THE HANDSTAND

DECEMBER 2005

 INTERVIEW WITH KEN LIVINGSTONE BY lESLIE bUNDER

Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:43:09 +1100 From: Peter Marshall <petemar@tsn.cc>

http://www.somethingjewish.co.uk/articles/1640_ken_livingstone_inte.htm

Ken Livingstone interview by: Leslie Bunder

Throughout his political career, London Mayor Ken Livingstone has never been one
to shy away from an issue.

For the Jewish community, he has been labelled anti-Semitic and anti-Israel by
his critics.

In a frank and revealing interview with SomethingJewish.co.uk editor Leslie
Bunder, Livingstone answers his critics on a range of issues and topics from his
clashes with the Board of Deputies of British Jews to his views on Israel. He
also talks about his childhood and his possible Jewish roots.

You are often outspoken about the Israeli government and in particular its prime
minister Ariel Sharon. How do you feel when the Board of Deputies of British
Jews denounces you for that?

The Board of Deputies ? and the Jewish Chronicle is their mouthpiece ? have this
idea that anyone who's critical of Israel gets denounced as being anti-Semitic,
so as a result the average spineless politician never says anything about the
Middle East again. I just think this is an insult to everyone's intelligence, I
mean when you look at how rude I have been about Mrs Thatcher's government, or
any successive American one there's nothing out of line that strengthens my
criticism on the Israeli government. I didn't notice anyone complaining when I
said the Saudi royal family should be hanging from lampposts. The Foreign Office
did, and the Saudi ambassador did, but governments need good criticism. I stood
in front of Mrs Thatcher in the House Of Commons and accused her of being an
accomplice to treason. I've been this rude about governments and I think it is
good for them, but there's this huge sensitivity around this.

I've been offering to go and meet the Board of Deputies for at least a
generation, and I would love nothing better than to go and have a real and
honest debate about what is and isn't wrong. But I'm not in the position to
broker a Middle East peace deal. If I was, I would. The main player is America,
if they prop up Sharon's government, it's going to do what it wants.

When the name Ken Livingstone is mentioned to many Jewish Londoners, and indeed
Jewish groups such as the Board of Deputies, it incites very strong feelings.
Why do you feel there is such negative feelings towards you, from certain
sections of the Jewish community?

I remember the defence committee of the Board back in the mid-80s said I was the
biggest threat to British Jewry since Oswald Moseley and I thought that's a
smidgeon over the top. Perhaps some might believe it, I don't think most of them
do.

Because when I became leader of the GLC in London we worked with Arab groups, as
we work with any other group, and the Board of Deputies also asked me to give
them a veto over Jewish groups we funded.

They didn't want me funding the Jewish socialist group, the Jewish Lesbian and
Gay Group ? and we said no. The Board of Deputies is probably the biggest single
strand of opinion in Judaism in Britain, but it's not unanimous. I mean, lovely
old lady came in, when I reaching up to buy my copy of the Jewish Chronicle in
Waitrose, and said, "they don't speak for all of us," and it's so true.

If you actually look at the vote last summer for Mayor, 18 months ago, you will
find that you were six per cent more likely to vote for me if you were Jewish
than if you were non-Jewish. And I've had 25 years of demonisation and being
denounced as anti-Semitic, and of course half the population in London ? I get
more of the Jewish vote than Tony Blair ? people were 12 per cent more likely to
vote for me if they were Jewish than to vote for Tony Blair's government ? and
they must be one of the most pro-Israeli that we've had.

So yes, while there are a lot of people who hate my guts because of the position
I take on the Middle East, equally there's a huge body of Jewish Londoners who
have watched me for 25 years and they know it's crap to denounce me as
anti-Semitic.

I am just critical of the state of Israel, but then so are they. I think for
people who aren't Jewish they think the Board speaks for Judaism, but they no
more do that than the Muslim Council of Britain speaks for Muslims. They're
strands, and they are important.

I have to say though, when my predecessors on the British left in the 1930s -
the socialists and the communists and trade unionists ? were all campaigning and
calling for a boycott of Nazi Germany, the Board of Deputies opposed it. They
are one strand of opinion, they're often wrong, sometimes they're right, but
they don't speak for the community any more than I speak for London. Some
Londoners agree with me, some don't, but I never wander round saying "I am the
voice of London," I'm just me, I get elected.

Talking about the incident with the reporter from the Standard, do you think
that was a witch-hunt against you?

It was quite clearly orchestrated, I mean here was Brian Coleman (London
Assembly Member), who was the driving force, and then it turned to Tim Donovan
(BBC London), and was overheard by Nicky Gavron the Deputy Mayor, saying this is
all theatre, and of course that's exactly what it was.

And three things came together ? the Board of Deputies wanted me to keep quiet,
so I thought 'big attack on Ken Livingstone, better keep my head down for a
couple of years'.

Then the Tory Party at the time was trying to run this ridiculous campaign that
Labour's deeply anti-Semitic ? that Fagin poster.

And of course the Standard's very nervous about the fact that I will shortly be
able to let the contract for the rival evening paper. So all these things came
together to be able to put the boot in for Ken Livingstone, and I have to say it
was really stupid.

Imagine if, in December, the Board of Deputies case results in my removal from
office. Can you imagine? I mean people have an opinion about whether or not I
was rude to a reporter and that's justified, but the Board of Deputies could use
this mechanism to remove me from office someone they disagree with me
politically . it would be very damaging for the Board's reputation but also
every anti-Semitic fantasist around the world would say "The Board removed the
Mayor of London who was automatically replaced by a Jewish Mayor. Someone would
find it was all written down in the protocols of the elders of Zion by the time
the day's finished, you know? I think they should have thought it through. You
don't set out on something that you then are not in control of.

You recently supported the Jewish culture guide to London. Are you planning to
go to any of the events?

I go to nothing that we do. I have three functions in life ? one is doing the
day job, two is looking after the kids and three is sleeping, and that's about
all I do. Once a year I go to the first ten minutes of whatever is the Mayor's
film festival. When the kids are older I shall bring them round and do all these
things.

You mention you have been to synagogues. Can you remember what the last one you
went to was?

Because I was the MP for Brent East and the GLC member for Stoke Newington and
the Labour candidate for Hampstead, I've been to a large number of North West
London and Hackney synagogues. The last real debate I had at one was at the
Saatchi Synagogue, I've been there a couple of times. The first time I went
there was a debate between me and Jeffrey Archer, and then the second time it
was a debate about what I think. It was good-humoured but obviously quite
intense.

2006 marks the 350th anniversary of the Jews returning to London. How does
London plan to mark this?

Well, until you mentioned it, I'd say I hadn't remembered when we had
re-admitted the Jews. I can't even remember who threw them out! I know we all
clearly want to do something around that, but it is quite interesting because it
must be just about the longest serving ethnic minority that we've actually got.
And what's quite interesting is that it's stayed in London. It's moved around
London ? it seems the pattern of Hindu settlement is following the Jewish
pattern, and there's a bit of overlap over the borders, but I suppose there are
just problems in terms of the people you need to sustain a synagogue, as with a
Hindu temple or mosque, but it's a lot easier to do that in a big city than in a
tiny village in the Home Counties, particularly if you're strictly Orthodox and
have to walk everywhere.

You've said you are an atheist.

I had no interest in religion. I am technically Church of England, I went to a
Church of England primary school and my parents had me christened, but we never
went near a church again except for a wedding or a funeral. My mum actually went
to a spiritualist church to try and contact her relatives on the other side! And
so I grew up totally without religion, I didn't suffer from it as a child
whereas some of my Catholic friends spent a lifetime recovering from brutality
and beatings in the convent and so on. And I became an atheist by the time I was
11, I rejected all this mumbo-jumbo in favour of rational science.

Did you have Jewish friends as a child?

There were Jewish friends at school ? because I went to Tulse Hill school and
you had the Church of England Service, then the Catholic service and the Jewish
service, everyone dispersed into three groups. We were all just mates at school.

I remember once going to the Catholic service just to see how it was different,
I never went to the Jewish one. I was born in 1945. In the 1950s TV drama,
whereas now you've got lesbians murdering people and burying them in the garden,
in my day a dramatic drama would be something like Christian boy brings home
Jewish girlfriend. So I was aware of this thing, and I was aware of the
Holocaust ? my generation was born just after the war, for the first 15 years of
my life it was if the war was still going on as it was all my parents talked
about. It was the most important thing in their lives, so my reference point for
total evil Hitler and the Nazis.

Just before Blair was elected Prime Minister, a lobbyist came to me and said
would I be prepared to be the tobacco company's lobbyist in Parliament. Given my
father died from smoking aged 56, I just wrote back a letter saying "Do please
tell these people that I think they are one rung on the ladder of human evil
above Adolf Hitler." That to me is what I do.

That is such a big thing in my life because I was born just about a month after
the war ended. But there's also this other funny thing that we've never pinned
down ? on my 60th birthday the Evening Standard ran an article about tracking
down ancestors. There's no evidence of where my maternal grandmother came from,
she was called Zona. And I remember a couple of times when I was a kid, she
would say to me, "Don't let anyone ever tell you you're Jewish." Which made me
think we must be, otherwise why would she raise this? And I remember chatting to
Greville Janner about this, saying it sounds like a middle European name. So I
might be Jewish. Not that I want anyone to feel mortified about this at the
Board of Deputies. I mean, because it runs through the maternal line if it
turned out to be true I could go and stand for the Knesset, couldn't I? In
Israel I could be elected, no problem.

There has been this theory that you are Jewish?

I know, and it would be lovely to find out. We know my grandmother was born in
1888 in London, which was the exactly the time that vast numbers of refugees
were coming in from the Tzar. So it could have been. As I said, religion has
played no part in my life. But it would be fun to know. Then I could be a
self-hater, couldn't I?

As Mayor of London, how do you think you've been engaging with the Jewish
community, because for a lot of people it seems that compared to other ethnic
groups Jewish Londoners don't get much out of you?

That's absolutely what you would expect, because in terms of average income, in
access to the professions, Jews have overcome the worst of the discriminations
they face ? they have made it. And also the strength of networks in the Jewish
community was like a precursor to the welfare state, the weakest were helped ?
and so young Jewish kids aren't facing two and a half times the national
unemployment rate, I'd be interested to know what the unemployment rate among
young Jews coming out of university is, but I should think it's pretty
negligible. There isn't the welfare function to tackle, and we do quite a bit to
celebrate the Jewish community in London and what it's done, but the community's
not there saying we need help with this or that, it's self-sustaining.

Most of my contact with the Jewish community has actually been the Labour Poale
Zion network. Every summer I would go to the Pole Zion fundraiser that Johnny
Lebor would put on his garden, and it's quite interesting because we'd have a
great row about what I'd say about the Middle East at that time. And about the
time that Sharon became Prime Minister, the first one I went to nobody mentioned
Israel or the Middle East, they were all "Oh my God we can't talk about it!" I'm
looking forward to the one next summer.

How do you view Israel? Are you actually anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or what?

I think Zionism is like every other form of nationalism. It can be inspiring or
it can have a dark side. If you actually look at the debate at the time when the
concept of a Zionist state was being kicked around at the end of the 19th
Century, there were several Jews who said if you go down this road and Judaism
becomes a state it will do all the terrible things that states do, you will lose
what has made us what we are, and I think that is a large part of the problem.

I remember when the former Chief Rabbi, Jakobovits, retired, he was interviewed
in the Standard and he said, "When I look at what's happening I'm not sure it
was right to create the state of Israel.". It's a perfectly valid thing to say
after so many wars, so much bloodshed ? did it work? It's academic because it's
there and we need to find a way forward for the future, but the other thing is
that I'm in favour of church and state being totally separate.

We've only got remnants of that here ? Catholics can't marry the heir to the
throne, for example ? lucky old Catholics, some people would say. But I was
amazed to discover for example only a couple of months ago that in Israel a Jew
can't marry an Arab. What a load of crap! And what I tend to find usually here,
whenever Sheikh Qaradawi says anything religiously conservative, which he often
does ? all you have to do is go to the website and find out what the Chief Rabbi
in Israel has said and it's often exactly the same.

So when there was the tsunami and Qaradawi said "this may be the judgment of God
for all the sex at these holiday resorts" ? that's not my opinion but you only
have to log on and that's what the Chief Rabbi said, and certainly what Ian
Paisley says. Religious leaders do this, they have to refer everything back to
God. So I'm lucky I grew up without religion ? I can marry who I want. And I do
think there needs to be that separation. I have this ideal and given the
cosmopolitan and humanist traditions of Judaism, of all the Arab nations the
Palestinians are most close to having a natural grasp for democracy and liking,
the most open, perhaps because they've been spread around the world

If there's one Arab nation Israel should be able to get a deal with, share some
common values with, do an awful lot of trade with, it's the Palestinians. And I
think it's a tragic loss of opportunity. It's got so bad and there's so much
bloodshed on all sides, seeing how you can put this back together.if Rabin had
pushed all this through in the first three months and just said 'we're not
taking this by stages..' If you take it by stages it allows Hamas and Netanyahu
to wreck the whole process from their different perspectives. If he'd just
driven it through there would have been some bombings, there would have been
some killings, but you would have gradually marginalized and isolated them and
you'd have given the Arab population a real stake in it succeeding. And I have a
horrible feeling the chance of getting that now after the bitterness and the
bloodshed, I'm very very pessimistic about the future.

Have you had the chance to visit Israel?

I went as the guest of Mapam in 1986 and was there for two weeks. Everywhere I
went I found myself at home, primarily because I was dealing with the left of
the Israeli political spectrum who already shared my views.

So you're not anti-Israel as such?

No, I enjoyed Israel immensely. I just look at the wall ? I tell you what's
good, the Israeli government does truly terrible things, such as this policy of
using Arabs as human shields, you read this and you boil with anger. And then
you see the Israel court rules it's illegal now ? you can still argue for decent
change and challenge these things. And you never forget about half Israeli
society wants them to do a peace deal and the other half want them to kick the
remaning Arabs out. It must be the most divided society in the West, and I see
Israel as being in the West.

But at the same time a lot of Israelis are concerned about Hamas and other
organisations. This is what's so annoying. You look back and it's quite clear
now that Israeli intelligence services did everything to encourage the growth of
Hamas in order to undermine Arafat. If you go back to the assassination policy
in the 80s, there's a disproportionate number of Palestinian moderates being
bumped off by Mossad, and you get the opinion that the more fanatical the
leadership of Palestinians the more we isolate them. That's why I'm very keen we
engage with people like Tariq Ramadan ? you look for what's the most progressive
voice in Islam, recognising there might be 100 years to go before Islam's going
to be what you want it to be and you work and build them up. You don't actually
try and destroy them in the hope it will turn out so horrendous the world will
turn against it.

What do you think of recent comments by the Iranian president that Israel should
be "wiped off the map"?

Oh, he's barmy. When the CIA overthrew Mossadegh's government in 53 because he
was going to nationalise the oil, if the West had not involved itself, the
Mossadegh government might have evolved into some genuinely secular Iranian
regime.

We propped up the Shah, and the Shah was overturned, and something infinitely
worse. I always hope that every time a new Iranian president is elected it might
be someone a bit more liberal ? and you think who created these monsters? He
shouldn't intervene in other people's countries, and I'm pretty sure what the
outcome's going to be. There's a lot of scuttlebutt around to imply that both
MI6 and Mossad had a hand in overthrowing Milton Obote's government in Uganda ?
might be true, he was seen as anti-Israel. But which two nations suffered the
most with Idi Amin? MI5, MI6, and the CIA gave Saddam Hussein and the Baath
Party all the communists and trade unionists they could kill when they took
power. That regime was seen as broadly in our camp.

Do you draw a distinction between targeting civilians on the one hand and
attacks on military targets on the other?

I very much do. Acts of terrorism where civilians are targeted are totally and
utterly unacceptable. Whether that's carpet bombing of civilian areas by America
or Britain in a war, or whether it's Hamas going into a café and blowing 30 or
40 people to bits. But if you take the Uzbekistan regime, where the president
boils his opponents alive, where two or three hundred people were gunned down on
a peaceful demonstration, there's no mechanism to remove the Uzbek regime. Now
blowing up innocent Uzbekistanis in the market is no way forward, but if someone
blows up or assassinates the president, I will have a moment of thinking, "let's
hope they now get something better". I mean they might get something worse. The
tragedy of Iraq is that they now might get this fundamentalist Shia regime. And
therefore I have to say if you haven't got a functioning democracy then acts of
terror will often be legitimate. We used them relentlessly in the Second World
War against the Nazi occupation of Europe, now I think the parallel is not with
that with what Israel is today. Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank for
the best part of 40 years and you can't be surprised if people violently resist
that.

What would your advice be to Sharon if you saw him tomorrow?

My advice to Sharon would be to accept that you've got to withdraw broadly to
the borders of 67, and you can either dismantle the settlements or do a deal in
which they stay there, but under the overall control of the Palestinian regime.
Now I would turn the settlements to look outwards, to employ local Arabs, to
integrate them into the economy and to build common economic structures, and it
might now be hopeless optimistic, but I'd give it a try, because otherwise what
you're going to get is the wall will be completed, a big chunk of the West Bank
will be behind the wall, and is the Jewish homeland really to be no more than a
walled enclave on the Mediterranean, with no engagement with the powers around?
What a disaster after 60 years of struggle to build a state.

Any plans to go to Israel at all?

Come on, you don't really want that, do you? Can you imagine that, everyone will
go mad. I'm pessimistic about the future but if my visiting the Middle East
would help I would go.

But if you did that it would stop people saying you are anti-Israel?

It won't make the slightest bit of difference ? whatever I say, people will
carry on believing what they want to believe. Jewish Londoners who voted for me
will carry on voting for me whatever they read in the Standard and people who
hate my guts will carry on hating my guts.

So you're not anti-Israel?

I'm not ? I'm anti this government. This government is the worst Israel has ever
had ? there was a chance of peace but Sharon has relentlessly ground down
everybody else.