Jews Bully Blacks In Israeli Concentration Camp [
6 April 2014 ]
Bullying is fun for
psychopaths & Zionist crazies. It works too. 4,000 of them have
decided to go back to the Hellholes they helped create. A bribe of $3,500
helps.
Israel to ‘Protect its Jewish nature’ by Building Concentration Camp for 10,000 African “Infiltrators”
Will the rabidly
anti-British National Party newspaper, the
Jewish Chronicle, condemn
Israel for announcing plans to build a concentration camp to hold 10,000
black African “infiltrators” who “threaten the nature of the Jewish state,”
the party has asked in a letter to that newspaper.
On Israel's little-known concentration and labor camps in 1948-1955
Much of the grim and murky circumstances of the Zionist ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians in the late 1940s have gradually been
exposed over time. One aspect – rarely researched or deeply
discussed – is the internment of thousands of Palestinian civilians
within at least 22 Zionist-run concentration and labor camps that
existed from 1948 to 1955. Now more is known about the contours of
this historical crime, due to the comprehensive research by renowned
Palestinian historian Salman Abu itta and founding member of the
Palestinian resource center BADIL Terry Rempel.
The facts are these.
The study – to be published in the upcoming issue of the
Journal
of Palestine Studies – relies on almost 500 pages of
International Committee of the Red Cross's (ICRC) reports written
during the 1948 war, that were declassified and made available to
the public in 1996, and accidentally discovered by one of the
authors in 1999.
Furthermore, testimonies of 22 former Palestinian civilian
detainees of these camps were collected by the authors, through
interviews they conducted themselves in 2002, or documented by
others during different moments of time.
With these sources of information, the authors, as they put it,
pieced together a clearer story of how Israel captured and
imprisoned “thousands of Palestinian civilians as forced laborers,”
and exploited them “to support its war-time economy.”
Digging up the crimes
“I came across this piece of history in the 1990s when I was
collecting material and documents about Palestinian,” Abu Sitta told
Al-Akhbar English. “The more and more you dig, the more you
find there are crimes that have taken place that are not reported
and not known.”
At that time, Abu Sitta went to Geneva for a week to check out
the newly-opened archives of the ICRC. According to him, the
archives were opened to the public after accusations that the ICRC
had sided with the Nazis during World War II. It was an opportunity
that he could not miss in terms of seeing what the ICRC had recorded
of the events that occurred in Palestine in 1948. It was there he
stumbled onto records discussing the existence of five concentration
camps run by the Israelis.
He then decided to look for witnesses or former detainees,
interviewing Palestinians in occupied Palestine, Syria, and Jordan.
“They all described the same story, and their real experience in
these camps,” he said.
One question that immediately struck him was why there was barely
any references in history about these camps, especially when it
became clearer the more he researched that they existed, and were
more than just five camps.
“Many former Palestinian detainees saw the concept of Israel as
a vicious enemy, so they thought their experience labouring in
these concentration camps was nothing in comparison to the other
larger tragedy of the Nakba.” – Palestinian historian Salman Abu
Sitta
“Many former Palestinian detainees saw the concept of Israel as a
vicious enemy, so they thought their experience labouring in these
concentration camps was nothing in comparison to the other larger
tragedy of the Nakba. The Nakba overshadowed everything,” Abu Sitta
explained.“However, when I dug into the period of 1948-1955, I found more
references like Mohammed Nimr al-Khatib, who was an imam in Haifa,
who had written down interviews with someone from al-Yahya family
that was in one of the camps. I was able to trace this man all the
way to California and spoke with him in 2002,” he added.
More references were eventually and slowly discovered by Abu
Sitta that included information from a Jewish woman called Janoud, a
single masters thesis in Hebrew University about the topic, and the
personal accounts of economist Yusif Sayigh, helped to further flesh
out the scale and nature of these camps.
After more than a decade, Abu Sitta, with his co-author Rempel,
are finally presenting their findings to the public.
From burden to opportunity: concentration and labor camps
The establishment of concentration and labor camps occurred after
the unilateral declaration of Israel's statehood on May 1948.
Prior to that event, the number of Palestinian captives in
Zionist hands were quite low, because, as the study states, “the
Zionist leadership concluded early on that forcible expulsion of the
civilian population was the only way to establish a Jewish state in
Palestine with a large enough Jewish majority to be 'viable'.” In
other words, for the Zionist strategists, prisoners were a burden in
the beginning phases of the ethnic cleansing.
Those calculations changed with the declaration of the Israeli
state and the involvement of the armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and
Transjordan, after much of the ethnic cleansing had occurred. From
that moment, “the Israeli forces began taking prisoners, both
regular Arab soldiers (for eventual exchange), and – selectively –
able-bodied Palestinian non-combatant civilians.”
The first camp was Ijlil, which was about 13 km northeast of
Jaffa, on the site of the destroyed Palestinian village Ijlil al-Qibiliyya,
emptied of its inhabitants in early April. Ijlil was predominately
made up of tents, housing hundreds and hundreds of prisoners,
categorized as POWs by the Israelis, surrounded by barbed wire
fences, watchtowers, and a gate with guards.
As the Israeli conquests grew, in turn exceedingly increasing the
number of prisoners, three more camps were established. These are
the four “official” camps that the Israelis acknowledged and were
actively visited by the ICRC.
The study notes:
All four camps were either on or adjacent to military
installations set up by the British during the Mandate. These
had been used during World War II for the interment of German,
Italian, and other POWs. Two of the camps – Atlit, established
in July about 20 kms south of Haifa, and Sarafand, established
in September near the depopulated village of Sarafand al-Amar in
central Palestine—had earlier been used in the 1930s and 1940s
to detain illegal Jewish immigrants.
Atlit was the second largest camp after Ijlil, it had the
capacity of holding up to 2,900 prisoners, while Sarafand had the
maximum capacity of 1,800, and Tel Letwinksy, near Tel Aviv, held
more than 1,000.
All four camps were administered by “former British officers who
had defected their ranks when British forces withdrew from Palestine
in mid-May 1948,” and the camp's guards and administrative staff
were former members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang – both groups
designated as terrorist organizations by the British before their
departure. In total, the four “official” camps were staffed by 973
soldiers.
A fifth camp, called Umm Khalid, was established at a site of
another depopulated village near the Zionist settlement of Netanya,
and was even assigned an official number in the records, but never
attained “official” status. It had the capacity to hold 1,500
prisoners. Unlike the other four camps, Umm Khalid would be “the
fist camp established exclusively as a labor camp” and was “the
first of the “recognized” camps to be shut down...by the end of
1948.”
Complementing these five “recognized” camps, were at least 17
other “unrecognized camps” that were not mentioned in official
sources, but the authors discovered through multiple prisoner
testimonies.
“Many of [these camps],” the authors noted, “[were] apparently
improvised or ad hoc, often consisting of no more than a police
station, a school, or the house of a village notable,” with holding
capacities that ranged from almost 200 prisoners to tens.
Most of the camps, official and unofficial, were situated within
the borders of the UN-proposed Jewish state, “although at least four
[unofficial camps] – Beersheba, Julis, Bayt Daras, and Bayt Nabala –
were in the UN-assigned Arab state and one was inside the Jerusalem
“corpus separatum.”
“[T]he situation of civilian internees was ‘absolutely confused’
with that of POWs, and… Jewish authorities ‘treated all Arabs
between the ages of 16 and 55 as combatants and locked them up
as prisoners of war.’” – ICRC report, 1948
The number of Palestinian non-combatant detainees “far exceeded”
those of Arab soldiers in regular armies or bona fide POWs. Citing a
July 1948 monthly report made by ICRC mission head Jacques de
Reynier, the study states that de Reynier noted, “that the situation
of civilian internees was ‘absolutely confused’ with that of POWs,
and that the Jewish authorities ‘treated all Arabs between the ages
of 16 and 55 as combatants and locked them up as prisoners of war.’”
In addition, the ICRC found among the detainees in official camps,
that 90 of the prisoners were elderly men, and 77 were boys, aged 15
years or younger.
The study highlights the statements by an ICRC delegate Emile
Moeri in January 1949 of the camp inmates:
It is painful to see these poor people, especially old, who
were snatched from their villages and put without reason in a
camp, obliged to pass the winter under wet tents, away from
their families; those who could not survive these conditions
died. Little children (10-12 years) are equally found under
these conditions. Similarly sick people, some with tuberculosis,
languish in these camps under conditions which, while fine for
healthy individuals, will certainly lead to their death if we do
not find a solution to this problem. For a long time we have
demanded that the Jewish authorities release those civilians who
are sick and need treatment to the care of their families or to
an Arab hospital, but we have not received a response.
As the report noted, “there are no precise figures on the total
number of Palestinian civilians held by Israel during the 1948-49
war” and estimates tend to not account for “unofficial” camps, in
addition to the frequent movement of prisoners between the camps in
use. In the four “official” camps, the number of Palestinian
prisoners never exceeded 5,000 according to figures in Israeli
records.
Taking accounting the capacity of Umm Khalid, and estimates of
the “unofficial camps,” the final number of Palestinian prisoners
could be around the 7,000 range, and perhaps much more, as the study
states, when taking into account a November 17, 1948 diary entry by
David Ben-Gurion, one of the main Zionist leaders and Israel's first
prime minister, who mentioned “the existence of 9,000 POWs in
Israeli-run camps.”
In general, the living conditions in the “official” camps were
far below what would be considered appropriate by international law
at that time. Moeri, who visited the camps constantly, reported that
in Ijlil in November 1948: “"[m]any [of the] tents are torn, that
the camp was “not ready for winter,” the latrines not covered, and
the canteen not working for two weeks. Referring to an apparently
ongoing situation, he stated that "the fruits are still defective,
the meat is of poor quality, [and] the vegetables are in short
supply."
Furthermore, Moeri reported that he saw for himself, “'the wounds
left by the abuse' of the previous week, when the guards had fired
on the prisoners, wounding one, and had beaten another.”
As the study shows, the civilian status of the majority of the
detainees were clear for the ICRC delegates in the country, who
reported that the men captured “had undoubtedly never been in a
regular army.” Detainees who were combatants, the study explains,
were “routinely shot on the pretense that they had been attempting
to escape.”
The Israeli forces seemed to always target able-bodied men,
leaving behind women, children, and the elderly – when not
massacring them – the policy continued even after there were low
levels of military confrontation. All in all, as the Israeli records
show and the study cites, “Palestinian civilians comprised the vast
majority (82 percent) of the 5,950 listed as internees in the POW
camps, while the Palestinians alone (civilian plus military)
comprised 85 percent.”
The wide-scale kidnapping and imprisonment of Palestinian
civilians tend to correspond with the Israeli military campaigns.
For example, one of the first major roundup occurred during
Operation Danj, when 60-70,000 Palestinians were expelled from the
central towns of Lydda and Ramleh. At the same time, between a fifth
and a quarter of the male population from these two towns who were
over the age of 15 were sent to the camps.
The largest round-up of civilians came from villages of central
Galilee who were captured during Operation Hiram in the fall of
1948.
One Palestinian survivor, Moussa, described to the authors what
he witnessed at the time.
“They took us from all villages around us: al-Bi'na, Deir al-Asad,
Nahaf, al-Rama, and Eilabun. They took 4 young men and shot them
dead...They drove us on foot. It was hot. We were not allowed to
drink. They took us to [the Palestinian Druze village] al-Maghar,
then [to the Jewish settlement] Nahalal, then to Atlit.”
A November 16, 1948 UN report collaborated Moussa's account,
stating that some 500 Palestinian men “were taken by force march and
vehicle to a Jewish concentration camp at Nahlal.”
Maintaining Israel’s economy with “slave labor”
The policy of targeting civilians, particular “able-bodied” men,
was not accidental according to the study. It states, “with tens of
thousands of Jewish men and women called up for military service,
Palestinian civilian internees constituted an important supplement
to the Jewish civilian labor employed under emergency legislation in
maintaining the Israeli economy,” which even the ICRC delegation had
noted in their reports.
Abuses by the Israeli guards were systematically rife in the
camps, the brunt of which was directed towards villagers,
farmers, and lower class Palestinians.
The prisoners were forced to do public and military work, such as
drying wetlands, working as servants, collecting and transporting
looted refugee property, moving stones from demolished Palestinian
homes, paving roads, digging military trenches, burying the dead,
and much more.
As one former Palestinian detainee named Habib Mohammed Ali
Jarada described in the study, "At gunpoint, I was made to work all
day. At night, we slept in tents. In winter, water was seeping below
our bedding, which was dry leaves, cartons and wooden pieces.”
Another prisoner in Umm Khalid, Marwan Iqab al-Yehiya said in an
interview with the authors, “We had to cut and carry stones all day
[in a quarry]. Our daily food was only one potato in the morning and
half dried fish at night. They beat anyone who disobeyed orders.”
This labor was interspersed with acts of humiliation by the Israeli
guards, as Yehiya speaks of prisoners being “lined up and ordered to
strip naked as a punishment for the escape of two prisoners at
night.”
“[Jewish] Adults and children came from nearby kibbutz to watch
us line up naked and laugh. To us this was most degrading,” he
added.
Abuses by the Israeli guards were systematic and rife in the
camps, the brunt of which was directed towards villagers, farmers,
and lower class Palestinians. This was so, the study said, because
educated prisoners “knew their rights and had the confidence to
argue with and stand up to their captors.”
What is also interestingly noted by the study is how ideological
affiliations between prisoners and their guards had another effects
in terms of the relationship between them.
Citing the testimony of Kamal Ghattas, who was captured during
the Israeli attack in the Galilee, who said:
We had a fight with our jailers. Four hundred of us
confronted 100 soldiers. They brought reinforcements. Three of
my friends and I were taken to a cell. They threatened to shoot
us. All night we sang the Communist Anthem. They took the four
of us to Umm Khaled camp. The Israelis were afraid of their
image in Europe. Our contact with our Central Committee and
Mapam [Socialist Israeli party] saved us .… I met a Russian
officer and told him they took us from our homes although we
were non-combatants which was against the Geneva Conventions.
When he knew I was a Communist he embraced me and said,
"Comrade, I have two brothers in the Red Army. Long live Stalin.
Long Live Mother Russia".
Yet, the less fortunate Palestinians faced acts of violence which
included arbitrary executions and torture, with no recourse. The
executions were always defended as stopping “escape attempts” – real
or claimed by the guards.
It became so common that one former Palestinian detainee of Tel
Litwinsky, Tewfic Ahmed Jum'a Ghanim recounted, “Anyone who refused
to work was shot. They said [the person] tried to escape. Those of
us who thought [we] were going to be killed walked backward facing
the guards.”
“Anyone who refused to work was shot. They said [the person]
tried to escape. Those of us who thought [we] were going to be
killed walked backward facing the guards.” – Former Palestinian
detainee Tewfic Ahmed Jum'a Ghanim
Ultimately, by the end of 1949, Palestinian prisoners were
gradually released after heavy lobbying by the ICRC, and other
organizations, but the releases were limited in scale and very
focused to specific cases. Prisoners of Arab armies were released in
prisoner exchanges, but Palestinian prisoners were unilaterally
expelled across the armistice line without any food, supplies, or
shelter, and told to walk into the distance, never to return.
It would not be until 1955 when most of the Palestinian civilian
prisoners would finally be released.
An enduring crime
The importance of this study is multifaceted. Not only does it
reveal the numerous violations of international law and conventions
of the age, such as 1907 Hague Regulations and the 1929 Geneva
Conventions, but also shows how the event shaped the ICRC in the
long run.
Because the ICRC was faced with a belligerent Israeli actor who
was unwilling to listen and conform to international law and
conventions, the ICRC itself had to adapt in what it considered were
practical ways to help ensure the Palestinian civilian prisoners
were protected under the barest of rights.
Citing his final report, the study quotes de Reynier:
[The ICRC] protested on numerous occasions affirming the
right of these civilians to enjoy their freedom unless found
guilty and judged by a court. But we have tacitly accepted their
POW status because in this way they would enjoy the rights
conferred upon them by the Convention. Otherwise, if they were
not in the camps they would be expelled [to an Arab country] and
in one way or another, they would lead, without resources, the
miserable life of refugees.
In the end, the ICRC and other organizations were simply
ineffective as Israel ignored its condemnations with impunity, in
addition to the diplomatic cover of major Western powers.
More importantly, the study sheds more light on the extent of the
Israeli crimes during its brutal and bloody birth. And “much more
remains to be told,” as the final line of the study states.
“It is amazing to me, and many Europeans, who have seen my
evidence,” Abu Sitta said, “that a forced labor camp was opened in
Palestine three years after they were closed in Germany, and were
run by former prisoners – there were German Jewish guards.”
The study essentially shows the foundations and beginnings of
Israeli policy towards Palestinian civilians that comes in the
form of kidnapping, arrest, and detainment.
“This is a bad reflection of the human spirit, where the oppressed
copies an oppressor against innocent lives,” he added.The study essentially shows the foundations and beginnings of
Israeli policy towards Palestinian civilians that comes in the form
of kidnapping, arrest, and detainment. This criminality continues
till this day. One merely has to read the reports on the
hundreds of Palestinians arrested prior, during, and after
Israel's latest war on Gaza mid-summer of this year.
“Gaza today is a concentration camp, no different than the past,”
Abu Sitta concluded to Al-Akhbar English.
