King’s Speech

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 9th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, the Holocaust Memorial Bill has been carried over from the previous Session. I speak with a heavy heart. Since the brutal mass slaughter undertaken by Hamas against innocent communities in Israel, there has been a worldwide outbreak of anti-Semitism, not least in this country. On our streets, people fear for their safety as bloodcurdling mobs call for jihad and the elimination of 7 million Jews in Israel and others around the world. We know that “from the river to the sea” means the complete elimination of Israel, because the presence of Jews in the Middle East has never been accepted by their neighbours, who killed, dispossessed and expelled Jews from nearly all Middle Eastern countries in the 1940s.

Among the worst offenders have been in our universities. At Nottingham Trent, Jewish freshers were attacked; at Bristol, the slogan is “Death to Zionists”; at Edinburgh people say “Heil Hitler” and at UCL “Intifada until victory”. I remind the House that last year the president of the National Union of Students was sacked for anti-Semitism. The same is true of some of our schools. These young people have had compulsory Holocaust education, but the only result seems to be that if they want to upset Jews then they resort to swastikas and references to gas and crematoria. They know nothing of modern Jews or Israel because they have been taught only that Jews are victims and that it was all the fault of the Nazis.

The late and much missed Lord Jonathan Sacks said of anti-Semitism: “In the past they hated us for our religion; then they hated us for our race; and now they hate our one and only state, our safe haven, Israel”. The old anti-Semitic slurs of the past have transferred themselves seamlessly to attacks on Israel, anti-Semitism dressed up as anti-Zionism.

In this country we have the National Holocaust Centre in Newark, the Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield, the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum, the Kindertransport Memorial at Liverpool Street and others in Hyde Park, Harwich and Swanage. We have Holocaust Memorial Day, Kristallnacht commemoration and outstanding Holocaust education centres at the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Sir Martin Gilbert Learning Centre, the British Library’s “Voices of the Holocaust”, the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Hull History Centre. Depending on how you count, there could be as many as 80 museums and collections.

What have they achieved? The history of the Holocaust is well documented and ongoing, for example in the Channel Islands, and the memories of the survivors are recorded. What is missing is the link to Jews today and their homeland and safe haven of Israel. Holocaust memorialisation tends to package up that genocide and consign Jew hatred to the past—nothing to do with us today and no mention of how the survivors went on to establish the state of Israel. In Britain, those memorials are designed to project Britain as a liberal democracy where nothing like that can happen and where all genocides are equally awful and in the past—Kosovo, Darfur, Rwanda and so on.

The proposed memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens will continue this, despite what we see in the streets right now. Its location is built on a false premise. It will fail to educate people about Israel and anti-Semitism today. I have watched politicians who are arch-enemies of Israel’s existence queuing up to sign the remembrance day book here in Parliament. Hypocrisy is too mild a word. As the American Dara Horn said, everyone loves dead Jews—the living, not so much.

Not only that, but to spend £138 million on a memorial to the dead of various genocides when the one and only Jewish museum in London has closed for lack of funds is a disgrace. We could and should have a splendid Jewish museum in central London dealing with the entire history of Jews in this country over a thousand years, triumph and tragedy, and with the Holocaust in context, as Lord Sacks wanted. The learning centre planned for here is a shallow specimen, ironically to be created by digging down two storeys at huge cost in funds and to the environment.

Given the protests in London recently, it will be a focus for graffiti and worse in no time. That is not a reason not to build it, but, if it is built, parliamentarians must prepare themselves for barriers and armed guards there, as well as disturbances and defacement. The children in the playground there will bear the brunt of it. How tin-eared is it to place a playground and café on top of a memorial to children who had no childhood and who starved to death? Would it be appropriate to have a café and playground right by the Cenotaph?

It is well meaning, but naive and misguided to go ahead with this. It will not improve the situation for the persecuted Jews of today. It will enable the sponsors to say, “Look what we have done for you. No more complaints please; it is all sorted”. It will provide a photo backdrop for politicians who like to say that they do not have a racist bone in their bodies—and give them carte blanche to join the Israel-haters.

I plead with those behind the Bill to educate themselves before pretending to educate others. Abandon the design for the current memorial, which is meaningless; it has been called a giant toast rack. It was designed by an architect who is now in disgrace for his sexual assaults and has been dropped by his clients. How could one stand in reverence before such a monument? Instead, we could have a figurative memorial that means something, like the one at Liverpool Station, or the Warsaw ghetto. We could have a new Jewish museum that includes the Holocaust and its impact on Britain. We could have all that without the expense and legislation before us, which will result in the spoiling of the only decent green space near us without any compensating features. I urge noble Lords as strongly as I can to change course on this.