How the Holocaust is weaponised to repress anti-genocide voices
23 April 2025
As a descendent of a Holocaust survivor, I have
marched in pro-Palestine protests - and watched UK opponents try to smear us.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/holocaust-weaponised-repress-anti-genocide-voices-how
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.
Victory for pro-Israel campaigners
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.
Manufactured stories
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.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario