Why Gaza is not a prison
Critics of Israel have latched onto the very graphic term “open-air prison” to try to communicate the extent of the humiliation and humanitarian crisis of the people entrapped in the walled-off enclave to the south-west of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and West Bank.
This metaphor has its uses, because the conditions are certainly highly restrictive and prison-like in Gaza, so the term can be useful especially in initiating general public awareness of the injustice of the Gazan situation, where millions of people are besieged from all sides and under bombardment as I write this, with nowhere to run.
I am writing because I have lately come to the view that our over-use of and reliance on this phrase “open-air prison” to describe Gaza actually feeds into and supports the master colonial narrative, for the subtext — at times subliminal but often openly stated by the leaders of Israel — is that the indigenous people are criminals, “savage”, “barbaric”, the PM says, needing to be permanently contained or expunged from the record of the living.
Describing Gaza as a prison simply doesn’t do justice to the facts.
- The people held captive in Gaza are not convicts but mostly refugees.
- People do not have their own houses in prison
- Generations of people are not born and married in prison
- Prison inmates are not exterminated en masse by the government.
- Prisons are not deprived of water, food and means of sustenance.
Gaza is thus not a prison by any proper definition. I concede that it is surely prison-like and that people are severely restricted. It is embarrassing in many respects, but we must have the courage to admit that the Gaza Strip is to all intents and purposes a modern concentration camp for the dispossessed people of Palestine.
I can see why the Israeli officials in charge of the evacuation and extermination plan in Gaza would prefer to avoid the use of the term, because of its tragic associations, but it has been well said that in a world of lies, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. One has to call a thing by its name in order to be able to have a meaningful and sensible discussion.
In Gaza the displaced Palestinians have been gradually encircled by the Great Wall of Israel and starved within for decades. The problem is that the underlying and somewhat subliminal implication of calling it a “prison” is that the captives held there are somehow assumed to be guilty of something, deserving punishment.
According to the official line, by their very longing to return to their homes, by their very existence, the Palestinians are generally suspected of criminal intent and sedition against the colonial state, and therefore need to be contained and/or eliminated.
The master would persuade us that these people are guilty by birth, by definition. And that is not true. We must reject the dominant narrative, for the liar in charge intends to subvert the most fundamental truth and obvious aspects of reality in order to present himself as the good guy in this Nakba 2.0. We would do well to heed the warning from Voltaire, that:
“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Thus, in my view this provides comfort and aid to the colonizer for us to describe his place of illegal containment a prison, for it subtly implies the guilt of his captives, who are in reality hostages of the situation, many born into captivity.
By avoiding the correct though harsh term, ‘concentration camp’, in reference to #Gaza and by referring to it metaphorically as a ‘prison’ we are doing the genocidal maniacs in power a great favor by denying the objective reality of those native people’s innocence by cloaking it in a convenient falsehood. For if they are in any kind of prison, surely all the children of Gaza have been falsely imprisoned from birth, and can never prove their innocence since they have never been charged with anything. They are just guilty: of existing, of being on land that the colonist desires.
That implication my reader will naturally find revulsive to even consider: that the leaders of Israel, who claim moral superiority in their war on Gaza have long been the overseers of the world’s largest concentration camp and the perpetual humilation and torture of its people. And that now, in October 2023, for reasons that historians and psychologists will debate for a long time, the colonists have decided to degrade their concentration camp into an extermination camp, in full view of the world.
Perhaps it needs be said that no sane person can relish the suffering of other human beings, no matter their color or nationality, so the destruction and bloodlust is surely no cause of joy to me, as it is apparently to some western leaders, who have joined in cheerleading the genocidaires.
But the inescapable fact that the whole world cannot ignore or unsee, is that the mighty Israel actually runs a massive concentration camp north of Egypt holding over 2 million native Palestinians hostage and uses all its might to demonize and vilify its captives.
Yet behind the high wall, amid the noise of the screaming jets overhead and the world’s most sophisticated bombs dropped on Gaza by the men who believe they are the bringers of civilization, we could in the quiet moments hear that the ‘beast’ that they fear so much was not roaring, it was weeping.
