Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Ex-London Mayor Seeks To Make Nice to Jews

Two-term former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, has always made a point of using the city’s public transport to get around Britain’s capital. On Tuesday morning, he took the elevator from the platform of Belsize Park Underground station up to street-level. For a couple of seconds, it seemed to stop in mid-ascent. “Maybe we’ll get stuck” he said to an aide, with a faint glimmer of hope in his eyes. The elevator began moving again, taking him and his team to a public meeting with a group of Jewish voters.

Livingstone, now in opposition, will be competing for the fourth time, next Thursday, for the Mayor’s office, trying to unseat incumbent Boris Johnson. In the long campaign, Livingstone’s uneasy relationship with London’s Jewish community has come to the fore, bringing in to question his sensitivity towards minority groups and his views on Israel have diverted attention from his policies on transport and housing. His appearance this week at an event organized by the London Jewish Forum, was officially a meeting like two previous ones held between Jewish voters and the other main candidates, but in reality it was a last chance attempt to patch things up between the community and the past and perhaps future mayor.

Nearly two months ago, a previous, closed meeting, between Livingstone and leading Jewish members of the Labor party ended acrimoniously after he had seemed to be saying that Jews would not vote for him because they are generally wealthy and therefore not inclined to vote Labor. Livingstone enraged his listeners when he failed to recognize the fact that Jews are a people, not just a religion or an ethnicity and seemed to be mixing up “Jews,” “Israelis” and “Zionists.” In addition, he refused to apologize for previous statements in which he had justified Palestinian suicide-bombers, accused a Jewish reporter of behaving like “a concentration camp guard,” calling upon two Indian-born Jewish businessmen to “go back to Iran,” a slur which he since exacerbated by becoming a presenter on the Iranian government-owned news channel Press TV.

Go to Haaretz.com

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.