RUTHFULLY YOURS

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. This rhetoric is as cynical as it is inflammatory. It fosters a narrative that Israel’s actions are not just wrong, but also Nazi-like evil. Unsurprisingly, this narrative is eagerly amplified by Israel’s enemies and anti-Semites worldwide.

As it happens, Israel’s military hates the Israeli government’s relocation plan, too – but for pragmatic reasons, not because it agrees it would be a new Auschwitz. The IDF has warned that building a giant civilian camp for 600,000-plus Gazans could take many months (or even a year), cost an exorbitant 15 billion shekels to construct and administer, and derail delicate ceasefire and hostage negotiations. In closed-door meetings, IDF generals told prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the ‘humanitarian city’ idea is a logistical nightmare beyond the military’s war-fighting scope.

After nearly 21 months of exhausting urban fighting in Gaza, the war-weary IDF is focussed on defeating Hamas on the battlefield, not on herding and guarding hundreds of thousands of civilians indefinitely in a desert encampment. Commanders know that gathering Gaza’s entire population in one location could cause chaos and lead them to lose control over the enclave. They know that their army is simply not built for the management of hundreds of thousands of people.

Israel’s conduct in this war, however hard it has been on Gaza’s people, does not resemble a genocide or the Holocaust. The IDF’s campaign since 7 October 2023 has been aimed squarely at destroying Hamas fighters and infrastructure, not at annihilating Palestinians as a people. The daily drumbeat of killed Hamas operatives and commanders attests to this focus – just this week, the IDF eliminated Nasr Ali Quneita, a Hamas terrorist who invaded Israel on 7 October and held British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari captive in Gaza.

Gaza’s civilian death toll is tragic, but killing civilians has never been Israel’s objective. Unlike the Nazis, who targeted children and innocents for the ‘crime’ of being born Jewish, Israel has taken pains (even if not always successfully) to spare non-combatants, urging evacuations, pausing operations for humanitarian relief and getting food into Gaza. The IDF has facilitated the establishment of 11 field hospitals, and coordinated a large-scale polio vaccination campaign for Gazan children, administering over 1.1million doses and reaching 90 per cent of children in the strip.

These are not the actions of an army intent on extermination. They are the deeds of a state fighting a fierce war against a terror group while still trying to maintain humanitarian responsibilities towards the enemy’s civilians. You would never see the Nazis providing vaccines to Jewish children or shipping extra food rations during the Holocaust. On the contrary, they aimed to eliminate those children entirely. The genocidal intent that defined Nazi concentration camps is simply absent in Israel’s policy, no matter how intense the suffering in Gaza can be at times.

No one denies that conditions for Palestinian civilians are horrific. They are displaced, living amid destroyed infrastructure and surviving on scarce water and limited power. Thousands of innocent lives have been lost. But however terrible Gaza’s reality may be, it is completely false to equate it with the systematic, industrialised murder that was the Holocaust.

The war in Gaza is not a ‘genocide’, and relocating civilians for their safety is not the same as putting them in a ‘concentration camp’. Those who toss around these terms are not defending human rights – they are weaponising historical trauma to demonise the world’s only Jewish state.

There are valid concerns worth raising about the ‘humanitarian city’ plan. It could indeed lead to forced displacement or long-term internment of Palestinians, raising serious ethical and legal issues. These points can be made without screaming ‘Nazis!’ at Israelis. Once you slap the yellow star or swastika on Israel, good-faith dialogue ends. All that remains is polarising hatred.

Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer and an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, specialising in defence and the Middle East.