Ken Livingstone: 'Creation of Israel was fundamentally wrong'
The former Labour mayor of London calls Israel a 'mistake,' argues there was no anti-Semitism in the Arab world until founding of the Jewish State in interview with UAE-based news network.
Ken Livingstone has described the creation of the State of Israel as "a great catastrophe" and said Jewish people should have been resettled in the UK and America after the Second World War.
The former Mayor of London was suspended from the Labour Party after he invoked Hitler to defend a colleague over anti-Semitic remarks and claimed that there was a “well-orchestrated campaign” against the party by the “Israel lobby.”
However, in an interview broadcast in Arabic by TV station Al Ghad Al Arabi on Wednesday, and posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), he said the creation of Israel had been "fundamentally wrong."
“The creation of the state of Israel was a great catastrophe,” he repeated. “We should have absorbed the post-World War II Jewish refugees in Britain and America. They could all have been resettled, whereas 70 years later, the situation is still very tense, and there is potential for many more wars, potential for nuclear war,” Livingstone told Al-Ghad Al-Arabi.
The former mayor recently came under fire for saying that Hitler didn't initially intend to kill Jews, but he went crazy at the end. He reiterated his stance by saying, “When Hitler won the elections in 1932 and came to power, his policy was not directed toward killing the Jews. He wanted to deport all the Zionists to Israel."
Livingstone also attributed the mass expulsion of Jews across the Arab world to Israel’s founding.
Prior to the creation of the Jewish state, he said, “there were large Jewish communities that never suffered threats or attacks. They lived in peace alongside their Arab neighbors. But all of this was destroyed with the establishment of the State of Israel, and all the Israeli communities in the Arab world were deported to Israel.”
The veteran politician also blamed Israel’s ongoing conflict with the Palestinians for global terrorism, including the recent brutal Islamic State attacks in Paris and Brussels.
“I have always believed that the failure to resolve the (Palestinian) problem fuels the terrorist attacks,” he said. “What makes a 15- or 16-year-old boy go and fight with ISIS, or carry out the barbaric attacks that we saw in Paris or Brussels? They don’t do it because they enjoy killing, but because they believe that they are the victims of injustice. The West must deal with the injustice, or will continue to fuel terrorism.”
