South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) condemn in the strongest terms the proposal for the so-called “humanitarian city” in Gaza to be built on top of the ruins that Israel has made of the City of Rafah, as put forward by Israel’s minister of defence, Israel Katz, and supported by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The proposed development, which would entail the forced removal of Gaza’s remaining population into an even smaller area than the besieged Gaza Strip, can only be described as a concentration camp, as the remaining Gazans will be under military control, their movements subject to the whims of the IDF, without political freedom, freedom of movement or the right to self determination. It is also extremely unlikely, given the way Israel has treated the people of Gaza thus far, that the conditions in this ‘city’ would be in any way adequate or humane.
In response to the plan, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said: “We firmly stand against any plan that involves forced displacements of civilians in Gaza or forces [these civilians] to make impossible choices.” The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that IDF military lawyers have told IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir that any plan to coerce Palestinian civilians into the zone and prevent them from leaving would be illegal. But Israel has shown in the past that it is willing to violate any law to further its goals of domination.
News of this abhorrent plan comes as Gaza’s population endures the results of Israel’s policy of forced starvation, with 19 people starving to death on the 20th of July alone, with the UN warning of a growing epidemic of children suffering from malnutrition, and with 92 people gunned down in food queues while trying to access aid, bringing those that have been killed in this unspeakable fashion to a total of 875 people, as reported by Al Jazeera.
This is just the latest escalation in the catastrophic, brutal and genocidal campaign that the Palestinian population of Gaza has been subjected to by Israel’s occupation forces for almost two years. Palestinians in Gaza continue to be massacred, maimed, starved, displaced, and made to endure a level of physical and psychological destruction none of us could begin to imagine. It is horrific to imagine that, on top of this devastation, Israel plans to forcibly confine the entire population of Gaza in what even former Israeli president Ehud Olmert has labelled a “concentration camp”.
As Israeli-American historian and Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studes at Brown University Omer Bartov recently put it, Israel’s “goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.” It is important that Bartov has come to this conclusion, while disappointing that he took almost two years to do so. It is also extremely disappointing that his op ed on the subject New York Times is one of the first incidences of this publication allowing those it publishes to correctly label what is happening a genocide.
The ‘humanitarian city’ proposal marks a significant escalation in this genocide. By decimating entire families while destroying virtually all of the infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, Israel has rendered it totally uninhabitable. Imprisoning the Palestinian population that remains in Gaza in a concentration camp, where many people will die or be removed from the Strip entirely, is yet another measure taken by Israel which is, in Bartov’s terms, “geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it will never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity.”
We call for the apartheid and settler colonial state of Israel to be held responsible for its crimes through the implementation of international law, and for individuals and governments worldwide to isolate Israel through the tools of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). We demand an immediate end to the ongoing Nakba that has culminated in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza as well as its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank.
We urge people of conscience around the world to increase their efforts to place pressure on the regime and to bring as much attention as possible to the horrors the Palestinians are suffering as a result of its crimes. As South Africans, we also call on our government to enforce an embargo against the sale of coal to Israel, as we currently continue to fuel the genocide by providing this coal through the Swiss company Glencore.
In a recent report, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese named Glencore as the primary supplier of coal for electricity to Israel, and noted that a significant amount of these shipments have come from South Africa. As the report says: “Corporate relations
with Israel must cease until the occupation and apartheid end, and reparations are made. The corporate sector, including its executives, must be held to account, as a necessary step towards ending the genocide and disassembling the global system of racialised capitalism that underpins it”.
We are witnessing Israel enacting its own “Final Solution” in its ongoing attempts to eradicate the Palestinian people, and it is up to the international community to finally put a stop to it. As Jews, the parallels between the current genocide and the extermination of our people in The Nazi Holocaust can not be ignored. The continuities between these two genocides makes a mockery of the phrase ‘Never Again’, which calls for the events that led to the extermination of an estimated 11 million people, including six million Jews, by Germany’s Nazi government never to be repeated. We remind those who use this phrase that it is not meant to apply only to the Jewish people, but to all human beings.
Palestinians have endured 77 years of some of the worst human rights violations imaginable in the name of the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish ethnostate in the region. The struggle for the total liberation of Palestine continues, and we will not rest until this Zionist ethnostate has been dismantled. Only then will we have a hope of seeing a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.