The Board of Deputies of British Jews on Tuesday called a panel's ruling not to expel Ken Livingstone from the Labour Party after he had claimed that during the 1930s Zionists collaborated with Nazi Germany a "hopelessly wrong decision."
Board President Jonathan Arkush, who is also a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, condemned the Labour Party for its failure to expel the former mayor of London over comments made in April 2016 and repeated at hearings last week. Arkush said in a statement: “Relations between the Labour Party and the Jewish community have reached a new all-time low. It is a year since Ken Livingstone’s outrageous comments on Hitler and Zionism.
"After 12 months of indecision, despite finding him guilty of all three charges, the Labour Party has decided to suspend him from holding office for just one year despite his shameless, disgraceful and tendentious attempts to link Zionism to Nazism.
"All we can conclude from this hopelessly wrong decision is that the party has an enduring problem with antisemitism to which is it is unwilling to face up."
UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis was equally harsh in his reaction to the ruling by National Constitutional Committee of the country's main opposition party. "This was a chance for the Labour Party to show that it would not tolerate willful and unapologetic baiting of the Jewish community, by shamefully using the Holocaust as a tool with which to inflict the maximum amount of offense,” Mirvis said in a statement.
"Worryingly, the party has yet again failed to show that it is sufficiently serious about tackling the scourge of anti-Semitism. The Labour Party has failed the Jewish community, it has failed its members and it has failed all those who believe in zero tolerance of anti-Semitism," the chief rabbi added.
'Betrayal of our party's values'
Livingstone was suspended from the party in April last year after claiming that Hitler supported Zionism in the 1930s "before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews." He has since refused to apologize for his comments and said that had been "suspended for stating the truth."
Luciana Berger, a Jewish member of parliament for the Labour Party, tweeted: "A new low for my party this evening. Appalling decision. Why is anti-Semitism treated differently from any other form of racism?"
A statement from the Jewish Labour Movement said: "One year suspension is insufficient for a party the claims zero tolerance on anti-Semitism. This is a betrayal of our party's values.
"One year suspension allows for a revolving door for repeat offenders."
Karen Pollock, the CEO of the Holocaust Educational Trust, declared: "Ken Livingstone has continued to cause significant pain and great offense to the Jewish community with his persistent rewriting of history. We have spent over a year now having to tolerate misinformation and falsehoods about the Holocaust - including during this hearing.
"This verdict is a slap on the wrist for a serial offender. That a mainstream political party would consider these views to be welcome within their ranks simply demonstrates that anti-Semitism is not taken as seriously as all other forms of racism and prejudice."
Livingstone blames Jewish newspaper
Ahead of his panel hearing, Livingstone told the BBC: "What caused offense were those people who opened the 'Jewish Chronicle' and saw the claim that I'd said Hitler was a Zionist, that I said Jews where the same as Nazis, and one week later, the article saying I had said that hating Jews in Israel wasn't anti-Semitic. None of that's true." When asked by the reporter whether he blamed the 'Jewish Chronicle', Livingstone affirmed by saying "yes, by printing a lie."
The weekly newspaper responded to the accusation by giving the following statement: "It’s somewhat surreal to be accused by Ken Livingstone of fomenting an uproar against him by…reporting his words. And yet somehow, out of all the coverage his words have received over the past year, he has decided it is all the Jewish Chronicle’s fault. One might wonder what conclusion can be drawn from that."
