We all know why Livingstone has disqualified himself from those posts. He’s the man who hugged Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim cleric who justifies attacks on Israeli civilians; who told the Reuben brothers to go back where they came from; who heard a Jewish reporter say he was offended to be compared to a concentration camp guard and didn’t care; and who, most recently, wrongly claimed that former Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits had declared the creation of the state of Israel a mistake.

So Ken can rule himself out as a future president of the Board of Deputies. Luckily for him — and us — that’s not the job he’s seeking. He wants instead to carry on serving as the mayor of London. And the basis on which Jewish Londoners make that decision should be entirely different.

For if we are full participants in the life of this city — and I believe we are — then we should elect a mayor not because of how he appeals, or doesn’t appeal, to our own particular, sectional interests, but what he does for London as a whole.

We would take a dim view of an American Jewish voter who chose between Obama, Clinton and McCain solely on the basis of how closely each candidate cuddled up to Israel rather than on what they would do for America.

The same applies in London.

Sure, we may not like the way Ken Livingstone speaks about the Middle East — thought the mayor has taken an admirable stance against the academic boycott of Israel — preferring the emollient words of Boris Johnson. But this is not about choosing a speaker for the annual Jewish Care dinner. Rather, we need to weigh up a record that has seen a congestion charge implemented and now copied around the world, put thousands more police on the streets and which has seen racist crime fall in the capital — even as it has been rising in the rest of the country — and ask whether that record would be continued or jeopardised by electing a man who, yes, pens a lively column and does a funny turn on TV but has done nothing to suggest he could run a major world city.

This is not to say we should put our Jewish sensibilities to one side. I can think of at least two ways in which a Jewish outlook might influence our vote.

The first is highlighted by the laudable Board of Deputies campaign, alongside other organisations, to block the British National Party. If turnout is low on May 1, the BNP could easily clear the 5 per cent threshold and win one, two or even three seats in the London Assembly. That would give them the most prestigious platform they have ever won in Britain. The only way to stop them is to ensure a high turnout, which means every one of us using our vote — no matter who we vote for.

This is the rousing appeal Ken Livingstone makes when winding up his campaign speeches. Whether he loses his job or not is secondary, he says, to the larger cause of stopping the fascists of the BNP.

I saw an audience otherwise hostile to Ken cheer him as he made this point: they know that, whatever else you may think about the mayor, his record in fighting the far right is long and sincere.

As for Boris Johnson, suffice it to say that the BNP is so comfortable with his politics — his leisurely branding, in writing and in documented conversation, of black people as “piccaninnies”, his claim that Africa’s problem is that it’s no longer ruled by the British Empire — that they are urging their supporters to use their second preference votes for Johnson.

That’s right: the BNP is backing Boris.

Second, we can use a bit of Jewish empathy. In the week after the July 7 bombings, Johnson wrote a piece which described the Koran and Islam itself, not merely Islamic radicalism, as “viciously sectarian” and “medieval”, accusing it of “disgusting arrogance”, and adding that Islamophobia was a “natural reaction” to Muslim holy texts.

Now ask yourself, as a Jew, how you would feel if someone who wrote that way about Jews and Judaism was leading in the polls for the London mayoralty. Then ask yourself, as a Londoner, whether that was the message we needed to hear in the immediate aftermath of 7/7 when every other public figure, including our own Chief Rabbi, was urging people to come together and not to turn on a religious minority because of the wicked actions of four murderous individuals. Do all that — and then vote.

Published in the Guardian

Published in the Guardian

Published in the Guardian

Published in the Guardian

Published in the Guardian

I’m speaking of Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, who last week issued the following warning to the Palestinians of Gaza: “The more Kassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

In that one sentence, Vilnai handed Israel’s enemies a propaganda gift that comes along once in a generation. They were not slow to seize it. The former Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, said: “They want the world to condemn what they call the Holocaust and now they are threatening our people with a holocaust.” Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri chimed in: “We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people.”

Press releases and letters to the press from anti-Zionist activists have, just as predictably, made fruitful use of Vilnai’s remark, citing it as evidence of Israel’s intention to carry out “genocide and ethnic cleansing”, according to one letter signed by Antony Gormley, Michael Rosen and others.

The immediate damage of Vilnai’s blunder was to frame the current Israeli offensive against Gaza in the worst possible light. People around the world could read of the subsequent Israeli assault, and the Palestinian children and teenagers killed, and they would see it as a shoah — because that’s how Vilnai had told them to see it.

But the damage will be much more lasting than that. For decades, Jews have urged the world not to trivialise the Holocaust by making glib comparisons with other catastrophes. We wince if a massacre here or an atrocity there is called a holocaust because it diminishes the event that nearly laid waste to all European Jewry. Yet now a Jew and an Israeli — a deputy minister of defence, no less — says that a military offensive in an ongoing, long-running conflict, is a shoah.

Worse still, Israel’s enemies have for years been likening Zionism to Nazism, insisting that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is similar to the Third Reich’s treatment of the Jews. Most Jews, rightly, condemn such an equation as wholly illegitimate; we have argued, mostly successfully, that even to hint at the comparison should be off limits.

But along comes Minister Vilnai to do the Israel-haters’ work for them, calling Israel’s conduct a shoah and, because of his position, making such an equation kosher. Make no mistake: this sentence will be hurled back at Israel’s defenders, on message boards and internet forums, on phone-in shows and campus debates, for years and years to come.

Oh, I know the defence. That Vilnai was merely using the word shoah in the colloquial, everyday sense it has in Hebrew, to mean a disaster — the way an environmental calamity is known as a shoah ecologi. But this won’t wash.

Jews and Israelis have worked hard to make Shoah the internationally recognised name for the Holocaust, the latter being a Greek-rooted word that implies the death of the six million was some kind of sacrifice to God. I recall the satisfaction when Pope John Paul II, in his reconciliation address, referred to the murder of European Jewry as the Shoah. Thanks in part to Claude Lanzmann’s landmark film, shoah has entered the international language; it is a near-universal term.

Yet Vilnai’s defenders now say that to interpret shoah as holocaust is an “appalling mistranslation”. That’s called having it both ways. We spend 20 years teaching non-Jews what the word means; then, when they’ve learned the lesson, we tell them they’ve got it wrong.

Nor will it do to claim that the only significant use of the word is when it comes with a capital letter or with the definite article, Ha’Shoah. No one thought Lanzmann’s film referred to an oil spillage — or some other mere disaster — because it was called Shoah, rather than Ha’Shoah.

Besides, even if a casual usage of shoah is available in everyday Hebrew, Vilnai should have known much better. This was not a private conversation in an office about sorting out, say, a shoah of a bad meeting. This was a public statement by a senior politician about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. The context was serious, not casual, and it was enormously sensitive. He should have known how explosive it was to bring the word shoah anywhere near this topic.

Next month, Bicom will host a conference for pro-Israeli activists in Britain, teaching them how to serve better as advocates for Israel. Well, it would be nice if Israel’s leaders made a start — by not making the job of defending them so damn hard.

Published in the Guardian

Published in the Guardian

Published on the Guardian's news pages

Published in the Guardian

From the Guardian

From the Guardian's Politics site