Nick Clegg, leader of the British Liberal Democrat Party condemned as “crass and insensitive” party member David Ward whose used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in a message issued on Holocaust Memorial Day.
The Liberal Democrat MP sparked outrage among Jewish leaders when he declared this week in his Bradford constituency: “On Holocaust Memorial Day, it's imperative that we share the memory of the millions who have been murdered in the Holocaust, and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Palestine, Bosnia and Darfur, in order to challenge hatred and persecution wherever it resides today.”
He said that, at the “deeply moving” Memorial Day, people were encouraged to remember other groups that had suffered as well as the victims of the Holocaust.
He argued that treatment of the Palestinians fell within the criteria laid down in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
“That’s particularly true at the time of the Nakba [in 1948] when 700,000 people were driven out of their homes and are still refugees. I believe it is not inconsistent to include them within a list of victims of genocide, alongside all the others,’’ Ward added.
Liberal Democrat party leader Nick Clegg, who is also Deputy Prime Minister,said Ward did not speak on behalf of the party and made clear that he does not personally believe that the situation in Gaza amounts to a genocide.
“He doesn’t speak for the party and I think this – on that day of all days – was a crass, insensitive thing to say,’’ Clegg said in a statement.
“To compare – however distressing it is to see – what is happening in Gaza to the Palestinian people to what has happened in Darfur or Cambodia or the Holocaust is completely inappropriate,’’ he added.
It is not the first time MP Ward has been rebuked by the party leadership over his views on the Middle East. In 2013, he was suspended from the Liberal Democrats for several months after writing in a Holocaust memorial book that he was ‘’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.’’
“To compare – however distressing it is to see – what is happening in Gaza to the Palestinian people to what has happened in Darfur or Cambodia or the Holocaust is completely inappropriate.
“Is it something people take offence at? Yes. Do I think it is wrong? Yes. But he doesn’t speak for the party and he never has.”
Asked whether he saw the situation of the Palestinians as a genocide, Mr Clegg said: “I don’t think it is recognised that that is what is happening in Palestine.”
In a letter to Clegg, Shimon Samuels, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre Director for International Relations, had urged Clegg "to expel Ward from the Liberal Democrat party for his Holocaust inversion, a form deemed ant-Semitic under the European Union 2005 Working Definition of Antisemitism and his egregious offense to Holocaust survivors –especially those who rebuilt their lives in the United Kingdom and in Israel."