BICOM

Mayor of London Boris Johnson’s trip to Israel and the West Bank ran into difficulties after two Palestinian NGOs cancelled their planned events with him.

After a positive start to Mr Johnson’s itinerary, where he visited the Western Wall, Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, the day hit a snag when media revealed that Jewish Chronicle reporter Noga Tarnopolsky would be banned from covering Mr Johnson’s meeting with the Palestine Women’s Business Forum because she was Israeli. The decision was condemned by Mr Johnson’s team.

Shortly afterwards, in an apparently-coordinated move, the Sharek Youth Forum, the Association of Engineers and the Women’s Business Forum all cancelled their meetings with the Mayor, claiming that his comments earlier in the week opposing boycotts of Israel were unacceptable.

A spokeswoman for the Sharek Youth Forum told the Independent that “As Palestinians and supporters of BDS, we cannot in good conscience host Johnson, a person who denounces the international BDS movement.”

Mr Johnson’s meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah did take place, but the meeting was closed to the media with a bus carrying journalists being turned back en route by the Palestinian Authority.

Mr Johnson suggested that the meetings were partly cancelled due to security concerns saying, “The reality is we were determined to come here even though it’s quite a difficult time at the moment and there’s a lot of tension…I think that some people have obviously taken remarks I made about the boycott, which is after all British Government policy, they’ve taken offence to that and that’s been very much whipped up on social media…So, we had a message from the office of the Prime Minister that the security with us was going to be perhaps at risk and so we’ve had to think about those meetings.”

Mr Johnson’s anti-boycott remarks earlier in the week were widely publicised. He said “I cannot think of anything more foolish than to say that you want to have any kind of divestments or sanctions or boycott [towards]…the only democracy in the region…The supporters of this so-called boycott are really just a bunch of corduroy-jacketed…lefty academics who have no real standing in the matter and I think are highly unlikely to be influential in Britain.”