Kate Osamor is not an antisemite – but she should be sanctioned for her Holocaust tweet

Being a generous-spirited, kindly person, I’d like to think that when Kate Osamor posted on Twitter (now X) a photograph of herself at a Holocaust Educational Trust event with what she thought she was an appropriate message, she simply made a blunder, or at least a mistake.

I’ve no reason to think that the solemn-looking Labour MP is some closet antisemite, nor anything but sincere when she wrote: “Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day, an international day to remember the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, the millions of other people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and now Gaza.”

Of course, she should have known better and been rather more careful in the drafting of her remarks, to say the least. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust says the occasion – January 27 is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi extermination camp – is to “encourage remembrance in a world scarred by genocide”, and one to recall the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

So you see what happened there: Osamor somehow deleted Darfur (presumably an error) and inserted “now Gaza” (presumably deliberately).

It caused outrage: the Board of Deputies of British Jews called her comment “disgraceful”, while the Jewish Leadership Council accused her of abusing HMD to attack the Jewish state. The Labour leadership suspended her from the parliamentary party, and she’s being investigated for her remarks.

Quite right, too. Holocaust Memorial Day should be treated with some reverence and confined to commonly accepted historical events that conform to the definition. Some would also include the Holodomor in Ukraine, the Armenian Holocaust, as its called, and the current wars against Ukraine, the Rohingya people and the Uighur Muslims.

What’s striking is that those genocides, as many people believe them to be, didn’t get much mention in the context of HMD, but Gaza and the Palestinians do. That’s where the whiff of antisemitism emanates from – drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

There is actually an argument for making HMD solely about the Shoah and the unique circumstances of the crimes committed against the Jewish people by the Nazis. This would be consistent with the important aim of keeping the focus on antisemitism as a particular kind of racism, with unique characteristics, such as the notion of a global conspiracy and of making all Jews answerable for the actions of any given Israeli government.

It is the weakness in the understanding of the true and historic nature of antisemitism that led the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn to refrain to it always bracketed with a caveat such as “…and all other forms of racism”. That was one of the many things that made Labour’s denials of antisemitism so unconvincing during that dark episode in its history.

It is something that Keir Stamer is rightly proud of stamping out, and accounts for his rapid and decisive action against Osamor. He was, no doubt, stung by what Rishi Sunak said in the Commons last week after another Labour MP, Tahir Ali, accused Israel of war crimes, and the prime minister of having “the blood of thousands of innocent people” on his hands. Sunak snapped back with an unusually hard edge: “That’s the face of the changed Labour Party.” As far as I can see, neither Ali nor Osamor have condemned Hamas’ own genocidal tendencies.

One day, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, it may be that Israel is shamed by war crimes, the International Court of Justice will find in a definitive, evidenced unimpeachable judgment that Netanyahu’s government is guilty of genocide against the Palestinian people, and that the war in Gaza is added to the accepted list of genocides. As we have seen in recent days, Israel has a case to answer, and has been instructed to stop or prevent actions that are genocidal.

From what we all read and see, it seems that the Israeli conduct of the war does violate humanitarian law, is disproportionate, and could well amount to war crimes and, in germs of its sheer scale, genocide.

But Holocaust Memorial Day is not the moment to make the point and turn remembrance into a row.

I’ve no doubt that Osamor and Ali are decent people, sincere, passionate and angry in their concern for the plight of the Palestinian people. Who would not be? They are not Jew-haters. But there can be no more serious charges than those of war crimes genocide.

It may yet come, that painful, shameful day for Israel, and for the world – but it has not come yet.