Attendees of the 16th Genocide Memorial Day in London today, 19 January 2025, passed the following resolution requiring GMD to urge all faith leaders to ensure that Holocaust Memorials also include the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Amid the death and destruction unleashed on Gaza over the last 15 months, more and more human rights experts, groups as well as nation states have classified Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide.
Most recently, in addition to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) has also concluded “there is a legally sound argument that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza”. That is aside from the International Court of Justice’s ongoing investigation into allegations of genocide committed by Israel on the basis of complaints from several countries.
As each passing day reveals yet more evidence of genocide perpetrated by Israel, there remains no moral justification for excluding Gaza from Holocaust memorials, especially those organised by the official Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.
So far over 46,000 people have been killed with more than 100,000 injured, many of them maimed for life. 40% of the victims are children and another 30% women. The respected medical journal, The Lancet, puts the death toll at 65,000. The territory itself including hospitals, clinics, universities, schools and housing has been decimated by relentless Israeli bombardment.
Holocaust Memorial Day is not a symbolic exercise in remembering historical atrocities. At the heart of HMD is the principle of “Never Again” – namely that humanity must prevent the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust from ever happening again. But if we exclude the Gaza genocide, it renders that pledge meaningless.
As religious leaders, we have a moral duty to uphold the sanctity of all human life, irrespective of ethnicity, religion or political conviction. We disavow, unequivocally, the unjustified killing of fellow human beings. We believe that all human life has equal value. There is no scale of human suffering by which any one genocide should rank higher than others.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has lamentably refused a request from the Islamic Human Rights Commission, the organisers of this memorial, to include Gaza in the list of genocides they will commemorate this year.
If we fail to recognize Gaza as a site of a genocide, we remain silent in the face of profound injustice. Such silence affords Israel moral and political cover to continue committing war crimes. To participate in Holocaust Memorial Day and rightly mourn the victims of past genocides while excluding places in the world where genocide is occurring today, such as Gaza, renders such memorials hollow and hypocritical.
We urge you, on behalf of the people of Gaza and Occupied Palestine, to heed this call and uphold the principle of “Never Again” for all peoples, including Palestinians, in this year’s Holocaust memorials.
