Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Wednesday and Thursday this week, will likely see Israeli and US politicians use the opportunity to suggest that their destruction of Gaza is somehow about protecting Jews from another Holocaust – and that anyone who protests against this destruction is really motivated by antisemitism.
That’s certainly what happened last year, when both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former US President Joe Biden made such claims. In response, 10 Holocaust survivors issued a letter, stating: “To use the memory of the Holocaust like this to justify either genocide in Gaza or repression on college campuses is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”
It’s not just Netanyahu and Biden who have misused the Holocaust in this way. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was clearly referring to the pro-Palestine movement when he talked about antisemitism on university campuses and “hatred marching on our streets” in a speech at the Holocaust Educational Trust last September.
This misuse of the Holocaust and antisemitism to discredit opponents of the Gaza genocide has now paved the way for the UK government to announce a new law banning protests near places of worship, including synagogues. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s justification for this was that several London synagogues had been “disrupted” by pro-Palestine protests on “too many occasions”.
What she didn’t mention was that there hasn’t been a single reported incident of any threat to a synagogue linked to any pro-Palestine demonstration. This is consistent with my own experience as someone who has, along with many others, carried signs highlighting my Jewish heritage at numerous pro-Palestine demonstrations.
My sign reads: “This son of a Holocaust survivor says stop the genocide in Gaza.” Along with other survivor descendants, I am not just warmly welcomed, but often cheered by thousands of our fellow demonstrators.
Of course, synagogues deserve to be safe from any real threats. But the fact that some synagogue attendees have strong political disagreements with opponents of the Gaza genocide does not mean that anyone’s right to protest should be repressed.
Unfortunately, as in the US and Germany, the UK government’s priority is not to defend the rights of its citizens, but to defend its support for seemingly endless wars in the Middle East. The fact that police recently questioned Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos over his participation in a pro-Palestine protest on 18 January is just one indicator of this very worrying trend towards more war and repression
Organisers of the 18 January protest had originally intended to march from the BBC headquarters to Whitehall. But the march was banned on the pretext that it was a threat to a local synagogue – a building that wasn’t even on the march route.
The Jewish Chronicle did claim that the rabbi of this synagogue said that he’d heard chants of “genocide of Jews” at a previous protest. But Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, says he discussed the issue with police, and the slogan the rabbi was referring to was merely: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
In other words, it seems police took the unprecedented step of banning a major demonstration based on a misinterpretation of a single slogan.
This marked a clear victory for pro-Israel campaigners, who had been trying to stop our protests for some time. A year ago, their strategy included the following shocking assertion from the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Gideon Falter: “Instead of addressing [the] threat of antisemitic violence, the Met’s policy instead seems to be that law-abiding Jewish Londoners should not be in the parts of London where these marches are taking place. In other words, that they are no-go zones for Jews.”
Falter made these widely publicised comments after being prevented from walking towards a pro-Palestine march by the Metropolitan police in April 2024, with one officer saying his “openly Jewish” appearance could antagonise the marchers.
The story, however, proved to be rather more complicated as the officer also said, he’d seen Falter “deliberately leave the pavement and walk against the march”. Not only that, our group of “openly Jewish” Holocaust survivor descendants were actually standing just a few metres away from Falter throughout his interactions with the police. This all seemed to contradict his claims that he was just trying to “cross the road” and that the area was a no-go zone for Jews.
The Falter story eventually faded, only for the media to push an even more absurd story, asserting that during another pro-Palestine march in April, the Hyde Park Holocaust Memorial was covered with a tarpauline amid concerns that it could be vandalised by an “antisemitic mob”.
Naturally, these reports failed to mention that Stephen Kapos was on the march’s front line, or that, once in Hyde Park, participants listened in awed silence to his descriptions of his Holocaust experiences. This was a crowd that had come together to oppose a genocide, not to attack a genocide memorial.
In his speech last September, Starmer said: “Just as I fought to bring my party back from the abyss of antisemitism, I promise you I will do the same in leading the country. So yes, we will build that national Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre. And build it next to Parliament.”
This new memorial would make sense if we had equally prominent memorials for the tens of millions of victims of wars, famines and massacres perpetrated by the British Empire. But of course, there are no plans to build huge monuments next to Parliament for these equally worthy victims.
The British establishment’s fixation on one genocide over all others led Starmer to announce in January that every student should listen to Holocaust survivor testimony. This respect for Holocaust survivors, however, does not seem to extend to those who criticise Israel.
When in 2018, it was reported that people were removed for “shouting“, journalists and politicians weren’t at all concerned about this disruption – even though the main speaker at the event was an Auschwitz survivor. Instead, they fixated on how the meeting’s chair, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, had allowed this particular survivor to compare Israel’s policies to those of the Nazis.
This was just one among many largely manufactured stories about the Labour Party’s supposed antisemitism problem – a ‘problem’ that was hugely exaggerated by Corbyn’s enemies in the Parliamentary Labour Party simply to discredit his leadership.
It’s therefore not surprising that when Kapos disagreed with Starmer at a meeting of Labour delegates, saying he’d never experienced any antisemitism in the party, Starmer accused him of dividing the party – and they never spoke again.
In 2023, Labour threatened to discipline Kapos if he spoke at a Holocaust Memorial Day event organised by the proscribed Socialist Labour Network. Unwilling to have his voice suppressed in this fashion, Kapos then resigned from the party.
This misuse of antisemitism and the Holocaust, as well as the mistreatment of Holocaust survivors, is shocking. But perhaps we shouldn’t be so shocked. After all we’re not shocked when Vladimir Putin uses the memory of Nazi atrocities to justify his war in Ukraine.
Misusing history is just what politicians do. The only really shocking thing is that so many supposedly intelligent journalists and political commentators are still so uncritical and credulous. One day this may change.
Until then we just have to keep protesting both against genocide and its misuse.
Source: Middle East Eye