Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Dave Rich, an expert on Left-wing antisemitism and the author of two books: “The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism” and “Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism Is Built Into Our World – And How You Can Change It.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
As expected, the Green Party (the UK’s third-largest political party) passed a motion this weekend declaring Zionism to be racism and calling for Israel to be replaced by a single “State of Palestine.”
The motion is antisemitic from first principles: It delegitimises and smears the very concept of Jewish peoplehood. It is extremist in its demand for Israel’s elimination, and it is likely to be anti-Jewish in its impact. What happens next will determine whether this marks another step into the antisemitic mire or becomes a wake-up call for the country.
The motion commits the Green Party to supporting “the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine” — in other words, the complete eradication and erasure of the State of Israel. Its scope could hardly be clearer. This is not simply a proposal concerning Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) and Gaza. As Greens 4 Palestine, the pressure group that pushed the motion through, put it: “When we say occupation, we mean the whole thing.”
The policy goes further, stating that “the struggle to achieve that liberation by all available means under international law is legitimate.” In case the meaning of the slippery euphemism “all available means” is not immediately apparent, Greens 4 Palestine has clarified it in an accompanying booklet.
The phrase refers to “the legitimacy of struggling by all available means, including armed struggle.” That’s right: The Green Party is now committed to a policy that endorses the violent destruction of the State of Israel (a sovereign state and member of the United Nations) through “armed struggle.”
It is worth pausing to acknowledge just how extreme a position this is. The Green Party now opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, putting it at odds with the United Nations, the European Union, and all of Britain’s allies. It has moved beyond disagreement over how to achieve such a settlement and rejected the premise that Israel and a Palestinian state should exist alongside one another.
Its position is even more extreme than that of the Palestinian Authority, which last year signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the British government in which the two parties “underline their resolute commitment to the two-state solution based on 1967 lines … with a viable and sovereign State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel living side by side in peace, safety and security.”
Rather than endorse that consensus, the Green Party has aligned itself with Hamas’ view that Israel should be completely eliminated, by force if necessary. Even the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” repeatedly proclaimed in the motion’s accompanying booklet, is wording used by Hamas in its official policy documents.
The Green Party can no longer credibly claim to be a party of peace while endorsing violence in this way. Nor can it claim to support reconciliation and compromise while seeking the eradication of an entire nation state. These are not minor inconsistencies between its rhetoric and its policy. They go to the heart of what the party now stands for. The Green Party is now an extremist party.
At the heart of the motion lies the assertion that “Zionism is racism.” Yet Zionism is nothing other than the belief in Jewish nationhood: that Jews are a people with the same right to national self-determination in our ancestral homeland as any other people. It does not require support for any particular Israeli government or any particular policy. Zionism goes much deeper than that, to the essence of Jewish peoplehood.
The Land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem are inseparable from the idea of the Jewish people. One would not exist without the other. To define this simple idea, shared by the vast majority of Jews around the world, as racism is disgraceful. The motion’s target is therefore something far more fundamental than the actions of a government: it is the Jewish understanding of ourselves as a people.
The slogan “Zionism is racism” is not new, and its history deserves attention. It burst onto the global stage through a 1975 UN resolution, annulled 16 years later, which declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” That resolution was a product of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian communist state that systematically persecuted its Jewish population.
The same idea was also the policy of the National Front (a Far-Right, fascist political party in the UK) back in the 1980s. In historical terms, that is the political company the Green Party is now keeping. Unlike the National Front, however, the Greens have five members of parliament and 1,300 local councillors. The adoption of this position by a party with that level of elected representation is a chilling and unprecedented development.
There is also something ironically colonial about a small British political party deciding that it has the right to dictate terms to Israelis and Palestinians. But the implications extend beyond the people whose future the party has taken it upon itself to determine. History shows that when anti-Zionist policies are adopted, restrictions on the rights of Jews follow.
In Poland in 1968, an anti-Zionist campaign by the Communist authorities led to thousands of Jews leaving the country. Many were effectively forced out with few belongings, having first lost their jobs because they were Jewish. In Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, student unions that adopted policies declaring Zionism to be racism subsequently banned their Jewish societies from operating or severely restricted their rights. Whether or not this is the original intention, political campaigns that declare Zionism to be racism usually end in a witch-hunt of Jews.
The fear is that the Green Party will now use its new policy in much the same way. The party is adamant that this will not happen, insisting, for example, that members will not be disciplined or expelled for attending “Zionist” synagogues. Those assurances do not dispel my concern that the activists who forced through this policy will be dissatisfied with leaving it unused in a policy document. They will want to put their victory into practice.
There is already reason to take that prospect seriously. Just two months ago, Lubna Speitan, the proposer and lead author of the “Zionism is racism” motion, called in a Greens 4 Palestine meeting for synagogues to be “confronted.” Against that background, the party’s assurances offer little comfort. We can see where this is heading, and it is very ugly indeed.
The five sitting Green Party members of parliament opposed the motion, but by then it was too late. They have only themselves to blame, having spent years enthusiastically demonising Israel with allegations of genocide and apartheid. One Green Party member of parliament even backed a campaign to make Bristol an “apartheid free zone.” Their opposition to this motion cannot be separated from the political atmosphere they helped create.
Veterans of the Labour Party’s battles against the antisemitic Far-Left repeatedly warned the Greens that they faced the same danger, often from the same people. Instead of heeding those warnings, the party welcomed some of the very activists who had dragged Labour into antisemitic disgrace. The warnings were there, and so was the example of what had happened to Labour. The Greens chose to ride the tiger, and now it has consumed their party.
The consequences could be felt particularly sharply in places where the Greens already exercise local power. Some of those Green councillors now control councils serving large Jewish communities, most obviously Hackney, while the Greens are the largest party in neighbouring Haringey. There are urgent questions about how they will engage with the Jewish schools, synagogues, and charities in those boroughs, given that most have connections to Israel and Zionism. For those institutions and the people who depend on them, the implications of this policy are far from abstract.
There is no doubt that the motion’s adoption is another sign of how much more common hostility has become in Britain towards things many Jews have long taken for granted. Although the Green Party remains relatively small, it is nonetheless part of the political mainstream. Its endorsement of this motion therefore helps to normalise ideas that many British Jews will find not merely offensive but threatening.
What this means in the longer term will depend on how people beyond the party respond. The British electorate rejected Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in part because of its antisemitism, and Labour never went this far, even in its darkest moments.
The question now is whether the Green Party will face a similar rejection. Time will tell whether the electorate recognises the gravity of what it has done — and responds accordingly.
Declaring that “Zionism is racism” is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. How about Hamas is terrorism? How is it that the UK has been redefined so extremely over the last 10 years?
And, the more important question: are we, in the US, next?
The horseshoe of left and right is closing in on the canary in the coal - the Jew! It can mean only one thing: England, France are in deep shite.