London bus stops vandalised with ‘Israel is a racist endeavour’ posters

Responsibility for a flyposting campaign at central London bus-stops, declaring “Israel is a racist endeavour”, has been claimed by London Palestine Action.

The full-size posters were posted over existing advertising space, belonging to JC Decaux, at a number of bus shelters, including those on Westminster and Waterloo Bridges. The posters went up this afternoon, the day after the Labour Party in-fighting about criticism of Israel and antisemitism resulted in the eventual adoption of the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tried and failed to add a rider to the IHRA definition suggesting that it was legitimate to describe Israel as a racist endeavour.

On Wednesday afternoon the flyposters went up and were admired as “amazing work” by Asa Winstanley, who writes the anti-Israel publication the Electronic Intifada.

He said the action had been taken by “the same activist group which brought you the brilliant tube “subvertisements” which sent Israeli politicians into hysterics back in 2016”. This reference was to a series of adverts put up in London Underground, covering existing, legal adverts, which declared Israel to be an apartheid state.

London Palestine Action posted a series of pictures of its bus-stop action, saying on social media that Israel was “created by ethnic cleansing; maintained by ethnic exclusion. Israel is a racist endeavour”, making the phrase into a Twitter hashtag.

JC Decaux described the posters as “vandalism” and said that steps were being taken to have them removed. A respondent on London Palestine Action’s Twitter feed asked ironically whether the notorious Nazi-era yellow star, with “Jew” in the centre, would be the next thing to be highlighted.

A TfL spokesperson said: “These adverts are absolutely not authorised by TfL or our advertising partner JCDecaux.. It is flyposting and therefore an act of vandalism which we take extremely seriously. We have instructed our contractors to remove any of these posters found on our network immediately.”

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