UK Greens are wrong – Zionism is not racism

The party’s new policy reflects ignorance of Zionism and does nothing to advance Palestinian self-determination. Senior Consulting Fellow at the MENA Programme, Chatham House. Save Share No notion has been so cynically exploited and distorted by both its supporters and its detractors as Zionism. Just when you think you have seen enough in politics to stop being genuinely surprised, let alone shocked, the Green Party of England and Wales has managed to do exactly that. The decision at its annual party conference on Sunday to vote, albeit by a small majority, in favour of a members’ motion declaring Zionism – which, at its broadest, asserts the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination in their historic homeland – to be racist, while supporting a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”, was not only unexpected but deeply damaging: to the Palestinian cause, to the prospects for peace, and, to be completely honest, to the Green Party’s claim to be taken seriously as an emerging force in British politics. Even before addressing the decision itself, one has to ask why, for a party whose raison d’être has always been saving the planet from the cataclysmic threat of climate change, the headlines at the end of its annual conference were about Israel-Palestine. They should have been about how best the UK could contain and reverse global warming, reach net zero, and address the many other issues that could unite the party rather than bitterly divide it. Such a focus might at least have given its MPs some spring in their step before returning to Westminster next week. The decision itself to treat Zionism as “any other form of racism” is, in my view, a sad reflection of the sheer ignorance of those who supported it regarding the fundamental principles of Zionism, fuelled by hostility towards the state of Israel and, in some cases, intertwined with antisemitism. The Zionist movement emerged in Europe as a reaction to rampant antisemitism, which in some places manifested itself through pogroms, displacement, persecution and systematic discrimination. It was also a reformist movement that rebelled against Jewish orthodoxy, seeking to change the course of Jewish history from within and enable Jews to become a nation like other nations, rather than remain a secluded and isolated minority living in the diaspora....