Israeli Party Leader Says Anti-Israel Tube Ads Removed After Call to London Mayor
by Algemeiner Staff
Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The chairman of Israel’s Yesh Atid Party said he phoned London Mayor Boris Johnson after boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists plastered hundreds of underground trains with posters extremely critical of any perceived support for or business ties with Israel.
“The government of Israel isn’t doing anything about what happened this morning in London,” a post on MK Yair Lapid’s official Facebook page said, referring to the placards.
Anti-Israel posters appear across London tube network https://t.co/dImPqsOZSW… pic.twitter.com/Wb0wLSsm4B
— The Jewish Chronicle (@JewishChron) February 22, 2016
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The Facebook post said Lapid called the London mayor — who recently visited Israel on a business delegation — “and around that time they took down the placards.”
Among the targets for criticism were the BBC, which the adverts said had a bias in favor of Israel; British security firm G4S, which the placards accused of turning a blind eye to the imprisonment of hundreds of Palestinian minors; British arms manufacturers, whom the activists accused of being complicit in the “massacre” of Gazans during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas; and, of course, Israel itself, which the images accused of practicing apartheid against Palestinians under its control.
The ads appeared ahead of Israeli Apartheid Week, a controversial occasion for pro-Palestinian, or anti-Israeli, demonstrators.
The London transportation authorities themselves said they treated the approximately 150 unauthorized ads as “an act of vandalism,” and the London Jewish Forum called them “awful smears.”
