Page 9 - TORCH Magazine #14 - July 2019

new PM’s maternal great grandfather, Elias Avery Lowe, being the Moscow-born son of a shmutter merchant (a cloth trader).
Boris told her, “I feel Jewish when I feel the Jewish people are threatened or under attack, that’s when it sort of comes out. When I suddenly get a whiff of antisemitism, it’s then that you feel angry and protective.”
Boris’s great-grandfather on his paternal side was Ali Kemal, an Ottoman Turkish journalist and politician who held the position of Interior Minister in the early 1900s in what is today Turkey. Kemal, who married an Anglo- Swiss woman, was outspoken against the waning Ottoman Empire and condemned its genocide of the Armenian people, demanding that those responsible be brought to justice. Having advocated for British protectorate status for Turkey, he consequently became public enemy number one to the nationalist movement. In 1922, after being arrested for treason for wanting to negotiate peace with the Allies, he was mob lynched, brutally tortured and then hanged.
Kemal’s son and daughter, who lived in England during the First World War, adopted their grandmother’s maiden name, Johnson.
A love for the Land of Israel
Boris Johnson has said he “loves the great country” of Israel. In fact his ties with Israel go back to the 80s.
In 1984 a 20-year-old Boris arrived in
Israel with his younger sister Rachel Johnson, where the two siblings spent the summer volunteering in Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi, situated north of the Sea of Galilee. The pair stayed with the Collins family, who had made Aliyah to Israel from Leeds and was arranged by Boris’s father, Stanley, who had remarried a woman from a well-known Anglo-Jewish family.
Boris’s assignment was to work in the communal kitchen of the kibbutz. There, as Rachel describes it in her diary, he “showed inner steel,” scrubbing pots and pans and sweating it out in the heat of the kitchen, meal after meal.
“He explores everything down to fine detail, he wanted to know everything about the Kibbutz,” Alec Collins told Israel Hayom after Boris’s leadership win. “Even back then, he
used to say ‘I will be a leader one day.'” Boris was very happy to be in Israel and
even told him, “Alec, I am having a great time here, but I want to see the entire country.”
Danna Harman, who interviewed Boris’s sister Rachel about the trip, said after their volunteer service ended, the pair travelled around Israel. They visited Hebron and Bethlehem, hiked up Masada, floated in the Dead Sea and went sightseeing in Jerusalem.
While in Jerusalem, Boris, who was a budding journalist, secured an interview with the well-known mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek.
Rachel recalled that “He came back from that interview in a state of great elation.”
A return to Israel
Decades later Boris was in Israel again in his role as Mayor of London with the aim of strengthening trade ties.
During the visit, Boris visited the Western Wal, was given a tour of Israel’s innovation and displayed his footballing skills along with President Rivlin at a match with Jewish and Arab children.
“I was proud to be the Mayor who led the first ever London-Israel trade mission,” Boris said in July, “I’m proud that the UK is now Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe and
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