It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of the Green Party’s conference this weekend. I’m really sorry not to be there in person – most particularly as a strong supporter of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion that the conference will be debating.
This is, inevitably, super-controversial, given everything going on at the moment. By which I mean:
– a continuing genocide in Gaza – – escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank – a growing number of war crimes in Lebanon – a Labour Government gradually shifting its previous policy position under the genocide denying Keir Starmer – – a deeply disturbing rise in levels of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.
So, briefly, why should every single member of the Green Party be vigorously supporting the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion?
Forgive me if this sounds obvious, but it’s always a bit surprising to discover how few people seem to understand the core differences between Judaism and Zionism.
Judaism is a time-honoured religion, like Christianity and Islam. The vast majority of Jews (around the world, if not always in Israel) are content to live and worship alongside their Christian and Muslim neighbours.
Zionism is an ideological construct, born of deep colonial and racist roots. All Zionists abhor any such religious tolerance. Theirs is a supremacist worldview.
Going one level deeper, I wish more people understood that Zionism (as represented today by Netanyahu’s Government) is a direct descendant of British colonialism. Over 28 years (1920 to 1948), Britain used its UN mandate first to steal the territory of Palestine from the Palestinians, and then heedlessly to hand it over to the Zionists in 1948. Leading directly to the ethnic cleansing of around 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in the Nakba. Leading directly to — today.
Some Green Party members opposing the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion are doing so because they think it’s ‘a distraction’. ‘Not relevant to how our people see the genocide in Gaza today’
It couldn’t possibly be more relevant.
Ministers in recent UK governments are irredeemably stained with the blood and suffering of countless Palestinians. But as ordinary citizens of the UK, we too must acknowledge our part (however unwitting) in that historical, callous criminality.
Today we can do something about it. First, by recognising our shared colonial guilt. And then by recognising our even more direct complicity in the genocide the Zionist government of Netanyahu has perpetrated on the people of Gaza since October 2023.
One final point – reaching out directly to all my fellow Green Party members understandably fearful of being accused of antisemitism as a consequence of following this line of thinking.
During the six occasions I’ve been arrested over the last 15 months (for supporting Defend Our Juries’ campaign to get the ban on Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation lifted), I’ve made a point of talking with and learning from the many Jews who support the campaign as passionately as I do. Some are the children of Holocaust survivors.
In the face of a literally ‘undeniable’ genocide being inflicted on Palestine today, they too maintain that there can be no compromise on this one point: one either stands with the people of Palestine or one stands with their Zionist oppressors. However unimaginably difficult it is for them to find themselves in that position.
The Green Party is unequivocal in its utter condemnation of antisemitism. It has been since I joined the Party back in the 1970s, and it always will be.
It is also unequivocal in its condemnation of all forms of racism – including the abhorrent racist, apartheid politics of Zionism.
It’s wholly understandable that Jews in Britain today are fearful – not least at the rise of right-wing populist parties that look and sound like a throwback to the 1930s. But they too, like all of us, are obliged to look to the root causes of this hateful increase in antisemitism (with a 20% increase in antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2026). And to ask themselves, however uncomfortable it may be, if the principal cause of that increase might perhaps be Zionism itself? Or even the kind of genocide-denial articulated so arrogantly by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis?
(I wonder, in passing, how much time the Chief Rabbi will be spending over the weekend looking at the satellite images of Gaza newly released by Google Maps? Or perhaps watching the new documentary NAZA?).
Historically, Jews the world over have had to bear inconceivable suffering and trauma. To that already intolerable burden will now be added the stigma of the Zionist genocide in Gaza. Just as all Germans since the 1940s have had to bear the stigma of the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate all Jews in the Holocaust.
