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A Pro-Palestinian activist holds up a placard during a march in London on 7 September 2024 (Justin Tallis\/AFP)<\/p><\/div>\n
Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Wednesday and Thursday this week, will likely see\u00a0Israeli<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0US<\/a>\u00a0politicians use the opportunity to suggest that their\u00a0destruction of Gaza<\/a>\u00a0is somehow about protecting Jews from another Holocaust – and that anyone who protests against this destruction is really motivated by\u00a0antisemitism<\/a>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s certainly what happened last year, when both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin\u00a0Netanyahu<\/a>\u00a0and former US President Joe\u00a0Biden<\/a>\u00a0made such claims. In response, 10 Holocaust survivors issued a\u00a0letter<\/a>, stating: \u201cTo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just Netanyahu and Biden who have misused the Holocaust in this way.\u00a0British<\/a>\u00a0Prime Minister\u00a0Keir Starmer<\/a>\u00a0was clearly referring to the pro-Palestine<\/a>\u00a0movement when he talked about antisemitism on university campuses and \u201chatred marching on our streets\u201d in a speech at the Holocaust Educational Trust last September.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Yvette Cooper<\/a>\u2019s justification for this was that several London synagogues had been \u201cdisrupted\u201d by pro-Palestine protests on \u201ctoo many occasions\u201d.<\/p>\n What she didn\u2019t mention was that there hasn\u2019t been a single reported incident\u00a0of any threat<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n My sign reads: \u201cThis son of a Holocaust survivor says stop the genocide in Gaza.\u201d Along with other survivor descendants, I am not just warmly welcomed, but\u00a0often cheered<\/a>\u00a0by thousands of our fellow demonstrators.<\/p>\n Of course, synagogues deserve to be safe from any\u00a0real<\/em>\u00a0threats. But the fact that some synagogue attendees have strong political disagreements with opponents of the Gaza genocide does not mean that anyone\u2019s right to protest should be repressed.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, as in the US and\u00a0Germany<\/a>, the UK government\u2019s 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\u00a0Stephen Kapos<\/a>\u00a0over his participation in a pro-Palestine protest on 18 January is just one indicator of this very worrying trend towards more war and repression<\/p>\n Organisers of the\u00a018 January protest<\/a> 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\u2019t even on the march route.<\/p>\n The Jewish Chronicle<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>did claim that the rabbi of this synagogue said\u00a0<\/b>that he\u2019d heard chants of \u201cgenocide of Jews\u201d at a previous protest. But\u00a0Ben Jamal<\/a>, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, says he discussed the issue with police, and\u00a0the slogan the\u00a0rabbi was referring to was merely: \u201cFrom the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, it seems police took the unprecedented step of banning a major demonstration based on a misinterpretation of a single slogan.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0assertion<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, Gideon Falter: “Instead of addressing [the] threat of antisemitic violence, the Met\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n This was a crowd that had come together to oppose genocide, not to attack a genocide memorial<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Falter made these widely publicised comments after being\u00a0prevented from walking towards a pro-Palestine march by\u00a0the Metropolitan police\u00a0in April 2024, with one officer saying his \u201copenly Jewish\u201d appearance could antagonise the marchers.<\/p>\n The story, however, proved to be\u00a0rather\u00a0 more complicated<\/a>\u00a0as the\u00a0officer also said, he\u2019d\u00a0seen Falter<\/a>\u00a0“deliberately leave the pavement and walk against the march”.\u00a0Not only that, our group of \u201copenly Jewish\u201d Holocaust survivor descendants were actually standing just a\u00a0few metres away<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0<\/b>Falter throughout his interactions with the police.\u00a0This 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.<\/p>\n The Falter story eventually faded, only for the\u00a0media<\/a>\u00a0to push an even more absurd\u00a0story<\/a>, 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\u00a0\u201cantisemitic mob\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n Naturally, these reports failed to mention that Stephen Kapos was on the march\u2019s front line, or that, once in Hyde Park, participants listened in\u00a0awed silence<\/a>\u00a0to his descriptions of his Holocaust\u00a0experiences. This was a crowd that had come together to oppose a genocide, not to attack a genocide memorial.<\/p>\n In his speech last September,\u00a0Starmer said<\/a>: \u201cJust 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u00a0British Empire<\/a>. But of course, there are no plans to build huge monuments next to Parliament for these equally worthy\u00a0victims.<\/p>\n The British establishment\u2019s fixation on one genocide over all others led Starmer to announce in January that every student should listen to\u00a0Holocaust survivor testimony<\/a>. This respect for Holocaust survivors, however, does not seem to extend to those who criticise Israel.<\/p>\n When in 2018, it was reported that people were removed for “shouting<\/a>“, journalists and politicians weren’t at all concerned about this disruption\u00a0– even though the main speaker at the event was an Auschwitz survivor. Instead, they\u00a0fixated<\/a>\u00a0on how the meeting\u2019s chair, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, had allowed this particular survivor to compare Israel\u2019s policies to those of the Nazis.<\/p>\n This was just one among many largely manufactured stories about the Labour Party\u2019s supposed\u00a0antisemitism problem<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a0a ‘problem’ that was hugely exaggerated by Corbyn’s enemies in the Parliamentary Labour Party simply to discredit his leadership.<\/p>\n It\u2019s therefore not surprising that when Kapos\u00a0disagreed<\/a>\u00a0with Starmer at a meeting of Labour delegates, saying he\u2019d never experienced any antisemitism in the party, Starmer accused him of dividing the party – and they never spoke again.<\/p>\nVictory for pro-Israel campaigners<\/h3>\n
Manufactured stories<\/h3>\n