Delegates at the Green Party of England and Wales conference in Brighton voted on Sunday to define Zionism as racism, passing the motion by 1,022 votes to 813 and making the Greens the first mainstream party in Europe to formally declare itself anti-Zionist, and calling for Palestine to replace Israel.
The motion describes Zionism as Israel’s founding ideology and claims it created and maintains an “apartheid regime” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It calls for a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital,” a formula that would erase the State of Israel.
Delegates also rejected Amendment III, a measure that would have protected Jewish members from expulsion if they belonged to synagogues that identify as Zionist. The amendment failed 684 to 1,026. The vote had been scheduled for the party’s spring conference in March but was delayed by a series of no-confidence motions.
Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, did not vote. According to The Telegraph, he was campaigning in north London ahead of Thursday’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election. The day before the vote, Polanski led the conference in calling to drop the charges against Palestine Action activists and to lift the ban on the group, which the British government designated a terrorist organization. He has not condemned the motion.
Jewish party members told the Mail on Sunday that the party set aside a designated “safe room” at the conference for Jewish members who felt endangered. One member said the room was used on the first day to host a meeting between a rabbi and Jewish members.
Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy, co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, the UK’s liberal Jewish denomination, told the Post the motion is “antisemitic in its formulation and intention.” They said that by adopting it, the Green Party made antisemitism official policy and turned itself into a racist party, branding Jews who believe in Jewish self-determination as racists and making their equal participation conditional on renouncing that belief.
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) issued the following statement from Shannon Seban, its Executive Director of European Affairs:
“What happened today in the United Kingdom should alarm anyone who genuinely claims to stand against racism,” said Seban. “The Green Party voted to define Zionism as racism and formally establish itself as an anti-Zionist party. This goes far beyond a debate about the Israeli government or a particular policy. It brands the very notion of Jewish national self-determination as racist.”
“We are witnessing a disturbing inversion of values. In the name of anti-racism, a national political party has adopted a position excluding and stigmatizing a vast majority of Jews and Jewish institutions because of their Zionist identity and ancestral connection to the Land of Israel.”
“We strongly reject the idea that Jews should be expected to renounce their shared peoplehood and fundamental rights to be accepted in progressive political spaces.”
“We also reject the attempt to turn ‘Zionist’ into a term of abuse, or a convenient label through which Jews can once again be singled out, ostracized, or collectively scapegoated.”
“At a time when antisemitism is already surging across Europe, words have consequences. Political parties carry a particular responsibility when they legitimize language that isolates Jewish communities and make hostility toward them socially permissible.”
“A movement that claims to fight racism cannot build its politics on the rejection of Jews. When anti-racism becomes a vehicle for anti-Jewish discrimination, it has betrayed its own purpose. At the Combat Antisemitism Movement, we will not remain silent when this happens.”
An Old Lie Dusted Off
The Green Party resolution resurrects a slander the United Nations formally adopted half a century ago. On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The measure passed 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions, carried by a bloc of Arab states, the Soviet Union and its satellites, and much of the developing world.
The groundwork had been laid earlier that year. In the summer of 1975, the UN’s World Conference of the International Women’s Year in Mexico City adopted a declaration listing Zionism alongside colonialism and apartheid as evils to be eliminated. Weeks later, the Organization of African Unity summit in Kampala, hosted by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, issued a similar condemnation.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog, responded from the podium of the General Assembly. “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value,” Herzog said. He then tore the resolution in half. Herzog noted that the vote fell on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan was equally blunt. “The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act,” Moynihan said.
The resolution stood for 16 years. On December 16, 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the General Assembly revoked it by a vote of 111 to 25 in Resolution 46/86. Israel had made the repeal a condition for its participation in the Madrid peace conference.
The libel returned in 2001 at the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The parallel NGO Forum adopted a declaration labeling Israel a racist apartheid state guilty of genocide, while activists distributed copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and cartoons depicting Jews with fangs. The United States and Israel walked out of the conference on September 3, 2001. Days later, the September 11 attacks struck New York and Washington. Durban became the template for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign that now drives resolutions like the one adopted in Brighton.
The Word Zion
The Green Party targeted a word that predates every European political party by thousands of years. Austrian Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum coined the term “Zionism” in 1890, but he drew it straight from the Hebrew Bible. Why would a modern national movement name itself after a hill in Jerusalem?
The answer lies in the Bible itself. Tzion (Zion) appears roughly 150 times in the Hebrew Bible, serving as a name for the Temple Mount, for Jerusalem, and for the entire Jewish nation. The prophets addressed the people of Israel directly as Zion. The longing to return to Zion is written into the core of Jewish prayer and practice.
Every Shabbat and holiday, before reciting Birkat HaMazon (the Grace After Meals), Jewish families sing Psalm 126, known as Shir HaMaalot (the Song of Ascents):
“A Song of Ascents. When the LORD brought back those that returned to Zion, we were like unto them that dream.” (Psalms 126:1)
The Sages taught that this psalm refers to Shivat Tzion, the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylonia to rebuild the Temple in the sixth century BCE, and that it also points to the final redemption. Jews in Yemen, Morocco, Poland, and Iraq sang these words at their tables for two thousand years before Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897.
Zionism is the Jewish people’s covenant with their land, carried in their prayers since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. A party that declares Zionism racist has declared the prayers of every observant Jewish home to be racist. The Green Party has now put that position in writing.
