The Wilderness and the Grave in Gaza

Thursday, news outlets began reporting the death of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and key figure behind the devastating terror attack on Israel a year ago. Gruesome photos of him lying amid rubble appeared online. His death offers an inflection point, and a moment of possibility to derail a plan for northern Gaza that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to be “mulling” (or even to have begun implementing).

That plan includes giving hundreds of thousands of people one week to leave the northern third of the Gaza Strip, to treat anyone remaining as combatants, and to starve them out or kill them outright. Whether Netanyahu knows it or not, the plan he’s considering is one that has played out again and again elsewhere in the world across more than a century. It promises a grim future.

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An early precursor to Netanyahu’s plan worth recalling took place in Cuba under Spanish rule at the end of the nineteenth century. Rebellions had erupted for decades without rebels managing to gain independence. In 1895 the insurgents started what would become their final campaign. Spanish forces were mustered under the command of Arsenio Martínez Campos, who had also previously served as governor of the island and helped to forge an end slavery there.

In the field, Martínez Campos quickly found himself upstaged and even routed by the rebels. He began to consider what would actually be required to end the uprising. He wrote to the Spanish prime minister in despair, assessing the situation frankly.

It might be possible, he explained, to “reconcentrate” hundreds of thousands of civilians by ordering them out of contested zones, and keep them behind barbed wire in Spanish-held areas. But that would doom them to “horrible misery and hunger” that there would be no way to relieve. He also thought victory would only be possible if—along with relocating civilians—Spanish forces shot all prisoners and took the families of known insurgents hostage.

As historian John Lawrence Tone wrote, “He realized that the fate of Spain was hanging in the balance,” but Martínez Campos declared that his conscience in these matters transcended even the interests of his country. He could not morally defend these actions and would not be able to push for this kind of Spanish victory.

Spain’s answer was to bring Martínez Campos home and replace him with General Valeriano Weyler, a man already nicknamed “The Butcher.” The measures that his predecessor had identified as immoral were soon implemented.

Residents in specific provinces and districts were given eight days to relocate—which meant that even civilians willing to follow orders did not have long enough to move. Anyone who resisted leaving home or stayed in the countryside with their livestock was considered a rebel collaborator. The result was a horror show that triggered shock abroad.

Israel currently faces different conditions in which it must choose whether to implement its own plan for reconcentración. The government has decades of experience with ghetto-style detention of millions of Palestinians in Gaza, and has been conducting a bombing campaign since the Hamas murders and kidnappings a year ago. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in that window. Today, more than 86% of Palestinians in Gaza are facing crisis-level hunger or worse. Infrastructure and emergency services are already devastated.

More than 125 years ago, Spain made gestures toward food, housing, and concern about civilians. The government mandated the establishment of cultivation zones guarded by Spanish forces, so the dislocated peasants would be able to grow food to eat (though it didn’t follow through reliably on those promises, or explain what reconcentrados should eat while waiting for their first harvest).

What Israel is reported to be proposing is even harsher: a complete shutdown of humanitarian aid going into northern Gaza. The United Nations had been reporting that no trucks carrying food, water or medicine have been allowed to enter since the end of September. But the delivery of some aid was said to have resumed on Monday after the US threatened to withhold arms shipments that Israel is using to conduct the war.

How did this nightmare scenario end in Cuba? Where they were not killed by disease, detainees—mostly women and children—slowly starved to death until they lay down in the streets to die. Photographs of the starving reconcentrados spurred sympathy among Americans and generated fierce support for the US declaration of war against Spain in 1898.

In his statement to Congress calling for war, President William McKinley described civilians devastated by famine and disease. “It was not civilized warfare,” he declared, “it was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

It’s impossible to know the precise number of civilians who died in Cuba as a result of reconcentración, but the floor of the estimates sits around 100,000, with a ceiling several times higher.

The Cuban example was the first in a decade of governments publicly embracing mass detention of civilians in colonial regions around the world. Military strategy led to similar policies and similar outcomes in Southern Africa under British or German rule, and (after America defeated Spain) in the Philippines under US occupation. Civilians were forced to relocate en masse, so that armies could isolate the guerrilla forces they’d found impossible to eradicate. There was talk about protecting civilians by driving them into camps, but by and large, it became clear over time that punishing civilians was part of the military strategy to defeat insurgents.

In the past, people in areas far from imperial capitals might have heard less about the worst deeds that were done in their name, but by the time reconcentración began, foreign reporters and lobbyists could quickly relay information around the world via telegraph lines. It was impossible to hide what had been done. Yet in each subsequent case after Cuba, the government involved claimed that their camps were not at all like the others. They insisted that they were not repeating the kind of atrocities committed elsewhere.

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Decades later, after the Nazis took up centuries of antisemitism in Europe as the basis for their propaganda; after the Jewish and Romani people on the continent had been rounded up, deported, and murdered in camps that went beyond every prior imagining of a concentration camp system; and after Auschwitz finally showed the nadir of humanity that could be reached by targeting and isolating a vulnerable people as a class—camps did not vanish from the Earth.

Instead, during the Cold War, gulags and exile were imposed in the Soviet sphere of influence. In colonial regions, leftist independence movements rose up, and over and over, Western powers emptied contested territory of civilians to fight what was portrayed as the Communist menace. In Kenya, in Algeria, in Vietnam, and other places, ruling powers resorted to tactics from the turn of the century, forcing mass relocation of civilian populations as part of military strategy to fight those deemed terrorists and guerillas.

Rarely did these measures keep civilians safe. These tactics frequently shattered the societies where they were imposed. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, they failed to achieve their goals.

No place is exactly like any other place; no part of history is just like another. But the warning lights flashing in northern Gaza are a beacon already visible to billions around the world. More than a century of history shows the ways that civilians receive the lion’s share of violence and death in mass relocations.

The situation on the ground in Gaza is already far worse than conditions in most of these historical settings. By many reports, the Israeli government has already thrown half-measures to the wind. Multiple doctors report assassination-style sniper targeting of children and the elderly. There is evidence of Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields. Entire extended families have already been annihilated. To apply a fence-and-clear military operation that renders everyone left behind a combatant will lead to apocalypse.

Yahya Sinwar is dead. This may be the last window to stop a vast escalation of the violence in Gaza—an escalation unlikely to secure an end to fighting or to bring the Israeli hostages home. The US has to do its part to keep Israel from launching an operation whose scope could bring a level of death which is, tragically, not at all unimaginable. Now, a more than a century after the deaths of the reconcentrados, more than eighty years since Birkenau became a death camp, it is all too easy to picture what humans are capable of when hatred and fury are left unchecked.