For Zack Polanski, Green Party leader, to claim that the Green Party’s new policy on ‘Zionism is Racism’ is ‘not controversial’ is absurd. It’s proved to be massively controversial, both externally (with a frenzied pile-on from the UK’s establishment politicians and media) and internally – with four of the party’s five MPs and former Leader Caroline Lucas giving voice to some very harsh criticism.
I suspect what he meant to say is that it should not be controversial to assert that Zionism is Racism. Indeed, it should not. Both he and the Party, in passing that Motion, are dead right about that.
A deep split has emerged in the Party, and it will not be easily healed. The Observer described the vote in favour of the Motion as ‘shameful’.
What is truly shameful, however, is that no other political party in the UK has made that call. And shows no sign of doing so – unlike many mainstream progressive parties across Europe.
Our collective complicity in what is going on in Palestine today is utterly staggering, wilfully condoning Israeli’s conflation of criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism.
So how is it that these mainstream parties prefer to be guided by the propaganda of Israel and all its subservient supporters across the British establishment? Many critics of the Green Party’s policy still deny that there is a genocide going on in Gaza. Or can’t bring themselves to utter the word itself. Their criticism of Israel is usually minimalist or even tokenistic. Despite the definitive analysis of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Despite the judgements of all those international institutions which they would have us believe they support?
As follows:
January 2024: the International Court of Justice orders Israel to take all measures to prevent the Commission of acts of genocide. Israel entirely ignores this ruling.
- July 2024: the International Court of Justice finds that Israel’s occupation and annexation of all Palestinian territories is illegal, and its discriminatory laws against Palestine violate the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. (In other words, Israel should always be referred to as an apartheid state, just as South Africa was for so many years).
- November 2024: the International Criminal Court issues warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant for the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare.
- September 2025: the UN Commission of Inquiry, chaired by Navi Pillay, recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, finds as follows:
“The Commission concluded on reasonable grounds that Israeli authorities and security forces were committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and identified Isaac Herzog, Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as having incited genocide”.
- Throughout this time, the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, has highlighted both the ongoing genocide, and the literally limitless war crimes committed by Israel in those Palestinian Territories since she was appointed in 2022.
Definitive? Indeed. So why do the UK’s notionally progressive parties suppose that Donald Trump is going to quite extraordinary lengths to close down the International Criminal Court, and to silence Francesca Albanese?
Is this ignorance? Naivety? Complicity? Whatever it is, the Green Party has broken free of that despicable, deeply shameful record.
Back to the original Zionism is Racism Motion. Five things to bear in mind:
- None of this started on October the 7th 2023.
Zionist propagandists have been extraordinarily successful in erasing the history of everything that came before October 7th, and in exploiting it as justification for everything that has followed. Including the unceasing slaughter of women and children in Gaza, and the escalating war crimes in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Lebanon.
When a single Israeli soldier or citizen is killed, we are instructed to remember October 7th. When hundreds of Palestinians are killed, post the October 2025 ‘ceasefire’, we are still instructed to remember October 7th.
Please try to imagine what it was like for millions of Palestinians on October 6th – living under an entirely illegal occupation, with no freedom of movement, no basic human rights, with thousands detained unlawfully in prison, and subjected to regular full-on assaults by the Israeli defence forces, described as ‘mowing the lawn’.
2. Zionism
I’ve always been aware of the hugely divergent views about Zionism, and since the Zionism is Racism Motion passed, the testimony of Jews explaining why Zionism has been so important to them, as a benign and aspirational ideal, has been instructive for someone like me.
But I do not understand how anyone could disagree with the evidence that this ideal has been systematically betrayed since the Nakba in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted from their homes and communities. Since then, all Palestinians have been subjected to an ongoing and increasingly cruel form of ethno-nationalist apartheid, culminating in the ongoing genocide in Gaza today.
Zionism is a political ideology, not a religion. Not an ethnic group. As such, of course Zionism today is racism.
3. Israel’s Right to Exist
I don’t know how many times one has to go on repeating this, but the legally constituted state of Israel today has no permanent right to exist. Just as the UK, as a state, has no permanent right to exist. Just as Nazi Germany had no permanent right to exist. Just as apartheid South Africa had no permanent right to exist.
Peoples have a right to exist, not the states in which they live. The citizens of Israel have every right to exist. As do all Palestinian citizens.
This may sound like legalistic nit-picking, but it’s fundamental. There’s absolutely no reason why Israel today should be given some special exemption to exist in perpetuity. As an apartheid, racist, militarised, genocidal entity (whose crimes are far worse than those of apartheid South Africa), it has lost that right – and must, at some point in the future, be reconstituted in ways that allow its citizens to regain their legitimacy.
4. Two States – or One?
One of Zack Polanski’s complaints about the ‘Zionism is Racism’ policy is the wording it uses to try and resolve the intractably difficult issue of accommodating the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians:
“….this motion supports the establishment of a single Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants”.
I think Zack’s right to be deeply concerned about this. It’s completely honourable (and well-established, historically) to call for a ‘one-state’ solution, with equal rights for all Israelis and Palestinians, however idealistic that may be. To refer to that one state as ‘Palestinian’ is peculiarly provocative – and has inevitably been construed by some as a signal of intent to ‘cleanse’ any newly-created Palestinian State of all Israelis.
That is clearly not the intent of anyone in the Green Party – so why create this verbal hostage to fortune? It would have been so easy to refer to ‘a single confederated State’ rather than a ‘Palestinian State’.
5. Anti-Semitism
Especially as the Motion’s wording strengthens the hand of those who believe that the Zionism is Racism policy is built on the worst kind of anti-Semitism.
I’m not claiming my experience is any more valid than anyone else’s, but as a member of the party for more than 50 years, I’ve never encountered any anti-Semitism. And like everyone else in the Party, I’m enraged by those prattling journalists, interviewers and political ‘pundits’ who continue to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
Like Zack, I intend to go on calling that out for what it really is: a well-funded, highly-organised, deeply dishonest campaign by pro-Zionist racists and genocide-deniers to crush all opposition to what Israel is doing today.
I’m sure the Party’s four MPs and Caroline Lucas would agree with me on that point. But I would be fascinated to know what they would actually disagree with in this post. Perhaps they could let me know?
I ask this because they need to be careful. There are many, many people in UK politics, on both the right and the left, who would love to see the Green Party split in two on this. I can’t help but reflect on the way in which the UK’s pro-Zionist ‘Friends of Israel’ set out to destroy Jeremy Corbyn — and succeeded.
Are my dear colleagues blind to the way in which that happened? Have they not read ‘Complicity’, Peter Oborne’s devastating analysis of how an honourable (if naive and occasionally misguided politician) was brought low by Israel’s daunting propaganda machine?
A deep split would be tragic at a time when more and more people see today’s Zionist State of Israel for what it truly is. At a time when the actions being taken by countries like Spain and Denmark contrast more and more tellingly with the utterly abhorrent complicity of our Government in the continuing genocide in Gaza, arming, investing in and providing cover for the racist, apartheid State of Israel. Supported by the Lib Dems, by the Conservatives, and by all right-wing outliers in this country.
The Green Party’s Zionism is Racism policy is the right message, providing voters with a chance definitively to disavow the ideology of Zionism. God help us if an on-going fractious debate inside the Green Party stands in the way of that.
