• I ACCEPT John Wilson’s correction in his letter (Racism history, October 12) that British concentration camps, set up by Lord Roberts during the Boer War, were not a historic novelty.

Nonetheless they were a stain on the reputation on imperial Britain’s reputation.

The Boer farmers and their families (literally torched out of house and home by British troops) and “concentrated” in them, suffered extraordinarily high levels of malnutrition, disease and death. On various estimates, between a quarter and one-third died in these horrifying camps.

Many in Britain at the time – because it was a growing democracy – did not take the same sanguine view of conditions in them as John Wilson does. They were nasty, brutal places. Quite rightly there was an outcry against them both in the UK and abroad.

Britain in 1901 was oldest democracy in Europe with a world-famous parliament where progressive radical social legislation had been enacted. England had its civil war more than 100 years before France and America; it had led in abolishing the trade in slaves, policing its legislation with a powerful Royal Navy.

It saw itself as a leading, pious Protestant Christian nation. Since Palmerston, Britain had pompously lectured foreign nations about Britain’s superiority industrially, politically, socially and in every other way.

So in Europe and America the appearance of concentration camps in British South Africa, led to entirely reasonable taunts of perfidious and hypocritical Albion.

So, John Wilson misses the point of my original letter: that the Israeli government reasonably suffers international and national criticism over its Palestinian policy similar to that, which quite reasonably, Britain suffered over its South Africa policy in 1901.

Arguably it’s Israel’s high reputation as an otherwise progressive democracy, operating mostly under the rule of law, which drives the vehemence of the criticism of Israeli government policy and not, as alleged, “anti-Semitism”. Confusing one with the other is dangerous.

ROBERT SUTHERLAND SMITH
Widecombe Way, N2