The concentration camp is becoming a symbol of our era, just as it was in the 1930s and 1940s when six million Jews were murdered by the Nazi state. The Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi, who barely survived Auschwitz, gave a simple but profound explanation in his memoir, If This Is a Man, as to what motivates people to mistreat and torture each other.
“Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’,” wrote Levi. “For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.
“But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager [concentration camp].’
The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone “as a sinister alarm-signal” Levi concluded, a signal which is now once again becoming horribly visible in different parts of the world.
The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, has instructed the Israeli army to draw up plans to force 600,000 Palestinians into a “humanitarian city”, to be constructed on the ruins of Rafah. The remaining 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza will be sent there later and will not be allowed to leave.
“It is a concentration camp,” Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert said this week. “If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing.”
US advancing down a dark path
Judging by its actions in recent years, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long regarded all Palestinians as enemies to be regularly targeted for collective punishment. But the US is now advancing swiftly down the same dark path in its treatment of legal and illegal immigrants.
The state of Florida is spending $450m to build the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp in the swamps of the Everglades west of Miami, where 4,000 inmates accused of being illegal immigrants will ultimately be detained.
Cruelty and neglect are the norm. One prisoner, Rick Herrera, speaking over the phone to The New York Times, told how he had arrived on a bus with other detainees, all of whom had their hands and feet shackled. They had to stay on their bus overnight, still shackled, and without food or water. Inside the facility they were housed in leaky tents, ill-fed and suffered from sleep deprivation with bright lights on all night.
The speed and ferocity with which the state can give pariah status to any single group of people, or to anybody expressing sympathy for them, is always frightening. Having reported on oppressive regimes from Haiti to Afghanistan for decades this comes as no surprise to me.
But I was still shocked this week when, a few hundred yards from my house in Canterbury, two armed police officers threatened to arrest one woman, Laura Murton, under the Terrorism Act because she was peacefully standing on the grass at St George’s Roundabout with a Palestinian flag and signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide”.
A policeman told her that “mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated by the Government”. Astonished at what was happening to her, Murton said that if the opinions expressed on her placards were an arrestable offence, then they would “have to arrest half the country”.
One of the policemen added that the phrase “Free Gaza” was “supportive of Palestine Action”, and it was an offence “to express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation, namely Palestine Action is an offence under section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act” under which she had already committed an offence.
Asked if she supported Palestine Action, proscribed two weeks ago, she said that she did not. But the police still demanded that she give them her name and address, or they would arrest her.
The state of civil liberties in Britain
After briefly claiming that her signs might dangerously divert the attention of drivers at the roundabout, the policemen said that she still faced arrest if she displayed the same words in nearby Canterbury high street, which is pedestrianised. Reluctantly, she gave them her name and address. As all this was filmed by Murton, anybody interested in the state of civil liberties in Britain should watch her exchange with the police on YouTube.
It is extraordinary – and depressing – to realise that, had Ehud Olmert held up a placard in Canterbury this week carrying his remark about Israel setting up a concentration camp in Gaza and carrying out ethnic cleansing, he too might have faced arrest as a supporter of terrorism.
As with the second suspension of Diane Abbott as a Labour MP for her perfectly arguable views about racism, the Starmer government instinctively opts for self-defeating authoritarianism. Critics and dissidents are treated as enemies, whether they are MPs who vote against welfare cuts or lone protesters appalled by the butchery of women and children in Gaza.
Though Starmer has since apologised for his infamous speech about Britain becoming “an island of strangers” in a clumsy bid for the anti-immigrant vote, his words fit all too well into Primo Levi’s vision, borne out by his own sufferings, about how easily a government can demonise strangers and turn them into mortal enemies.
The Starmer government, on occasion, grudgingly distances itself from Israel’s destruction of Gaza. But in practice, like most European governments, it lines up with Israel – an alliance graphically illustrated on a small scale by the encounter in Canterbury between Murton and the two policemen, who were clearly well-briefed about their powers of arrest under the Terrorism Act.
Israel’s newly forged dominance in the Middle East and mass migration to Europe from the region may seem like separate issues. But they are intimately connected.
If one symbol of the 1930s and 1940s was the concentration camp, another was the mass exodus of refugees in flight from the camps and other horrors. It is Western-led or supported wars and sanctions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Syria over the past 20 years that have provoked mass migration by those not able to live a tolerable life in their home country. From those four countries come the majority of the asylum seekers crossing the Channel in small boats.
Yet the new era in which Israel, backed by the US, dominates the Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than in the past. In the last few days, Israel has carried out airstrikes in the centre of Damascus while other strikes took place in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen earlier in the month.
As all these countries are progressively wrecked, another great wave of desperate migrants in flight will seek to make their way to Europe. Everywhere, strangers are turning into enemies.
Further thoughts
How will the Israeli airstrike on central Damascus this week impact on the sort of people who take small boats across the Channel from France to the UK?
The two events are intimately connected because the continuing disintegration of the Middle East means that its people will have no alternative but to try to rebuild their lives elsewhere. This has been the consequence of the military and economic wars waged against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Lebanon over the past quarter of a century.
These conflicts are the far end of a conduit down which people make dangerous journeys, suffering terrible hardships on the way, to reach the White Cliffs of Dover. Governments in the UK are either blind or embarrassed by their own role in driving this mass migration. It is lazily said that asylum seekers in the small boats come from “failed states”. But it is important to ask: who did the failing?
Of the 174,000 people arriving on the Kent coast between 2018 to 2024, the five largest national groups were from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Albania – though Albanian immigration was something of a blip.
Western complicity in wrecking the societies from which migrants come is strange since everybody knows the political explosion in Europe ignited by the flight of Syrians from the Syrian civil war 10 years ago. It was this which gave the far right its opportunity and probably led to the pro-Brexit vote in the UK referendum. In 2011, the Western backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi reduced Libya to a murderous anarchy in which criminal warlords earned vast profits smuggling people across the Mediterranean.
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That was ancient history, but over the last year a new Middle East has been created by Israel’s military success in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Syria. Israeli military dominance, backed by its airpower and fully supported by the US, is the new norm. But the Israeli-US hegemony will depend on the periodic use of extreme force and will be entirely unstable, most likely provoking the mass exodus of refugees heading north and west from the shattered cities and towns of the Middle East.
Sir Keir Starmer speaks of “smashing the gangs” organising people smuggling, infantilising a problem driven by high demand from desperate people, ensuring vast profits for those who transport them. If one gang of smugglers is caught, they will be promptly replaced by another – as in the drugs trade.
A curious feature of the super-patriotic Reform UK party is that so few of its ideas and priorities are indigenous to Britain. On the contrary, almost all are transplants from the Trumpian agenda of the Maga Republicans, notably an obsession with combating “trans ideology”, supposedly rife across the land.
Since Reform UK’s triumph in the local elections on 1 May, the party now has control of several county councils, enabling us to see them in action.
Reform UK won 57 out of 81 seats on Kent County Council (KCC) and have been quick to deal with pressing issues, notably the removal of a book for autistic trans people from the children’s section of local libraries.
The excellent online newsletter Kent Current has the story in a fascinating article by Ed Jennings with the title “First They Came for the Books”. He quotes the Reform UK’s Leader on KCC, Linden Kemkaran, as claiming the book purge as “another victory for common sense in Kent,” adding that “telling children they’re in the ‘wrong body’ is wrong and simply unacceptable”.
Alongside this, she included photos of the book in question, The Autistic Trans Guide to Life, part of a Pride month display at Herne Bay Library. Jennings points out that there is a problem here because the evidence is that the book was never in the children’s section of the library at Herne Bay.
The case of the Herne Bay trans book is evidently a tiny Kentish echo of the giant book purge by Maga Republicans of libraries across the US. With only one book under its belt so far, KCC has a long way to go.
Cockburn’s picks
I thought this piece in The Wall Street Journal about vigilante groups increasingly taking control of Russia’s streets, as police leave for higher salaries fighting in the war in Ukraine, told one a lot about the present state of Russia. In some towns and cities, half the frontline police officers have gone.
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