Controversial comments about Zionism by a
former London mayor prompted the British-based polling firm
YouGov to examine the views of the British public when it comes to Israel and antisemitism.
Some 60 percent of those surveyed last Friday
said criticism of Israel alone does not amount to antisemitism,(The Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism Note:
Criticize Israel and its activities is not antisemitism)
but 53 percent said hating Israel and questioning its right to exist does.
The poll, which YouGov said surveyed a
representative sample of over 4,400 U.K. respondents, was carried out after
former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended for saying that Hitler was a
supporter of Zionism. The former mayor made his remarks, which have been widely
challenged as inaccurate, in defense of another Labour Party parliamentarian,
Naz Shah, after she was suspended for anti-Israel comments.
Reacting to Livingstone’s remarks, Jonathan
Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told BBC radio:
“What Ken Livingstone deliberately did was to draw an equation between
Nazism and Zionism. He therefore crossed a line into what certainly most people
would regard as distinctly antisemitic.”
In addition to the 53 percent of those who
told YouGov pollsters that hating Israel and questioning its right to exist is antisemitic,
21 percent said it was not and 26 percent said they did not know. The British
public made a major distinction, however, between that level of animosity for
Israel and statements simply critical of the Israeli government. Only 9 percent
said such criticism constituted antisemitism, 60 percent said it did not and 31
percent said they did not know.
On Saturday, Livingstone said he was sorry
for causing a disruption or any offense with his claim that Adolf Hitler
supported Zionism early in his political career, but not sorry for saying so,
even citing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s infamous Mufti comments.
“How can I have hurt and offended the
Jewish community when the prime minister of Israel said exactly the same
thing?” Livingstone said, adding that he had only made a “statement
of fact” concerning Hitler that had been seized on by his political
enemies, so called “embittered old Blairites,” to stir up trouble.
