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Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London:“Now is not the time for boycotts. Boycotts should only be used as a last resort, when there is no other alternative, such as was the case with South Africa but is not the case here.”
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LONDON (EJP)---London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone has expressed his opposition to the academic boycott of Israel by the University and College Union, Britain`s largest trade union for academics.
Speaking at a meeting organised Tuesday night by the Movement for Reform Judaism and the London Jewish Forum, at the Sternberg Centre in North London, Livingstone said that such a move would undermine efforts to restart the Middle East peace process.
He said: “Now is not the time for boycotts. Boycotts should only be used as a last resort, when there is no other alternative, such as was the case with South Africa but is not the case here.”
In response to questions, Livingstone reaffirmed his support for a two state solution and said that he would have advised Yasser Arafat to accept the proposal for settlement of the Israel- Palestine conflict made by former US president Bill Clinton at Camp David.
He also said that it was a mistake to consider Zionism to be racism.
It was Livingstone's first major public meeting with the Jewish community.
The Mayor of London has a fractured relationship with the Jewish community after he was reported as making inflammatory remarks to a Jewish journalist for the London Evening Standard newspaper two years ago.
Reminding the reporter at a party that his newspaper’s owner, Associated newspapers, had been sympathetic to the Nazis in World War II, Livingstone compared him to a concentration camp guard for working for the newspaper.
Livingstone was later suspended from office for the remarks by the UK local Government standards board, but later re-instated on appeal.