The Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue is a 15-minute stroll from the Green Party annual conference. It is a proud member of EcoJudaism, dedicated to “embedding sustainability into synagogue life”, supportive of LGBT+ rights and firmly in favour of Palestinian self-determination as part of a two-state solution. And now, any member of the Green Party who attends is to be considered a racist.1 2
Over the weekend, the Green Party passed a motion declaring that “Zionism is racism”3, called for the destruction of Israel and its replacement by a single state of Palestine. For the avoidance of doubt, this should be achieved by “all available means”, that is, including violence.
The Green Party is not in government but it is a mainstream political party with parliamentary representation, that runs local councils (including Hackney, home to Europe’s largest Charedi Orthodox Jewish community) and, even if it were none of these things, words matter. And they have consequences.
“Definitions to Israel”
Zionism is the belief in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, a right shared by every other people. But it is so much more than that. While not all Jews are Zionists45, from the shattering of glass at Jewish weddings as a reminder of the destruction of the First and Second Temples to the prayers recited while facing Jerusalem, Zionism is a characteristic of being Jewish.
Crucially, Zionism has nothing to do with the policies of any Israeli government, the expansion of illegal settlements or the right of other indigenous peoples to their own self-determination. Zionism existed prior to the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 and would continue to do so were the Green Party and its supporters to ever get their way.
This is why Jewish communal leaders, amongst others, have said that, by adopting the motion, the Green Party has made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party. Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy, co-Leads of The Movement for Progressive Judaism, observed:
The Green Party would not presume to tell other minorities what their identity means and then use that definition to exclude them. Jews are entitled to the same respect. The party cannot impose its own meaning on a central part of Jewish identity, declare it racist and demand that Jews renounce it.
As Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust, puts it:
This motion is antisemitic from first principles, in the way it delegitimises and smears the concept of Jewish peoplehood. It is extremist in its call for Israel to be eliminated; and it is likely to be anti-Jewish in its impact.
As a Jew who does not live in Israel (by the way, why don’t anti-Zionists ever come up to me on the street and congratulate me on having the right to live in Israel but for choosing not to exercise it? Why, instead, are they contributing to making Jewish life in Britain and around the world so miserable?) I’m most interested in that third strand.
Part of the fun
Put aside the fact that it is not the Green Party’s place to be defining a belief that lies at the heart of Judaism (let alone be ill-defining it) or the fact that the motion is inherently colonialist, in that it dictates to Palestinians what their future ought to be. Instead, it is important to understand what Green Party members really want from this motion.
The best way to do so is by reading Amendment 3. This sought to include language to ensure that the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline members based on affiliation with Jewish community institutions.” In other words, that Jews should be allowed to go to synagogue or visit their elderly relatives in Jewish care homes and still be members of a political party.
This was voted down by a margin of 1,026 to 684 votes.
If the headline motion is itself racist, the refusal to even pretend to make a carve-out for Jewish members of your own party is perhaps most revealing. Evidently, a majority of Green Party members who voted for the motion and against the amendment simply have little interest in finding an accommodation with Jews.6
And I think this speaks to what a lot of people — good people — fail to understand. That for Jew-haters, antisemitism (like other forms of racism but right now we’re talking about antisemitism) is fun. Even better, it frequently forces Jews to play the game of emptying their pockets and patiently explaining why this obviously horrible, racist thing — a slogan, a placard or a burning of ambulances operated by a Jewish charity — is in fact antisemitic. That, too, is part of the fun.
Grimly fascinating to note that Green Party supporters, who are overwhelmingly in favour of higher immigration, are also, at 51%, the most likely to want to reduce migrant numbers from Israel.
Which does rather beg the question: if Israel is to be eliminated, but Israelis barred from leaving Israel for the UK, where exactly are they to go? That is left ominously quiet.
Who gets to be a victim?
You don’t need to label every antisemitic terrorist attack (and there are horrifyingly many to choose from this year alone) a “false flag” or suggest that “Zionists control the media” to oppose a terrible war or in any way dilute support for Palestinians. You certainly don’t have to, as Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories claimed in a recent interview, say that Jews in Nazi death camps were called “Muslims”.
I could attempt to explain why they do this. Why so many people believe that Jews, whether stabbed on the streets of Golders Green or murdered in gas chambers, are molecularly incapable of being victims. Indeed, how and why the Holocaust itself is an example of Jewish power and privilege. But that would be to play the pocket-emptying game.
Suffice to say that the work of building coalitions and of rebuilding Gaza from the rubble is really difficult and kind of boring. But calling Jews Nazis? A little bit thrilling if you’re into that sort of thing.
A numbers game
Something else happened over the weekend. Two Iranian men appeared in court, charged with terror offences over an alleged plot to target Manchester’s Jewish community during Yom Kippur. Not to be confused with the Heaton Park Synagogue terror attack on the same date last year.
The Iranian regime and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, behind the wave of antisemitic attacks in the UK and elsewhere earlier this year, are among the most prominent leaders of the anti-Zionist movement. They certainly appear to believe that British Jews living thousands of miles from Israel are fair game. And they’re not alone.
Jews living in the UK face the highest rate of reported religious hate crime per head of any population, at 106 per 10,000 people, compared with 12 per 10,000 Muslims, 5 per 10,000 Sikhs and 2 per 10,000 Hindus. Jews were the target of around 30% of all religious hate crimes in 2024-25, despite being 0.5% of the overall population. Little wonder that if Jews wish to partake in civic life, organise and dance to bad music like any other group, police protection and secret locations come as standard.
And now, the Green Party has effectively made Jewishness itself an offence. Whether the party will now be treated like any other racist movement is unclear.
All or nothing
When antisemites abuse Jews, set their buildings on fire or massacre them on public beaches, they tend not to ask for their views on Zionism first. For that reason, I really do think that if you want to ban Zionists and still claim it has nothing to do with Jews or Judaism, you really need to ban all Zionists. That includes the non-Jewish Zionists, i.e. 99% of them.
Otherwise you end up in the ludicrous position of protesting a celebration of the Jewish festival of Shavuot while operating under the assumption that you are good and other people are bad.
I’m being serious. At the start of every Green Party meeting, organisers should have to ask every attendee — not just the Jews — for their views on Jewish self-determination. Weird that that is the litmus test, but there you are. Such surveys may take some time, I accept, but a small price to pay to remain an “anti-racist” party.
But does anyone really believe that banning all Zionists is the aim of this motion? And if not, why not?
The sentiment is my own, but these words are largely taken from Sean Carroll, who lives nearby.
A cousin of ‘Zionism is white supremacy’, which further has to ensure that Jews are and can only be ‘white’, despite, well, the existence of millions of ‘not white’ Jews and the fact that whiteness hasn’t really been all that helpful to Jews over the millennia.
The history of this language dates back to the Soviet Union, a regime that both persecuted its Jewish minority and sought to use the phrase to curry favour with Arab states during the Cold War. It passed at the UN in 1975 before being revoked 16 years later.
Though some antisemites do use the word ‘Zionist’ as a stand-in for Jew, e.g. “Zionists control the media”.
Around two-thirds of British Jews identify as Zionists.
Earlier this year, Rome’s LGBTQ+ Pride event sought to bar the main Jewish group from registering a float. The group, Keshet Italia, released a statement sympathising with Palestinian suffering but refused to sign up to a document labelling the war in Gaza a “genocide”. The meeting to attempt to resolve this lasted only a few minutes, again suggesting that the Pride organisers weren’t trying to find a way through.