except for US abstention (see Gideon Polya, “End 50 years of genocidal Occupation & human rights abuse by US-backed Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 9 June 2017: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/06/09/end-50-years-of-genocidal-occupation-human-rights-abuse-by-us-backed-apartheid-israel/ ).
ABDEL-FATTAH. Randa Abdel-Fattah (Muslim Palestinian Australian lawyer, sociologist, academic, writer, author and activist): “After seventy years, I'm done trying to persuade people of our cause. It needs no defence, no humanisation, no legitimising. My words are no longer an argument. We won the argument at Deir Yassin, in the UNRWA refugee camps, in the buried villages, stateless generations, the billions of Western dollars cashing up what the UN, South African diplomats and former anti-apartheid activists - including Jews - have described as an "apartheid state," the live bullets at protestors in Gaza… They kill Palestinians with bullets, missiles and bombs. But they kill many more slowly, quietly, without a trace. What is the hashtag for death by occupation?... We start to speak, to write, and we do not know when or how to stop because it is unending. The Nakba is not an anniversary, it is repeated every day across the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, the refugee camps, in the diaspora. Seventy years of bearing witness. Seventy years of millions of testimonies. We write and we speak because it is all we have left” and “I think it’s important to put this into context if we’re really to make sense of this conflict. They are protesting a brutal siege. They are an open-air prison – the largest concentration camp in the world, as it has been described by a prominent Israeli sociologist. They are about 1.8 million people in a size of about 355 square kilometres. There’s about 41km by 10-12km. They have a blockade for the last 11 years. Israel described it as economic warfare, where they were calculating the number of calories that Palestinians could live under, just short of starvation. They have a population of 75% under the age of 25. 51% of those are children. 97% of the water is poisonous. It is undrinkable. And why is that? Because Israel denied them a water desalination plant and bombed their water treatment facility in the 2008 and 2009 siege. It is an area that is trying to send a message to the world that, after 11 years of being besieged, of being traumatised, of having no sense of dignity or hope and being trapped – they’re not even allowed to leave – they’re trying to tell the world, “Wake up. It’s been 11 years now. What more do we have to do for you to take notice?” And they did it in a non-violent protest. And what were they met with? … They were met with live fire by snipers… What would you have the Palestinians do? They... What broke me about this protest is not that they were resisting Israel. It’s not that they were sending a message to Israel. They were sending a message to the world. “This is our cage. We’re rattling this cage. Help us, because we are besieged and no-one is coming to our aid.” So that’s what, for me, is the message here. Listen to Palestinians.” (Randa Abdel-Fattah, “Living the Nakba: testimonies of trauma, loss, rage and hope”, ABC, 10 May 2018: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/05/10/4841570.htm ; ABC Q&A, “Weddings, Gaza and losing faith”, 21 May 2018: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s4831058.htm .)
AKLEH. Elias Akleh (a US Arab writer of Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit-Jala; his family was first evicted from Haifa after the "Nakba" of 1948, then from Beit-Jala after the "Nakseh" of 1967) (2014): “Israel is at it again. Israel is executing a new phase of its genocidal strategy against Palestinians. Israel’s military genocidal “Operation Protective Edge” is its third major and the most intensified military onslaught, after 2008/09 and 2012 onslaughts, against the largest ever 1.8 million densely populated open air concentration prison camp of the Gaza Strip; Israel’s new-weapons test field, whose population have been starved and bombarded throughout the last seven years” (see Elias Akleh, “The systematic Palestinian Genocide”, MWC News, 23 July 2014: http://mwcnews.net/focus/editorial/43660-systematic-palestinian-genocide.html ).
AL-ASHI. Basman al-Ashi, executive director of the Gaza Wafa Hospital shelled by Israelis in the 2014 Gaza Massacre and thence evacuated ) (2014): “It's a very natural response for the Palestinians to respond, to defend themselves… [Israel has made] a concentration camp of 1.8 million people. .No air. No land. No sea. You're trying to tell the people what? I'm putting you in prison and I want you to obey, eat, sleep and that's it. We're human" (see Basman al-Ashi qioted in Paul Adams, “Hoispital on Gaza conflict’s front line:, BBC News, 18 July 2014: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28380923 .)
AMAYREH, Khalid (a Palestinian journalist and author based in Dura, near Hebron, Palestine) (2007): “In 1940, several months after invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis forced about 500,000 Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto, surrounding it with a high wall. Tens of thousands died from hunger and disease. Eventually, 300,000 were sent to death camps, mainly Treblinka in eastern Poland. Similarly, Israel is now incarcerating nearly a million and a half helpless Palestinians in the Gaza Strip into a hell similar in nature to the Warsaw Ghetto. The Gaza concentration camp is not only fitted with a wall, but also with every conceivable tool of repression, such as electric fences and watch towers manned by Gestapo-like trigger-happy Jewish soldiers who shoot first and ask questions later. Moreover, thousands of Israeli soldiers, are surrounding Gaza in a hermetic manner, shooting and killing any Palestinian trying to escape, e.g. enter Israel to search for work or even food. Palestinian kids survive on bread and tea. Even Palestinian kids playing soccer near the hateful fences, are routinely riddled with bullets or reduced into pieces of human flesh by the “most moral army in the world.” As a result of these genocidal designs, Gazans in the thousands are dying of malnutrition and illness resulting from anemia. Moreover, Children in great numbers are surviving on a meager and totally inadequate diet consisting mainly of bread and tea” (Khalid Amayreh, “Gaza: the Auschwitz of our time. Largest detention camp in the world”, Global Research, 9 August 2007: https://www.globalresearch.ca/gaza-the-auschwitz-of-our-time/6509 ).
BARRETT. Kevin Barrett on the Gaza Concentration Camp (2014): “The Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip has crippled Gaza’s main power plant for more than a month - and it’s getting worse. The power outage has wrecked Gaza’s waste water treatment system and flooded the streets with raw sewage… becoming an extermination camp” (Press TV, “Israel turning Gaza into concentration camp: Analyst ”, 16 July 2014: http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/12/04/338244/israel-made-concentration-camp-of-gaza/ ).
BIBLEBELIEVERS. Biblebelievers: "Nowhere else in the world is there anything of this kind. When the White South African government drew up "Apartheid" plans in the 1970s, a pattern existed already in the Israeli occupied territories -- and those "Bantustans" are now gone. Beyond the maps, the Israelis enforce a regime of colored and computerized passes that restrict where Palestinians can go, different color license plates for Jews and Arabs have a similar result, "by-pass" roads for "Jews only", land confiscations, home destructions, settlements, all on top of a deceptive and complicated systems of apartheid-type laws that create systematic separation while promoting Jewish interests and severely repressing and dispossessing Palestinians. The changes agreed to recently in the "Wye Memorandum" do not alter these overall conditions and are hedged with so many Israeli restrictions that the situation for Palestinians is likely to worsen.
The majority of Palestinians are essentially imprisoned in a large Gaza Ghetto from which they are unable to leave and which is now surrounded by a barbed wire, electrified fence. Most others are now bottled up in one of the "autonomous" population centers, all of which are surrounded by Israeli check-points and roadblocks. Millions more Palestinians continue to live in dozens of refugee camps in neighboring countries or in diaspora" (see Map illustrating Gaza Ghetto and West bank "Bantustans": http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/maps1.htm ).
BOOTH. Lauren Booth (British left-wing activist and sister-in-law of British war criminal and mass murderer PM Tony Blair) described Gaza in 2008 as “the largest concentration camp in the world today” (see “Blair sister-in-law: Gaza world’s largest concentration camp”, YNet News, 9 November 2008: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3595097,00.html ).
Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of Tony Blair, interviewed on Iran's Press TV by British MP George Galloway, both stating that Gaza is a concentration camp (2008): “[George Galloway]: "Why are they keeping you cooped up in the concentration camp called Gaza?" … [Lauren Booth]: “I want to say thank you for using the word concentration camp because the word prison has been applied in the last few years and that's a lie. In a prison you get three meals a day, a nourishing diet, visits from outsiders and some hobbies and rehabilitation and a date for your release” (see Jonny Paul, “”Booth: Gaza a massive concentration camp”, The Jerusalem Post, 17 September 2008: http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Booth-Gaza-a-massive-concentration-camp ).
Lauren Booth (anti-racist British activist and sister-in-law of war criminal UK PM and Quartet envoy to the Middle East, Tony Blair; she was stuck in Gaza, unable to exit via Apartheid Israel or Egypt, after arriving there on a blockade-busying boat) (2008): “[Gaza is] the largest concentration camp in the world today. I was startled the Israelis agreed to this. There is no right to punish people this way. There is no justification for this kind of collective punishment. You were in the concentration camps, and I can’t believe that you are allowing the creation of such a camp yourselves. The Palestinians’ suffering is physical, mental and emotional," she went on, "there is not a family here in which someone is not in desperate need of work, shelter or food. This is a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Darfur. One Western person is stuck in Gaza and the media turns it into a huge story. A million and a half people are stuck in Gaza, and it's a non-story. I am telling you, what is going on here is a tragedy. Whatever is being done, it's not enough” (Noa Raz, “Blair sister-in-law: Gaza world’s largest concentration camp”, Ynet News, 11 September 2008: https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3595097,00.html ).
BUCHANAN. Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan (an important conservative US political commentator, author, columnist, political candidate, broadcaster, a senior advisor to American presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, and formerly a host on CNN’s Crossfire) on what the Catholic Church has described as a “concentration camp” (2009): ““And they [Gaza rockets] triggered a blitzkrieg against the Palestinians in Gaza, which in my judgment is an Israeli concentration camp where a million and a half people are locked up.” ( see partial transcript from a Pat Buchanan interview video, “Pat Buchanan: Israel turning Gaza into a “concentration camp””, Prison Planet, 9 January 2009: http://www.prisonplanet.com/pat-buchanan-israel-turning-gaza-into-a-%E2%80%98concentration-camp%E2%80%99.html ) .
CAMERON. David Cameron (Conservative PM of the UK) on Gaza as a “prison camp” (2010): “The situation in Gaza has to change. Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp” (see David Cameron quoted in Nicholas Watt and Harriet Sherwood, “David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a “prison camp””, The Guardian, 27 July 2010: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jul/27/david-cameron-gaza-prison-camp .
CANTAROW. Ellen Cantarow (a widely-published Boston-based journalist who first wrote from Israel and the West Bank in 1979) (2009)“Gaza is a concentration camp” (Ellen Cantarow, “Gaza is a concetration camp”, AlterNet, 15 January 2009: http://www.alternet.org/story/120197/gaza_is_a_concentration_camp ).
CHOMSKY. Professor Noam Chomsky (outstanding anti-racist Jewish American linguistics scholar at the prestigious, 83-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)) re Gaza Concentration Camp a “huge prison”(2006) : “If there's a conflict going on, aside physical war, not in a military conflict going on, abduction -- if soldiers are captured, they are to be treated humanely. But it is not a crime at the level of capture of civilians and bringing them across the border into your own country. That's a serious crime. And that's the one that's not reported. And, in fact, remember that -- I mean, I don't have to tell you that there are constant attacks going on in Gaza, which is basically a prison, huge prison, under constant attack all the time: economic strangulation, military attack, assassinations, and so on. In comparison with that, abduction of a soldier, whatever one thinks about it, doesn't rank high in the scale of atrocities” (see Professor Noam Chomsky interviewed by Amy Goodman, Conn Hallinan, “Israel/Palestine”, ZNet, 15 July 2006: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/3566 ).
EFFARAH, Jamil (Dr Jamil Effarah is a Haifa-born Palestinian American and author of “Think Palestine: To Unlock U.S.-Israelis & Arab Conflicts”) (2006): “Some 20 percent of Israel is remnants of the original Palestinian inhabitants [after the 1948 mass expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians], some 1.6 million persons. They are second class citizens in many ways. But the some 4 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestine are the real obstacle before the Zionists realizing their goal to create a Jewish state for the Jews only. In the West Bank, Palestinians live under Israeli military rule; there are a few civil institutions, but all of these can be over-ruled by the whim of the Australian army. Palestinians do not control their land, water or air. In Gaza, the Israelis have put them under siege, including the children and non-combatants in general. They aren’t allowed to export virtually anything they prodoivce. They have no port or airport (both bombed by Israel). They suffer from massive unemployment and even malnutrition. The Israelis have placed the Palestinians of Gaza in a huge open-air concentration camp with American and European help” (Jamil Effarah, “Think Palestine: To Unlock U.S.-Israelis & Arab Conflicts”, AuthroiHouse.com, 2006).
EID. Haidar Eid (an associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza) (2014): “Gaza has become a permanent war zone; the biggest concentration camp on earth has become a burial site - a noisy graveyard. The Palestinian body has become the ultimate target of the Israeli bullet - the younger the better! The Palestinian body has, in other words, become the site of (in) justice: eliminate the body, and it will leave a vacuum that can be occupied - a land without people for people without land. The Palestinian people have long realised that the so-called "peace process" does not challenge or change the long-held status quo, nor will it allow them to exercise their national and political rights. Right or left, the Israeli position is crystal clear: No return to the borders of June 4, 1967, No dismantling of Jewish settlements, No return of Palestinian refugees, no backing down on Jerusalem as the undivided, eternal capital city of Israel, and no sovereign, independent Palestinian state with its own military on the western bank of the Jordan river. The best that is on offer is a Palestinian Bantustan, a reservoir for the unwanted natives. And the people in Gaza don't even deserve that undignified solution: better to get rid of them all with a final solution via genocide with the support of the US president, European countries, the Arab League and even some native Palestinians! ” (see Haidar Eid, “The rape of Gaza. Gaza has turned from the world ‘s biggest concentration camp to the world’s biggest graveyard”, Al Jazeera, 31 July 2014: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/07/rape-gaza-201473114415929540.html ).
EILAND. Giora Eiland (Jewish Israeli National Security Council Director under PM Sharon in 2003-2005) stating that Gaza is already "a huge concentration camp" as revealed by WikiLeaks (2004): “1. (C) Summary. In a series of meetings with GOI officials between March 26-30, former NEA A/S and Ambassador to Israel Ed Djerejian, here as an official guest of the Foreign Ministry in his current capacity as Director of the Baker Institute, heard that the regional strategic situation faced by Israel had improved, largely as a result of the Iraq war, but that threats remained. Drawing on his experience as former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and on the U.S.-Syria dialogue hosted by the Baker Institute, Djerejian advocated "muscular diplomacy" with the Syrians. Israeli officials were uniformly dismissive of any prospect for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, as long as Arafat is on the scene. PM COS Dov Weissglas briefed Djerejian on the main contours of the PM's disengagement plan. Other interlocutors, while accepting the premise that unilateral disengagement represented a means of decreasing tension until such time as bilateral negotiations with a credible negotiating partner could be resumed, raised a number of concerns about the plan's implications. For example, Immigration and Absorption Minister Tzipi Livni raised questions about the "ambiguous legal status" of the territories from which Israel will withdraw. Others explored the issue of what "price" should be paid to compensate Israel for its territorial concession. Djerejian's interlocutors widely assumed that, in the absence of a credible Palestinian partner, the United States should be prepared to compensate Israel. Ambassador Djerejian emphasized the need to help empower the Palestinian security forces to assume security responsibility and to avoid the empowerment of Hamas. NSC Director Giora Eiland briefed on his alternative vision for achieving a viable, two-state solution through a land swap with Egypt. End Summary…
12. (C) Repeating a personal view that he had previously expressed to other USG visitors, NSC Director Eiland laid out for Ambassador Djerejian a different end-game solution than that which is commonly envisioned as the two-state solution. Eiland's view, he said, was prefaced on the assumption that demographic and other considerations make the prospect for a two-state solution between the Jordan and the Mediterranean unviable. Currently, he said, there are 11 million people in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, and that number will increase to 36 million in 50 years. The area between Beer Sheva and the northern tip of Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza) has the highest population density in the world. Gaza alone, he said, is already "a huge concentration camp" with 1.3 million Palestinians. Moreover, the land is surrounded on three sides by deserts. Palestinians need more land and Israel can ill-afford to cede it. The solution, he argued, lies in the Sinai desert. 13. (C) Specifically, Eiland proposed that Egypt be persuaded to contribute a 600 square kilometer parcel of land that would be annexed to a future Palestinian state as compensation for the 11 percent of the West Bank that Israel would seek to annex in a final status agreement. This Sinai block, 20 kms of which would be along the Mediterranean coast, would be adjacent to the Gaza Strip. A land corridor would be constructed connecting Egypt and this block to Jordan. (Note: Presumably under Egyptian sovereignty. End Note.) In addition, Israel would provide Egypt a 200 square km block of land from further south in the Negev” (“Israeli official brief Djerejian on improved regional security situation; unilateral disengagement plans”, Wikileaks, 31 March 2004: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/04TELAVIV1952_a.html ).
GALLOWAY. George Galloway, progressive British MP, interviewing Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of Tony Blair, on Iran's Press TV by both stating that Gaza is a concentration camp (2008): “[George Galloway]: "Why are they keeping you cooped up in the concentration camp called Gaza?" … [Lauren Booth]: “I want to say thank you for using the word concentration camp because the word prison has been applied in the last few years and that's a lie. In a prison you get three meals a day, a nourishing diet, visits from outsiders and some hobbies and rehabilitation and a date for your release” (see Jonny Paul, “”Booth: Gaza a massive concentration camp”, The Jerusalem Post, 17 September 2008: http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Booth-Gaza-a-massive-concentration-camp ).
GAZA ARTISTS, SINGERS, ACADEMICS & STUDENTS. Gaza artists, singers, academics and students in an Open Letter to singer Thomas Quasthoff (2010): “Dear Mr. Thomas Quasthoff, We are a group of artists, singers, academics and students from Gaza, and our only fault is being Palestinians. For that, Mr. Quasthoff, we are imprisoned with our families and loved ones in what even main-stream Human Rights Organizations call the largest open air prison in modern history. It has come to our knowledge that you have plans to perform in Apartheid Israel. The state you are planning to entertain has been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against us, the indigenous population of Palestine. We in Gaza have been under a hermetic, medieval siege imposed since 2006 by the state you are planning to entertain. This blockade has cut off the main life-line of goods and people coming into Gaza resulting in severe shortages of food supplies, basic goods and importantly items like cement which is vital to rebuild the 17000+ homes that have been destroyed by Israeli attacks. Injured people are not allowed to travel abroad to receive needed medical care: consequently 400 sick patients have died because they had no solution but to stay in the besieged Gaza Strip where they spent their dying days, to the despair of their families. Do you have plans to sing for them?...
A host of musicians have already joined the Boycott Divestment and Sanction Call of 2005 by refusing to perform in Israel including Santana, Annie Lennox, Faithless, Elvis Costello, the Pixies, Gil Scott Heron, Massive Attack, Leftfield, Gorillaz Sound System and Devendra Bernhart. We hope that you join these courageous artists. To us, your inspirational latest album, “Tell It Like It Is,” is a reminder of what the latest Palestinian intellectual Edward Said called “speaking truth to power”. It is high time to take real action to stop Israel's war crimes against children, women and men; it is time to stand on the right side of history and make a difference by singing songs of freedom and “telling it like it is!”” Besieged Gaza, Occupied Palestine.
Signed by: Bassam Abu Jiab (Singer), Fadl Lelli (Composer), Samir Shataly (Chorographer), Iamial El-Agha (Musician), Naim Nasr (Composer), Samir Mousa (Singer), Ibrahim Zinaty (Musician), Ibrahim Lulu (Oud Player), Mohammed Abu Eisha (Musician), Basem Shakhsa (Conductor), Sahalah Abu Hamad (Composer), Wael Yazji (Composer),Mohammed El Masri (Composer), Hassan Kharoubi (Musician), Aklram Hassan (Singer), Mohammed Bardawil (Oud player), Rami Okasha (Singer), Samir Shatali (Choreographer),Ali Abu Yasin (Director), Zuhair Balbisi (Actor), Sami Fatouh (Actor), Hassan Khatib (Actor), Inas Saqqa (Actress), Majeda Taleb (Actress), Hazem Abu Humaid (Director), Wael Hajjou (Actor), Jawad Harrouda (Actor), Said Eid (Director, Actor), Hassan Aydi (Director), Mohammed Abu Sido (Director), Ahmed Naser (Dramatist), Mohammed Naser (Dramatist), Majed Badra (Cartoonist), University Teacher’s Association in Palestine, Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)” (see “An Open Letter from Gaza to Thomas Quasthoff: do not forget the Gaza Concentration Camp and “Tell it like it is” “, Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural Boycott of Israel, 31 December 2010: http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1439 ) .
HANNA. William Hanna (freelancer with a recently published book the Hiramic Brotherhood of the Third Temple) on the Palestinian Genocide and the “open prisons” of Gaza and the West Bank (2014): “Following the World War Two Jewish Holocaust (6 million Jews murdered) and the general Holocaust death toll of more than 30 million, well-intentioned vows of “zero tolerance for racism” and “never again to anyone” were made and quickly forgotten. The first victims of this postwar universal forgetfulness were the Palestinians whose homeland, heritage, history, and human rights as a people was — without their consent — given as compensation to displaced Jews in Europe by Western nations who did not want them. The result of this Western generosity at the expense of the Palestinian people has seen the displacement of some 7 million Palestinians who are virtual prisoners in either scattered refugee camps (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Egypt) or in what are in effect still Israeli occupied territories (open prisons) such as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank where they are subject to a racist genocidal horror at the hands of a people whose Talmud — containing the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis on a variety of subjects including Jewish ethics — categorically states that the supreme sanctity of all human life is pertinent to man's place in the universe: “He who saves one life . . . is as if he saves an entire universe. He who destroys a life . . . is as if he destroys an entire universe.” (Mishnah, Sanhedrin 4:5). All law, civil and religious, has as its purpose the promotion of human life, and when it ceases to serve that end it becomes obsolete and is superseded… Can Jews and Judaism honestly justify either their support for, or toleration of such a barbarous, war criminal state? While Israel may be able (with iniquitous support from the world’s foremost war criminal nation the U.S.) to contemptuously ignore condemnation by the rest of the world, it would not be able to ignore the universal condemnation of the Jewish people it claims to represent” [(see William Hanna, “Who Is Actually Guilty of More Than 60 Years of Palestinian Genocide?”, Countercurrents, 11 August, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/hanna110814.htm ).
HART. Alan Hart (anti-racist UK writer on Middle East matters ) referring to the Gaza concentration camp (1955): “The background truth of what happened on the night of 28 February 1955 was that for the previous four months the Gaza-Israel border had been remarkably quiet. Virtually incident free. And that was because Nasser, as he promised Sharett he would, had instructed his security forces – the army and the plain-clothed thugs of Egypt’s counterintelligence services – to do what ever was necessary to stop the infiltrations. Nasser had been desperate to avoid provoking Israel’s hawks and anxious to demonstrate to Sharett that he was a man of his word – to the extent that his own difficult circumstances allowed him to be. (As I noted in my book about Arafat and his struggle, there was no way Nasser could have put a complete stop to infiltration unless he had built a sky-high concrete wall around the Gaza “concentration camp”). In the days before Sharon attacked Gaza with 2 platoons of paratroops there had been two infiltrations incidents. The first, a quite deep penetration into Israeli territory, had resulted in the theft of some documents. It could have been a Palestinian refugee liberating his property deeds. In the second incident an Israeli cyclist was killed ” (Alan Hart, “Zionism: the Real Enemy of the Jews. Volume 2. David became Goliath”, Clarity Press, 2009).
HASS. Amira Hass (Jewish Israeli Haaretz journalist) (2014): “Those who rejected Fatah and Yasser Arafat’s peace proposal for two states have now been given Haniyeh, Hamas and BDS. Those who turned Gaza into an internment and punishment camp for 1.8 million human beings should not be surprised that they tunnel underneath the earth. Those who sow strangling, siege and isolation reap rocket fire. Those who have, for 47 years, indiscriminately crossed the Green Line, expropriating land and constantly harming civilians in raids, shootings and settlements – what right do they have to roll their eyes and speak of Palestinian terror against civilians? (Amira Hass, “Reaping what we have sown in Gaza” Information Clearing House, 22 July 2014: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39186.htm ).
ISRAELI OFFICIALS. Israeli officials referred to Gaza as “a huge concentration camp” as revealed by a Wikileaks-released US cable dated 31 March 2004 (see Current events inquiry: http://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/gaza-concentration-camp/ ).
KING. Christopher King (UK consultant and lecturer in management and marketing) (2010): “Anthony Blair said on television prior to invading Iraq, “Well, we won’t kill as many people as Saddam has!” He underestimated his ability. Sanctions had already killed half a million Iraqi children and the American invasion sold to this country and Europe by Blair killed about one million persons, created four to five million refugees and devastated the country. This war criminal has subsequently been enriched by America for his work and was presented with one million dollars by Israel. In creating the Gaza concentration camp where food from humanitarian organizations is allowed in to 1.5 million Palestinians on a basis calculated as the minimum necessary to sustain life, Israel is similarly challenging Nazi achievements. Israel claims that it does not ration food to Gaza on this basis but the calculation exists. We must draw our conclusions from it. Israel’s action in attacking the humanitarian relief flotilla that was attempting to breach the illegal blockade of Gaza is nothing less than piracy with murder. At least nine and perhaps 19 persons are reported to have been killed, according to reports. One cannot comprehend why the international community tolerates the existence of this regime, much less supports and protects it as America does. Israel was established by terrorism. We might recall that between 1944 and 1948, when the state of Israel was declared on Palestinian land, Jewish terrorist gangs murdered about 280 British soldiers as well as uncounted thousands of Palestinians in driving them from their land. The enmity of the surrounding Arab states to Israel is not due to anti-Semitism. It is opposition to the confiscation, with murder, of Palestinian land by the Jews from 1944 until the present day. If dispossessed Palestinians and their descendants were allowed to return and United Nations-approved arrangements were made for their compensation and partial restoration of their land, there would be peace in Palestine and the Middle East. Palestinians are willing to share their country equitably with Jews… Israel’s attack on Gaza, 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, conducted with tanks, artillery, military aircraft, helicopters, rockets, bombs and white phosphorus shells, as well as soldiers with the usual weapons, killed over 1,400 Palestinians. This murderous action by a well-protected, mechanised army against the Hamas government of Gaza, who had a few hundred fighters with rifles, was supported by Jewish civil and religious leaders in the UK and other countries. Since then, Israel has maintained its blockade that is starving Gaza as well as denying it medical supplies, fuel, electricity, construction materials and really, everything. Israel maintains that the blockade is necessary to contain Hamas. Hamas is, of course, the legitimate, democratically-elected government of Palestine that emerged following elections that the United States and Israel promoted” ” (Christopher King, “The concentration camp that is Gaza. Only a One-sate Palestine is possible”, Information Clearing House, 1 June 2010: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25587.htm ) .
MARTINO. Cardinal Renato Martino ( head of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace and a former Holy See envoy to the United Nations) in remarks to the Italian website Il Sussidario (2009): “Defenceless populations are always the ones who pay. Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp” (Cardinal Renato Martino quoted by Richard Owen, “”Concentration camp” remark threatens Pope’s visit to Israel’, Times Online, 8 January 2009: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5473588.ece ) .
MID-EAST REALITIES (Mid-East truth-telling organization): “Over the years the Israelis have essentially turned The Gaza Strip from a Ghetto to a kind of Concentration Camp. In this small area today live more than 1 million Palestinians, a large number of whom have never been able to leave and reenter. Today the Gaza Strip is fully surrounded by an electrified fence with all entrances and exits controlled by the Israelis military. Call it an Israeli created Warsaw Ghetto, if you will, complete with a kind of kapo internal "VIP" police force today known as the "Palestinian Authority". Tragically, it is through the use of this "Palestinian Authority" imagery in fact that the Israelis have been able to further implement their approach to the Palestinians of which Gaza is in a sense the model -- the creation of isolated and surrounded concentration camps pocketing the landscape; the "autonomous Population Centers" supposedly "agreed" to at Oslo by the very Palestinian negotiators who today are the "VIPs"” (Mid-East Realities, “The Gaza Concentration Camp, Dossier Palestina”: http://www.cie.ugent.be/Palestina/palestina15.htm ).
PELED-ELHANAN. Nurit Peled -Elhanan (Jewish Israeli professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, translator, author and a human rights activist who received the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2001) speaking to the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (2014): "I dedicate my words to the people of Gaza … Apartheid … The people of Gaza are still locked up in this immense prison, hungry, unemployed, ill and poor, with no means to escape or to better their lives in any way” (Nurit Peled, “Jewish Israeli Professor Nurit Peled: Gaza Concentration Camp”, YouTube, 21 July 2014 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwiCtCm0r4E ” ; Nurit Peled-Elhanan, “Jewish Israeli professor: Gaza concentration camp”, You-Tube, 21 July 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwiCtCm0r4E&app=desktop ;
POLYA. Dr Gideon Polya (anti-racist humanist, human rights activist, writer, scientist, artist and editor of the "Gaza Concentration Camp" website (2014): "The “Gaza Concentration Camp” site exists to document the opinions of expert observers who correctly apply the descriptive “Gaza Concentration Camp” to the Gaza Strip that is surrounded and cruelly blockaded by war criminal, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and grossly human rights–abusing Apartheid Israel and by similarly war criminal, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and grossly human rights–abusing Fascist Egypt" (see “Gaza Concentration Camp”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/gaza-concentration ).
POLYA. Dr Gideon Polya on racist Zionism, the Gaza Concentration Camp and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide (29 September 2009): “Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention (see: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html ) states:“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”…
7. 1.5 million Arab Israelis live as second class citizens subject to Nazi-style race laws demanding Apartheid-style, race-based ID and affecting property rights, employment, and marriage.
8. 4 million Indigenous Palestinians live under an illegal, brutal, genocidal, 42 year duration Occupation that has been formally condemned by both General Assembly and UN Security Council Resolutions.
9. 2 .5 million West Bank Occupied Palestinians live in Zionist-encircled “Bantustans” in a territory being illegally whittled away by military camps, military check points, race-based settlements and Jews-only highways and roads.
10. 1.5 million Occupied Palestinians live in what the Catholic Church has described as the Gaza Concentration Camp which is policed not by Israeli police but by Israeli air force, army and naval shelling, bombing and shooting.
11. In 1880 there were 500,000 Indigenous Arab Palestinians and 25,000 Jews (50% immigrants) in the Holy Land – today there are 5.5 million Indigenous Palestinians in the Holy Land and some 5.5 million Palestinian refugees elsewhere and excluded from their Homeland, which is occupied by 5.5 million Jewish Israelis backed by the US, UK, Canada, the EU and racist Australia.
12. In the 2006 Occupied Palestinian elections conducted under Occupier guns, Hamas won 76 seats out of 132 but these Hamas MPs are now overwhelmingly either dead, imprisoned or hiding in the Gaza Concentration Camp and regarded as “terrorists” by the “democratic Nazi” US, UK, Canada, the EU and Australia.
13. UN data reveal that each year Israel is responsible for 3,600 Occupied Palestinian under-5 year old avoidable deaths, 5,700 Occupied Palestinian non-violent avoidable deaths and about 800 violent Occupied Palestinian deaths.
14. The Palestinian Genocide continues despite numerous UN General Assembly and UN Security Council Resolutions, notably UN Security Council Resolution 252 prohibiting land and property seizure, notably in Jerusalem…
22. As of mid-2009, in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories post-invasion non-violent excess deaths total 0.3 million, 1.0 million and 3.2 million, respectively; post-invasion violent deaths total about 11,000, 1.3 million and up to 4 million, respectively; post-invasion violent plus non-violent excess deaths total 0.3 million, 2.3 million and 3-7 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively; and refugees total 7 million, 5-6 million and 3-4 million, respectively (plus a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees in NW Pakistan). This constitutes a Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention; and egregious war crimes due in part to Occupier war criminal non-supply of life-sustaining food and medical requisites demanded unequivocally by Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War – thus the Gaza Concentration Camp has been under US-backed Israeli blockade for 2 years and according to WHO the “total annual per capita medical expenditure” permitted by the Occupiers in Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan is US$124 and US$29, respectively, as compared to US$6,714 for the US” (see Gideon Polya, “Palestinian Genocide as defined by UN Genocide Convention”, Palestinian Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/polya-gideon ).
Gideon Polya (anti-racist Jewish Hungarian-origin Australian scientist, writer, artist and humanitarian) (2017): “Netanyahu is the PM of nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, serial invader, serial war criminal, women-abusing, children-abusing, democracy-by-genocide, ethnic cleansing, pathologically mendacious, neo-Nazi, anti-Arab anti-Semitic and indeed anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, race-based kleptocracy Apartheid Israel. Netanyahu has been invited to visit pro-Zionist, US-lackey, climate criminal Australia, the world’s leading supporter of Apartheid Israel after the US, and will address the Australian Federal Parliament in February 2017…
Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention states that :“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”. Apartheid Israel is guilty of violating all these elements of the UN Genocide Convention: (1) since 1936 there have been 2 million Palestinian deaths from Zionist violence (0.1 million) or Zionist-imposed deprivation (1.9 million ); (2) there are 7 million Palestinian refugees and all of the 12 million Palestinians are excluded from all or part of Palestine; (3) of 12 million Palestinians (half of them children), 6 million are forbidden to even step foot in their own country on pain of death, 4.7 million are highly abusively and violently held hostage with zero human rights under Israeli guns in the Gaza Concentration Camp (2.0 million) or in ever-dwindling West Bank Bantustan ghettoes (2.7 million), and 1.7 million live as Third Class citizens as Israeli Palestinians under Nazi-style Apartheid Israeli race laws; (4) 90% of Palestine has now been ethnically cleansed of Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants (this making a 2-State Solution impossible); (5) the huge disparity in annual GDP per capita between Occupied Palestinians ($2,800) and Israel-proper ($38,000) is reflected in huge differential avoidable mortality of over 4,000 avoidable deaths per year for Occupied Palestinians versus zero (0) for Israelis; (6) through imposed deprivation, each year Apartheid Israel passively murders about 2,700 under-5 year old Palestinian infants and passively murders about 4,200 Occupied Palestinians in general; (7) Apartheid Israel violently kills an average of about 500 Occupied Palestinians each year (3,900 Gaza Palestinian violently killed in 2008-2014 in response to 32 Israeli deaths from home-made Gaza rockets since 2004); and (8) Occupied Palestinians are deprived of essentially all human rights by Apartheid Israel, of which the most fundamental is the right to live unmolested in their own country…
Decent people around the world urge and apply comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against genocidally racist Apartheid Israel and all its racist supporters” (Gideon Polya, “Australia welcomes genocidal racist and serial war criminal Netanyahu”, Countercurrents, 10 February 2017: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/02/10/australia-welcomes-genocidal-racist-and-serial-war-criminal-netanyahu/ ) .
Dr Gideon Polya: “Pro-Apartheid Trump America and US lackey Australia merit international Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as the only countries to vote against the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution to formally investigate the latest Israeli Gaza Massacres in which Apartheid Israeli soldiers have shot [and killed] 116 unarmed Palestinian protestors and injured about 13,000. No Israeli soldiers have been killed or wounded and no Palestinians protestors penetrated the barbed wire surrounding the Gaza Concentration Camp. Just as a galvanized world successfully boycotted Apartheid South Africa after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre (69 unarmed African protestors killed and 220 wounded), so the world must respond to the latest Gaza Massacres with BDS against Apartheid Israel and all people and countries supporting this genocidally racist obscenity.” (Polya, “Boycott Pro-Apartheid US & Australia For Backing Israeli Gaza Massacres, Apartheid, Theft & Palestinian Genocide”, Countercurrents, 22 May 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/05/22/boycott-pro-apartheid-us-australia-for-backing-israeli-gaza-massacres-apartheid-theft-palestinian-genocide/ ).
PRESCOTT. John Prescott (Baron Prescott, Lord Prescott, is British Labour politician who was the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 ) (2014) “Those who live in Gaza are kept like prisoners behind walls and fences, unable to escape the bombings, and an Israeli economic blockade has forced Palestinians into poverty. Israel’s Iron Dome defence system easily intercepts missiles launched from Gaza. Three Israeli citizens have died from these primitive rockets, with 32 soldiers killed fighting Hamas. Compare that to the toll in Gaza. Of the 1,000-plus to die, more than 80 per cent were civilians, mostly women and children. But who is to say some of the other 20 per cent weren’t innocent too? Israel brands them terrorists but it is acting as judge, jury and executioner in the concentration camp that is Gaza. And Israel flouts international law by continuing to build illegal Jewish settlements. Why? Because it knows it can get away with it. What happened to the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis is appalling. But you would think those atrocities would give Israelis a unique sense of perspective and empathy with the victims of a ghetto … We must force Israel to end the blockade on Gaza to ensure free and unfettered access for humanitarian aid and reconstruction materials. There must be a freeze on illegal settlement growth to let talks start. We should support a phased approach to end the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem within a reasonable timeframe. The EU should play a bigger role in supporting mediation and push for sanctions for non-compliance. The lack of a two-state solution is a running sore that continues to inflame the passions not just of Palestinians and Muslims, but all fair-minded people around the world. We cannot be a silent witness to this carnage one minute longer. The world must force Israel and Hamas to stop this endless cycle of death”(see John Prescott, “John Prescott: Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is a war crime – and it must end”, Daily Mail, 26 July 2014: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/john-prescott-israels-bombardment-gaza-3918413 ).
PRESS TV. Press TV (Iran) reports on the Gaza Concentration Camp (2014): The Zionist regime of Israel has turned the besieged Gaza Strip into a big concentration camp by paralyzing life for residents, an analyst says. “The Gaza Strip is the world’s most densely populated urban area. Some call it the world’s biggest concentration camp,” Kevin Barrett wrote in a column for Press TV on Wednesday. “The Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip has crippled Gaza’s main power plant for more than a month - and it’s getting worse. The power outage has wrecked Gaza’s waste water treatment system and flooded the streets with raw sewage,” the commentator wrote. Barrett said the Gaza Strip is close to “becoming an extermination camp” due to Israeli and Egyptian blockades of the enclave” (Press TV, “Israel turning Gaza into concentration camp: Analyst”, 16 July 2014: http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/12/04/338244/israel-made-concentration-camp-of-gaza/ ).
REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY (RCP) condemns the State of Israel’s Gaza Concentration Camp as quoted by Stephen H. Norwood, “Convergent Anti-Zionisms: The American Far Left And Far Right”, in Robert S. Wistrich, editor,“” Anti-judaism, Antisemitism and Delegitimizing Israel”, University of Oregon Press, 2016): “The American far left denunciation of Israel’s response to Hamas’s continuous firing of rockets at its civilians was almost identical to the far right’s . The RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party] condemned Israel’s “savage escalation” of its “genocidal attacks.” It called Gaza “the world’s largest outdoor prison,” populated by Palestinians whom the Israelis allegedly drove from their homes in 1948 by “massacres and terror. ” 55 [55. Revolution, 24 Aug. and 1 Sept. 2014]. The ISO [International Socialist Organization] called Israel’s military campaign a “barbaric campaign” on the Palestinians, victims, it claimed of “more than a century of Zionist colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, apartheid and genocide.” 56… 56. Socialist Worker, 30 July 2014”.
SEATTLE MIDEAST AWARENESS CAMPAIGN. Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign (SEAMAC): “More than 5 million Palestinians are denied equal rights by the state of Israel under a system of apartheid, a deliberate policy of racial or ethnic segregation. Under Israeli military occupation, millions of Palestinians live in conditions which closely resemble the apartheid system that existed in South Africa:
No right of free speech, assembly or movement
Arrest and imprisonment without charge or trial
Torture
House searches without warrant
Assassination, extra-judicial murder
No right to vote for the Israeli government (even though it controls their lives)
Israel controls all Palestinian borders, all imports and exports, and all movement between towns and cities.
THE GAZA STRIP, still surrounded, besieged and controlled by Israel, has been sealed off and effectively turned into the world’s largest open-air prison… These are just some of the many aspects of Palestinian life affected by the Israeli government’s apartheid policies. Fortunately, an international solidarity movement has formed around the world and is heeding the call of Palestinian civil society to boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) Israel for its flagrant violations of human rights. Just as in South Africa and the American South where whites joined with blacks to fight segregation and white supremacy, many Israeli Jews are also repudiating their government’s policies. They have actively joined with Palestinians to fight apartheid” (Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign, “Equal rights for Palestinians”: http://www.seamac.org/equalrights.htm ).
SHEHADA. Muhammad Shehada (Palestinian Gaza writer and activist): “The point is that people are trying to undertake a mass jailbreak out of what David Cameron, the prime minister of—the former prime minister of Britain, called an “open-air prison,” what a Haaretz editorial calls a “Palestinian ghetto,” and what Israeli distinguished scholar Baruch Kimmerling calls “the largest concentration camp ever to exist. Then you have the call for return, which is the main theme of the protest. And that represents even deeper and deeper desperation amongst the masses. The call for return does not constitute, what Israel claims, an attempt to destroy the state of Israel, but it rather shows that Gazans have given up about the place where they are caged … For the mass protest, the main target or goal is basically finding life. People’s livelihood has been completely destroyed behind the fence. Their future is glittering, literally, after the fence, if they manage to break out of Gaza. Although, virtually, these are waiting, they are no longer prisoners. And that’s exactly what they want. The separation fence is a window for the people of Gaza to always stare at Israelis on the other side leading a normal and organized life. This window does not awaken only jealousy, but also extreme anger and outrage. For how come on Earth that the entire world is watching 2 million people chained to the ground, dying slowly, and doing absolutely nothing?... when Jared was saying that the people in Gaza who are marching and risking their lives and walking towards death bare-chested are part of the problem, not the solution. Then what’s the solution, in his head? Just exterminating the entire population.” (“Gazan writer: protesters are seeking freedom from the world’s largest concentration camp”, Democracy Now, 15 May 2018: https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/15/gazan_writer_protesters_are_seeking_freedom .)
SHUAIBI. Zaid Shuaibi (a spokesperson for the Palestinian BDS National Committee) (2014): "What we are witnessing is nothing short of a massacre against the Palestinian people. Israel must be made to pay a heavy economic and political price for its crimes against the people of Gaza. We call on people of conscience everywhere to get involved with the BDS movement, including by signing the call for a military embargo on Israel and taking action against companies and academic institutions that facilitate Israel's heinous crimes in Gaza. The trade and diplomatic sanctions taken in particular by countries from the global south are a hugely welcome step that we urge other governments to follow. States have a legal and moral obligation to do all that they can to hold Israel to account for its violations of international law, including by cancelling free trade agreements and imposing a military embargo, as a first concrete step. All across the world, people are echoing the call from Palestinian civil society for a full military embargo on Israel as the most urgent measure of accountability. Israel's on-going massacre, its deliberate and premeditated targeting of schools, hospitals and civilians, including children, in accordance with its criminal Dahiya Doctrine, makes any continued military cooperation with Israel an indefensible act of conscious complicity. If scenes from the Gaza concentration camp reveal an Israeli-made tsunami, a counter tidal wave of BDS campaigning is crucially needed to end Israel’s habitual brutalities and massacres against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. It has never been as urgent to isolate Israel as a world pariah as it is right now” (Zaid Shuaibi quoted in Palestinian BDS National Committee, “Round-up: Israel’s massacre in Gaza prompts international sanctions and boycott action”, 1 August 2014: https://bdsmovement.net/news/round-israel%E2%80%99s-massacre-gaza-prompts-international-sanctions-and-boycott-action ).
SILBER. Arthur Silber (a humane US writer whose blog is Once Upon a Time) on the Gaza Concentration Camp (2012): “The most striking and significant quality of our national conversation "is one of overwhelming, oppressive and suffocating unreality. It is as if everyone knows, but will never acknowledge, that we may speak only in code, and that we may only utilize the safe, empty phrases that we have agreed are 'acceptable' -- phrases and language that are safe precisely because they have been drained of all correspondence to facts. It is as if everyone realizes, but will never state, that we are engaged in an elaborate charade, a pageant of gesture and indication, where substance and specific meaning have been banned. ... [T]he truth is not merely unpleasant, an uninvited guest who makes conversation difficult and awkward. Truth is the enemy; truth is to be destroyed" [quoting himself].
Gaza is a concentration camp. It is not like a concentration camp. It is not a metaphorical or figurative concentration camp. It is a concentration camp. Our culture, our political leaders, and the cacophony of voices in the media have all agreed that this truth must never be spoken.
If one wanted to be momentarily charitable about people's absolute refusal to recognize the obvious, one might argue that a land area of approximately 140 square miles, containing a population of roughly 1.7 million people, could not possibly be a concentration camp. But size and the number of prisoners are not the distinguishing characteristics of a concentration camp. The most essential characteristic of a concentration camp is what is permitted, and what is not. Only one question matters: Under what conditions are the people within its borders permitted to live?
Israel controls most of Gaza's land borders, just as Israel controls the air space above it and the waters that border Gaza on the west. The sole exception is the small border with Egypt, and Israel subjects that border to attacks whenever it chooses. In essence, nothing is permitted in or out of Gaza without Israel's permission. When Israel imposes severe restrictions on what and who is allowed to enter and leave Gaza, the consequences are catastrophic” (Arthur Silber, “We are forbidden to say this: Gaza is a concentration camp”, Information Clearing House, 18 November 2012: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33077.htm ).
SLATER. Philip Slater (an American sociologist, writer, taught sociology at Harvard, Brandeis, and University of California at Santa Cruz, was Professor and Chairperson of the Brandeis Sociology Department and author of the bestselling 1970 book on American culture, “The Pursuit of Loneliness” (2009): “Calling Hamas the ‘aggressor’ is undignified. The Gaza strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy—even deprived of hospital supplies. They cannot come and go freely, and have to build tunnels to smuggle in the necessities of life. It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn’t fire a few rockets back. The Israel lobby has a hissy fit when anyone points out that Israel has been borrowing liberally from the Nazi playbook, but to punish a whole nation for the attacks of a few—which Israel has been doing consistently in Gaza—is a violation of international law—a law enacted in response to the Nazi practice… You’ll have to kill them all. And when you do, you may finally lose the support even of the United States. Remember that American support is based entirely on the notion that no politician can win without the Jewish vote. But not all American Jews think Israel is on a divine mission from God. A great many American Jews believe in international law and justice.I can understand how Israel could resent this lecture coming from an American. After all, isn’t this what we Americans did? Came into someone else’s country, slaughtered 95% of its inhabitants and took over? And didn’t we go all Nervous Nellie whenever they fought back, accusing them of aggression to justify even more genocidal slaughter? And didn’t we get away with it? Yes, but I’m sorry to tell you, Israel, you came on the scene too late. Genocide just doesn’t fly any more. I know it isn’t fair, you have every right to feel aggrieved about this, but the world’s smaller, cowboys are passé, and bullies aren’t heroes any more.” (Philip Slater, “A message to Israel: time to stop playing the victim role”, Huffington Post, 7 January 2009: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/a-message-to-israel-time_b_155978.html ) .
SMITH. Zarah Smith (a UK student and human rights activist) (2014): “As a student who has been actively campaigning with the Palestinian solidarity movement, I was one of thousands who travelled to West London, last Friday, to voice my anger and disgust at the violence and bloodshed perpetrated by Israelon a densely populated open air concentration camp. Rather than calling Gaza an “open air prison: , I believe that concentration camp is a far more accurate description. Since calling it a “prison” implies that the people - the majority of whom are refugees kicked out of Israel upon its creation – have committed a crime” (see Zarah Smith, “For Gaza, a concentration camp”, The Kashmir Walla, 15 July 2014: http://www.thekashmirwalla.com/2014/07/gaza-concentration-camp/ ).
SPARTACIST LEAGUE condemns the State of Israel’s Gaza Concentration Camp as quoted by Stephen H. Norwood, “Convergent Anti-Zionisms: The American Far Left And Far Right”, in Robert S. Wistrich, editor,“ Anti-judaism, Antisemitism and Delegitimizing Israel”, University of Oregon Press, 2016): “The Trotskyist Spartacist League, equating Israel with the Nazis, denounced the Jewish State’s “latest terror bombing of its Gaza concentration camp.” , The Zionists “armed to the teeth,” threatened to carry out “a major bloodbath of Palestinians.” 57 … 57. Worker’s Vanguard, 11 July 2014.”
THE MARKET ORACLE (a market prediction blog) (2014): “Israeli's drunk on the blood of approaching 1,500 dead Palestinian civilians, fermented by the religious zeal of a self professed chosen people of God and programmed by state propaganda that even Goebbels would be proud of as Channel 4 news reports on what appears to have been enacted is Israel's own version of the final solution that amounts to turning the Gaza concentration camp into an unlivable graveyard, presenting Gaza's 2 million people with a stark choice either leave or die by either bombardment or starvation as the Jewish fundamentalist state remains in total control of what enters and leaves Gaza… … The bottom line is that the price tag for creating a neo-nazi state is U.S. $150 billion” *(see “Israel’s final solution of turning Gaza concentration camp into a grave yard”, The Market Oracle, 31 July 2014: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article46694.html ).
* The long-term, deaths-, damage- and debt-related accrual cost of Apartheid Israel and Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI) domination of the US and the West is $40 trillion (see Gideon Polya, “American Holocaust, millions of untimely American deaths and $40 Trillion cost of Israel to Americans”, Countercurrents, 27 August 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya270813.htm ).
VELLOSO. Agustín Velloso ( a lecturer at the Spanish National University for Distance Learning) (2008): "My visit to “the Gaza concentration Camp... When you approach the Erez frontier post to enter Gaza from the north, you notice a concentration camp straightaway even if you may never have seen one like the ones turned into museums or educational centres, or like the ones that appear in documentaries or photographs. An observation balloon, innocently painted white, rocks gently to and fro in the air over the wall surrounding Gaza. It makes sure no unhappy soul moves beyond arbitrary limits set by the camp guards. The visitor is overwhelmed by the mammoth steel-reinforced wall. This imprisons a million and a half inmates inside an area approximately 38 kilometres long and 12 wide at its widest. Apart from cases you can count on the fingers of one hand, Palestinians quite simply cannot pass through Erez. Full stop. Besides, they are not allowed out via the South, crossing into Egypt, nor via the West, since the Mediterranean Sea is barred to them, nor via the air, since that too is likewise barred, despite there being no boats or planes to travel in. In any case, the airport was destroyed by the bombs of Israel air power. Gazans are not allowed to exit by digging underground either… The terrible history of the Nazi concentration camps does not seem to deter Israel in creating a concentration camp of its own in Gaza. Now, with the blessing and the money of the international community, the Erez crossing point has turned into the entrance to a concentration camp right now in the 21st Century. If blame, even if only moral blame, was cast on those who did nothing and looked the other way in times gone by, what judgment do the people deserve now who not only keep quiet about Israel's actions in Gaza, but actually aid and abet them? It is a disgrace that in Europe and the United States, stalwart defenders of women's rights find space in the most influential newspapers and most watched television programmes to clamour against the use of the veil by Muslim women, but there is no clamour against the Israeli State for denying medical care in the Gaza strip, which means that hundreds of Gazans die due to medical neglect. Some women even have given birth right there in the control post, in the most shameful conditions, because they are not authorized to leave Gaza.” ( Agustín Velloso, “My visit to the Gaza Concentration Camp, The Palestine Chronicle, 18 August 2008: http://palestinechronicle.com/old/view_article_details.php?id=14086 ).
WEISS, Philip (anti-racist Jewish American writer and human rights activist) (2014): “Gaza is a concentration camp, and its an American delusion not to recognize that – Weschler. Prestigious, mainstream journalist says what others are afraid to… Lawrence Weschler, a writer of considerable mainstream prestige, is sick of prevaricating about Israel. It’s rabid. It has rabies. And Gaza is a concentration camp. Weschler has let loose chiefly because of the “remorseless” and “repetitively compulsive” aspect of Israeli violence. I believe that understanding is now widely shared in the liberal mainstream, and interventions like Weschler’s make it easier for others to speak up” (Philip Weiss, “Gaza is a concentration camp, and its an American delusion not to recognize that – Weschler”, Alternet, 21 July 2014: https://www.alternet.org/world/gaza-concentration-camp-and-its-american-delusion-not-recognize-weschler ).
WESCHLER. Lawrence Weschler (anti-racist Jewish American writer, longtime writer on The New Yorker, writer on politics and a US author of works of creative nonfiction) on Gaza as a concentration camp (2014): “For the single overriding fact defining the Israeli-Palestinian impasse at this point is that if the Palestinians are quiescent and not engaged in any overt rebellion, the Israelis (and here I am speaking of the vast majority of the population who somehow go along with the antics of their leaders, year after year) manage to tell themselves that things are fine and there’s no urgent need to address the situation; and if, as a result, the endlessly put-upon Palestinians do finally rise up in any sort of armed resistance (rocks to rockets), the same Israelis exasperate, “How are we supposed to negotiate with monsters like this?” A wonderfully convenient formula, since it allows the Israelis to go blithely on, systematically stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank, and continuing to confine 1.8 million Gazans within what might well be described as a concentration camp.
Note, incidentally, I say “concentration camp” and not “death camp.” I am not comparing Gaza to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but one cannot help but liken the conditions today in Gaza to the sorts of conditions once faced by Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the Boers in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War, or the black South Africans years later in such besieged townships as Soweto, or for that matter Jews and gays and gypsies at Dachau and Theresienstadt in the years before the Nazis themselves settled on their Final Solution.
And it is quite simply massively self-serving delusion that Israelis (and their enablers and abettors here in America, among whom incidentally I count a steadily declining number of American Jews) refuse to recognize that fact” (Lawrence Weschler, quoted in Phillip Weiss, “Gaza is a concentration camp, and it’s an American delusion not to recognize that”, AlterNet, 21 July 2014: http://www.alternet.org/world/gaza-concentration-camp-and-its-american-delusion-not-recognize-weschler ).
X. Marvin X (African American poet, playwright and essayist, born Marvin Jackmon but has taken the Muslim name El Muhajir, and his work has been associated with the Black Arts/Black Aesthetics Movement of the 1960s) poem entitled “Gaza Concentration Camp” (2014):
“There are those who say we must restore peace to GAZA
Peace in the concentration camp
Peace of genocide
Peace no protest allowed
Submit to starvation
humiliation
stunted life
hell on earth
No protest
peace before anything
Before justice
Before life even
peace
Let the people of GAZA sing silent night
Holy night
All is peaceful
All is right
Under the shadow of death
Let there be peace
No justice
Peace
With boots on our necks
Mass murder but peace
At all costs
Hamas Rockets to no avail
Iron Dome is our gift from USA
Iron Domes is saving our asses
From land, air, sea you attack
Mighty Mouse you are
Iron Dome Mouse
Look at you
Wild wild West beast
No thought of justice
Just peace
Peace be still” ( Black Bird Press News & Reviews, “Poem - Gaza Concentration Camp by Marvin X”, 17 July 2014: http://blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com.au/2014/07/poem-gaza-concentration-camp-by-marvin-x.html ).
Some key websites documenting views against racist Zionism and nuclear terrorist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel of outstanding, humanitarian, anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, leaders and writers :
“Boycott Apartheid Israel”: https://sites.google.com/site/boycottapartheidisrael/.
“Gaza Concentration Camp”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/gaza-concentration .
“Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/ .
“Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/nonjewsagainstracistzionism/ .
“Nuclear weapons ban, end poverty and reverse climate change”: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/nuclear-weapons-ban ..
“Palestinian Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ .
“Stop state terrorism” : https://sites.google.com/site/stopstateterrorism/ .
"State crime and non-state terrorism": https://sites.google.com/site/statecrimeandnonstateterrorism/ .