A friend of mine (half Lebanese, half Palestinian) would often claim that Israel has concentration camps wherein it holds (innocent, or so he claims) Palestinians.
My question - all polemics and politics aside - is: does Israel have concentration camps?
Yes (with proof) or no, please. No politics.
WRS
What does your friend offer in support of his position?
I wonder if you’re friend also believes that Israel warned 4,000 people to stay away from the World Trade Center on Sep 11, 2001…
Zev Steinhardt
There are prisons in Israel where there are certainly Palestinians along with Israelis and others. There are refugee camps for Palestinians but they’re not in Israel. I think that the answer is no.
Haj
I haven’t spoken to him for many years. I know he backed up his claims somehow, but I have forgotten what his support was. It might have been hearsay. All I remember is that whenever the topic of Israel came up (which was often enough - I was my high school’s only outspoken Zionist, and this was an American high school in an Arab country), he would claim that Israel has illegally incarcerated many innocent Palestinians in concentration camps (followed by the usual diatribe of how Israel is a hypocrite). I’d maybe do some research online about what arguments such people use, but I don’t want to have a heart attack from rage just yet. So much anti-Israel material is plain stupid, wrong, and unbelievable.
In any case, it doesn’t matter. Does Israel have concentration camps? I’m guessing no, but if someone has proof otherwise, I’d like to see what that proof is.
WRS
There are stories about concentration camps in the US as well. Finding them, however, has proven to be a bit of a challenge.
I also think “prison” or “detention center” vs “concentration camp” is an important distinction. Most holding facilities are not concentration camps.
No concentration camps that I know of. Israel does practice administrative detention (which they got from the British). Administrative detention is a practice whereby the government, for matters of security, is allowed to hold someone, without bringing charges against them. Israel’s not the only state to do this (I think Britain did it in Northern Ireland), and it’s legal under international law, but it is easy to abuse.
Well, there are certainly a lot of prisons and detention centers that are sometimes called that, mainly by Palestinian organizations (I think others are wary of the word because of its connotations with the death camps of WWII). If you want some names to start with, there’s the Fara’a detention center in the northeastern part of the West Bank, the Etzion internment camp north of Hebron, the Dutan center near Jenin and newly-opened detention center in the Negev in southern Israel.
Israel has a practice called “administrative detention” that is basically locking up anybody suspected of wrongdoing. It’s for six months at a time, but can be renewed indefinitely. Read more about it here.
There were also the camps in Southern Lebanon operated by the SLA, or Southern Lebanese Army, which many describe as a puppet organization of the Israeli army (though they deny involvement). They had some lovely facilities like the Al-Khiam prison that might deserve the name. The inmates there received torture on a regular schedule of three hours a session, three times a day. The BBC has more.
I don’t know if concentration camp is the right word for these prisons (what’s the definition?). Certainly people are treated harshly and kept in squalid conditions for years without being charged for any crimes. Reports of torture or torture-like practices are common. The inmates are not murdered or worked to death as in the death camps of WWII, however.
If you’re interested in the subject, why not go to Amnesty International (a well respected, neutral organization if ever there was one) and read a little about it?
I would like to add that the Israelis are not the only wrongdoers in the conflict, but that I think these prisons need to be discussed seriously.
As for the argument that some of these prisons and detention centers are not in Israel itself, the same argument could be made for the German death camps of world war II, which where not in Germany itself, but in the occupied countries in the east (mainly Poland). Yet nobody would argue that Germany didn’t have death camps.
I’m not, of course, equating the Israeli prisons with the Nazi death camps - they are a very different beast. I’m just not very happy with the argument that since country X operates facilities in country Y, they are not responsible for them because they are not in country X.
(For the record, I must state that Amnesty International is not neutral. There’s nary a peep from AI about human rights violations by Palestinians authorities.)
I guess it does seem like a semantic issue - detention center, concentration camp, prison, bad and scary place with a roof and four walls: it’s difficult to differentiate.
So, Israel doesn’t have concentration camps per se. Good to know.
WRS
I have known a man originally from S. Lebanon for quite a few years (we have done a couple of research papers together). He has personally known several people who just disappeared. They were in the wrong village in S. Lebanon at the wrong time, the Israeli Army comes in and arrests a bunch of men at random and that’s it.
So some Hezbollah jerk comes into town, fires a missile and leaves. The next day you get hauled off to Israel. Nice.
As you can imagine, he has quite strong views on this. Regardless of the terms used, this is a not a good thing.
Whenever I hear someone say “amnesty does not say anything on …” I just know that they haven’t even bothered to check. Here is the amnesty criticisms of the Palestinian authority, including executions, detentions, and stifling political dissent.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/palestinian_authority/index.do
What more do you want?
Maybe something that pertains to some of the really nasty stuff that happened in the last three years?
The last entry on that page is from 11/01.
I’m not bashing you OR Amnesty, but your cite seems a bit outdated.
One link away from the URL provided by scm1001: the 2004 annual report which seems to cover the year 2003.