Israelis don't need a lecture on the Holocaust from you, David Ward

The Liberal Democrat MP's statements about "the Jews" were as ill-timed as they were hideous Image 1 of 2
People lay down flowers on slabs of the Holocaust Memorial to commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime at the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Berlin, Germany Photo: AP A woman lights a candle during a memorial ceremony for International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Stockholm Photo: REUTERS By Matt Hill

11:45AM GMT 28 Jan 2013

International Holocaust Memorial Day, which fell yesterday on the 68th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, is an opportunity to remember the victims of the most horrific mass murder in history.

Its other main purpose is to provide an annual occasion for witless public figures to score moral own goals by trying to make half-baked points about Israel.

In 2009, for instance, the Muslim Council of Britain boycotted the ceremony in protest against Israel’s assault on Gaza of that year – an act carried out over 60 years after the event being commemorated, by a country on a different continent that hadn’t existed when it happened.

This year it was the turn of a Liberal Democrat politician to seize the moment and enjoy five minutes of infamy.

After signing a memorial book in the House of Commons for the Holocaust Educational Trust on Friday, Lib Dem MP David Ward took to his blog to deliver the following remarks: "Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza." The Holocaust Educational Trust called his remarks “sickening and outrageous”.

Challenged on Sky News about his comments, Ward said simply: “It’s just a statement of fact”. For the sake of anyone as fatally oblivious as Ward, it is not a “statement of fact” that “the Jews” are “inflicting atrocities on Palestinians”. Acts committed in the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the responsibility of the state of Israel, not of "the Jews", a diverse ethnic group with a global population of 13.5 million.

In fact, Israel is a land that has some two million non-Jewish citizens, and whose policies are often fiercely criticised by Jews in other countries. Not only is conflating Israel and “the Jews” idiotic, it subtly reinforces the claim, made by a number of Israeli leaders, that the country somehow represents all Jewish people, from Brooklyn to Beersheba – an idea that many in the diaspora reject as false and pernicious.

What’s more, this kind of remark is highly damaging to the Palestinian cause – because it fuels the notion that criticism of Israeli government policy is merely veiled anti-semitism.

But the problem with Ward’s comments wasn’t just their unhelpfulness, inaccuracy or racially inflected nastiness, it was their appalling timing. As the furore over his comments grew over the weekend, he protested he was merely “trying to make clear that everybody needs to learn the lessons of the Holocaust”. But for him to take it upon himself to teach Israelis this “lesson”, and in this way, was like gatecrashing the funeral of a beloved elderly relative to deliver a graveside lecture about the supposed failings of the extended family.

It would be foolish to deny the profound effect of the Holocaust on the Israeli national psyche. After all, when the country was formed in 1948, almost one in three Israeli Jews were either survivors or escapees (a fact worth remembering when the country is portrayed by anti-Zionists as some kind of neocolonial adventure).

But Israelis don’t need David Ward to help them investigate this painful, complex subject – because Israeli writers and thinkers have long been doing it themselves, with the kind of subtlety the MP so utterly lacks.

Take, for instance, the historian Tom Segev, who, in his magisterial work on Israelis' reckoning with the Holocaust, The Seventh Million, argues the country has been torn between two conflicting views of the “Shoah”: one which teaches the importance of universal values like democracy and tolerance, and another which warns of the dangers of Jewish weakness and passivity. Between these two ways of looking at the past lie many of the contradictions that have beset Israel's history.

Or take Israel's greatest living author Amos Oz, who has described his country as one made up of “half-hysterical refugees and survivors, haunted by dreadful nightmares”, who see in the Arabs a reflection of their former oppressors – just as the Arabs are prone to seeing Israelis as a reflection of the European colonialists who once exploited them.

Israelis and Palestinians, as Winston Churchill said of the Balkans, are burdened with more history than they can consume. Both peoples must come to terms with this bitter inheritance in order to learn to share their common homeland. When that day arrives, I suspect it will have done so without the need for further interventions from the Member for Bradford East. In Israel Ultra Orthodox Jewish wedding Horses under the knife Israeli-Palestinian clashes Jerusalem snowbound Jerusalem synagogue axe attack Gaza's rubble runners Clashes in Jerusalem as suspect gunman killed
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