Stop playing with fire

The Mayor insists he is being accused of anti-Semitism simply because he is critical of Israel. This is a dangerous stance - and it is not in the interests of London

Published in the Evening Standard 2 March 2006

Ken Livingstone is back in his favourite position. For the third time in his career, he is the people's champion, cruelly shut out of power by undemocratic forces determined to thwart the popular will.

It happened in 1986, when Margaret Thatcher abolished the GLC rather than see Livingstone run it. It happened again in 2000 when Labour fiddled the system to deny him its candidacy for the London mayoralty. And it happened once more last week, when the Adjudication Panel for England, the key local government watchdog, suspended the mayor over his "unnecessarily insensitive" and "offensive" remarks to a Jewish reporter from this newspaper, whom he had likened to a concentration camp guard.

It is a remarkable hat-trick. Three times Ken has had the voters on his side, only to see his mandate denied. It's a plight that suits Ken's brand of populist politics perfectly: each time he has been able to cast himself as the victim, the plucky David up against an undemocratic Goliath.

And each time he has been right. Few would defend the abolition of the GLC now, and even Tony Blair admits he made a mistake trying to block Livingstone six years ago. And this latest decision is not much more defensible. On the essential point - that an elected official should only be removed from office by a vote of the electorate or if he has broken the law - the mayor has right on his side.

In his long statement this week, Ken was right about something else, too. He made the coherent case that the accusation of anti-semitism is bandied around too freely, hurled especially at those who are critical of Israel. He quoted one Jewish analyst who has said that the equation of criticism of Israeli policy with anti-semitism "drains the word anti-semitism of any useful meaning."

All of that is true, but it doesn't quite exonerate the mayor. For the encounter with Oliver Finegold of the Standard had nothing to with Israel: the word was not even mentioned. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has insisted from the beginning that its objection was simply to Livingstone's treatment of a Jewish reporter. Ken says he has "never believed a word of it"; as far he is concerned, the whole episode is merely an excuse for attacking a high-profile critic of Israel.

On this the mayor is badly - even dangerously - wrong. For one thing, plenty of people in the Jewish community who are neither great admirers of Israel nor friends of the Board of Deputies saw the hurtfulness of the mayor's remarks to Finegold. What I hear mentioned most is the mayor's failure to apologise or change tack, even once Finegold had told him he was Jewish and found it offensive to be compared to a German war criminal. Plenty of Jews cannot believe that if the mayor were confronted by, say, a black or Muslim or gay reporter who said they were similarly hurt, he would not have made amends immediately. This is a man who prides himself on his sensitivity to London's minorities - and yet, on that night outside City Hall, he trampled on a very raw Jewish nerve, for which he has never straightforwardly apologised. To repeat: one does not have to be pro-Israel or a creature of the Board of Deputies to be troubled by this.

Second, there is something wrong about the constant attempt to change the subject, typified in a piece the mayor wrote in the Guardian at the height of the row exactly a year ago, headlined "This is about Israel, not anti-semitism." This manoeuvre denies the right of Jews to object to prejudice in its own right, here in London, Britain or Europe - separate and distinct from the politics of the Middle East. For no insult is ever just an insult: it's always 'really about' Israel.

It works as a kind of mirror image of the very equation Livingstone rightly attacked, the lazy conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. The mayor ends up implying that what Jews regard as anti-semitism is often, in fact, mere opposition to Israel. In his own case, he seeks a kind of immunity from accusations of offence, even when, as in the Finegold affair, his actions are wholly unrelated to the Middle East: I can't possibly have hurt Jewish feelings, I'm merely a critic of Israel!

This leaves Jews in a very uncomfortable spot, for it implies that so long as Israel continues as an occupier and a violator of the human rights of Palestinians, then that's what accusations of anti-semitism will be 'really about.' The unspoken message is: when Israel behaves properly, then you can complain about anti-Jewish prejudice; until that day, you better keep your mouths shut.

Why is this dangerous? Because Ken's insistence that this is all about Israel turns him into a victim not of an unelected quango, but of a shadowy, powerful Israel lobby. That's certainly how he's seen by the more radical Islamist websites, who have already branded him "Palestine's Livingstone", as if the crime for which he has been punished is his support for the Palestinians.

A mayor of as diverse a city as London can't afford to start setting one community against another like this. For that is the inevitable result of this line of rhetoric, one that will pit Muslims against Jews. There was a hint of that competition in Livingstone's rather pointed note that, while a Jewish Londoner is three times more likely to suffer a racist attack than a "white European", an Arab is 11 times more likely. In the victim Olympics, he was handing Arabs and Muslims a gold medal - with the Jews told they were lagging behind.

Community relations are fragile enough in this city, without the mayor inflaming them more. He is one of the country's most skilled politicians; I still admire him. But right now he is playing with fire - and it is not just him who risks getting burned.

Posted on March 2, 2006 10:49 PM

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