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Opinion
OPINION No memorial – now what?
OPINION PIECE BY ROBERT FESTENSTEIN The issue of the Holocaust Memorial has finally come to an end. For now. In order for the project to go ahead, planning permission was needed to build the memorial at Victoria Tower Gardens. Westminster Council refused permission. This was appealed to the High Court who turned it down. Last week the Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal. In other words, no memorial, at least at the venue chosen by those in charge of the project.
So now what? A pause for quiet reflection certainly. That includes me. In an earlier piece in another publication I had advocated for a programme of education, concentrating on young people visiting Auschwitz and seeing the horror first hand. Since then I have seen a number of articles on the subject and in particular those from Baroness Ruth Deech. The Baroness makes a number of points, one of which is that a memorial solely to the Holocaust is a two edged sword. We have all seen notorious anti-Semites declaring solidarity with the Jewish Community when it comes to Holocaust Remembrance Day and hours later condemning Israel and calling for its destruction.
In a speech to Limmud last year Baroness Deech said the following:
“There must be no disguising of the menace of antisemitism behind a cloak of generalised hatred or distortion of history. The finger points at Church hostility, at the extreme right and the extreme left and at Islam. Generalised and expensive waffle about democracy and “Never Again” will not do it. Just as pulling down statues will not in reality improve the existence of black lives, so putting up a memorial will not promote safety and tolerance of the Jewish – and other – minorities. Building it without attention to what is needed by way of education could set back the cause of combating antisemitism for decades.”
The vital word here is education. We need to make it clear that the Shoah was not a one-off which came from nowhere. Antisemitism has been alive and well for centuries. Jews were blamed for the death of Christ and suffered as a consequence. The accusation that the Jews were Christ-killers encouraged Christian anti-Semitism and spurred on acts of violence including pogroms, massacres of Jews during the Crusades, expulsions of the Jews from England, France, Spain, Portugal and other places, and torture during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Islam has always viewed Christianity and Judaism as second class religions and discriminated against believers accordingly. Across the Middle East and North Africa, Jews were subject to additional taxes and were granted lower status simply because they were Jews. The pro-Hitler approach of the Mufti of Jerusalem during the Second World War has been well documented. Whilst the Shoah was the worst by far of antisemitic campaigns, it needs to be seen in a historical context, both before and after and particularly when it comes to Israel.
The language used by Israel haters is no different to that used from centuries gone by. Stories of organs being stolen from Palestinians mirror claims of Christian blood being used to make matzah. Claims that Zionists are responsible for world finance are just an updated version that Jews are only interested in cash and control the world by way of monetary conspiracy. As set out above, it is often these people who claim to oppose anti-Semitism yet in reality hate Jews just as much as those responsible for excluding Jews from the professions or carrying out pogroms.
It is this context which is vital to highlight when educating the non-Jewish and indeed the Jewish community about the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism didn’t end with the Shoah, it is alive and well; thriving in the political left and right and in certain Christian and Islamist groups, despite many in our community determined to ignore one or more of these factions. Any project concerned with the Holocaust must include the before and all of the after, otherwise it must surely fail.
Robert Festenstein is a practising solicitor and has been the principal of his Salford based firm for over 20 years. He has fought BDS motions to the Court of Appeal and is President of the Zionist Central Council in Manchester which serves to protect and defend the democratic State of Israel.
