The last time I saw Amichai Chikli, he was struggling to put on a suit jacket at the Israeli embassy in London. ‘Do I really have to wear one of these things just to make a speech?’ he muttered. He got it on by hoiking it over his shoulders like a rucksack.
That was last September, when the Israeli diaspora affairs minister visited London to mark Rosh Hashanah. Chikli had sparked controversy with comments about Tel Aviv’s gay pride parade (‘vulgar’), the Palestinian Authority (‘neo-Nazis’) and George Soros (‘his actions and investments are feeding the flames of anti-Semitism’). But the hotheaded minister finds it as easy to restrain his rhetoric as he does to put on a jacket.
We have to stop the blot of bigotry from creeping across our country under the guise of opposition to Israel
This week he waded once again into a highly-charged debate, branding London the most anti-Semitic city in the West during an interview with European journalists in Jerusalem.
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