Nowhere is safe
The latest target in Israel’s terror campaign is a school in Jabaliya. Let me be clear that this wasn’t a terrorist training camp. It was a children’s school, run by the United Nations. It was clearly marked as a school, and like all UN buildings in the Occupied Territories its GPS coordinates had been supplied to the Israeli military. There can therefore be no question of it being hit by accident – like Israel’s “accidental” murder of 17 people in a Gaza market recently.
If an Arab state had done this to an Israeli school, then the American tanks would already be rolling in. Will anyone in the international community have the courage to bring this rogue state under control? It is long since past time that Israel was made to withdraw to its own borders – rather than blockading Gaza and building illegal squatter towns in the West Bank. In the short term at least, the Israeli military must ensure that the perpetrators of this atrocity are brought to justice.
–UPDATE 8th January–
Cardinal Renato Martino of the Catholic Church’s ‘Vatican Council for Justice and Peace’ (Author’s note: I’m not sure what that is, Wikipedia has drawn a blank and there’s no official site. Assuming it’s some sort of charity/poverty campaigning thing) has reiterated what campaigners have been saying about Israel’s behaviour for years: Israel has turned Gaza into an open air prison. Actually the phrase he used was ‘concentration camp’. Of course the response from the Israeli government and pro-Israeli pressure groups has been to invoke everything from Godwin’s Law to anti-Holocaust denial legislation. However the original meaning of ‘concentration camp’ is, one can argue, very close to what Gaza has become:
At the time that Kitchener started the concentration camps in South Africa the war had entered the guerilla phase and set battles during which farms could be destroyed no longer happened. By destroying crops, livestock and farmsteads under the ‘Scorched Earth’ policy the Boer fighters were deprived of supplies and shelter.It also left the women and children on such farms destitute and they were forcibly removed, against their will, to the camps where thousands died of disease and starvation.
Use of the word concentration comes from the idea of concentrating a group of people who are in some way undesirable in one place, where they can be watched by those who incarcerated them. For example, in a time of insurgency, potential supporters of the insurgents are placed where they cannot provide them with supplies or information. (from the Wikipedia article ‘Internment‘. Copyright 2003 – 2009 Wikipedia contributors.)
If anyone can put forward an argument as to why that description does not apply to Gaza, I’m happy to listen. I’ll even post it as a further update to this article. Despite the modern assumption, the phrase ‘concentration camp’ does not purely refer to the appalling Nazi camps of World War II. This doesn’t excuse the fact that the Cardinal knew exactly what meaning people would take from his words, and could have chosen a better phrase. “Prison camp” would have conveyed the message without the unsustainable Nazi connotations.
–End Update–
External links