Holocaust has been trivialised in anti-lockdown protests, says Israel

Demonstrators who liken Covid-19 restrictions to the Holocaust are guilty of fuelling anti-semitism, Israel has said.

In a report published on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the country’s diaspora affairs ministry warned that such comparisons were a leading driver of anti-Jewish hate crimes in Europe and North America in 2021. So was the backlash over Israel’s actions in Gaza last year, it added.

The Israeli government’s findings follow the sight of anti-lockdown protesters in countries such as Germany and the UK wearing yellow stars similar to those forced on Jewish people by the Nazis. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres called such behaviour “reprehensible” this week.

Nachman Shai, the diaspora affairs minister, said the distortion of the Holocaust was anti-Semitic and could endanger Jews.

“There are people so fraught with hate who can, when faced with such imagery, be tipped over into action,” he explained.

During the pandemic, some Covid-19 agitators have also been “consuming and disseminating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews are responsible for the crisis and are using it for oppression, global domination, economic gain, etc”, the report said.

Several politicians in Britain and the US have been condemned in the past year for equating coronavirus measures with policies in Hitler’s Germany.

In May last year, the far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene equated mask mandates in the US to the Nazi stipulation for Jewish people to wear gold stars.

The Georgian politician apologised the following month, saying that there is “no comparison and there never ever will be”.

Elsewhere, the Tory MP Marcus Fysh, who opposed the introduction of vaccine passes in Britain, said the UK was not a “‘papers please’ society” like Nazi Germany. He also later expressed regret for his choice of words.

Dani Dayan, who runs Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum, criticised leaders for using inappropriate comparisons.

“Covid brought Holocaust trivialisation to a summit,” he said. “Things like that, sometimes done by politicians, by public figures, are despicable and Yad Vashem is very clear in demanding those persons retract.”

Meanwhile, Meir Lau, a former Israeli chief rabbi whose parents and brother died in the Holocaust, urged people not to triviliase the genocide. “Please leave the word ‘Holocaust’ for the Holocaust - and nothing but it,” he said.

Additional reporting by Reuters