ATLIT, Israel — Jonathan Silberman and Ólöf Andra Proppé, members of the Communist League in the U.K., Bob Aiken from the CL in Australia, and Lea Sherman and Rachele Fruit from the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. toured the Atlit “illegal immigrant” Detention Camp built by the British to intern thousands of Jews trying to flee Hitler’s fascist forces beginning in 1939. They were imprisoned behind barbed-wire fences by British troops and pressed into forced labor on citrus farms there, until many were deported to internment camps in Cyprus and Mauritius. The camp-prison was used to detain fleeing Holocaust survivors after the war.
Tour guide Avital Weissman, left, described the 80 barracks with 40 prisoners in each and how they were “disinfected” with DDT. She stressed the importance of this facility being preserved as part of the history of struggle waged by Jews before, during and after World War II.
One highlight was a film of an October 1945 operation by elite Jewish combat forces in the Haganah freeing 200 detainees who escaped to Haifa. When British troops tried to rearrest them, tens of thousands of working people took to the streets to defend them.
The visitors were part of a group participating in the Contemporary Antisemitism Conference at the University of Haifa July 7-9. Silberman is speaking there on “U.K. policy on the Middle East: Defend British interests, not the Jews.” An article on the conference will be forthcoming.