The Green Party’s ‘anti-racist’ exclusionary politics

On Oct. 4, Green Party members in Brighton, England, voted 1,022 to 813 to transform themselves into an “anti-Zionist” party. They passed a motion saying that Zionism should be treated as a form of racism and calling for a single “democratic” Palestinian state throughout historical Palestine—in other words, in place of the Jewish state.

In this context, consider that, last year, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research surveyed more than 4,800 British Jews. Eighty-one percent said they supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Sixty-four percent called themselves Zionists. Three-quarters felt emotionally attached to Israel. Many are sharply critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war in Gaza, so attachment to Israel is clearly not the same as applauding its government.

Someone following the news might take the Green Party vote as another expression of anger at Netanyahu. It is more than that. Criticism of Israeli governments has long been mainstreamed in Britain, and Jews take part in it too. For decades, even Israel’s harshest European critics asked how two peoples, each claiming self-determination, could share the same land.

The Greens have moved beyond that question. An amendment that would have kept open the possibility of two states was rejected. What remains is one Palestinian state across the whole territory, with Zionism classified as racism.

That is no longer an argument about what Israel does. It is an argument about whether a Jewish state should exist at all.

The Greens have a reply, and it deserves a hearing. Zionism, they say, is a political ideology, while Jews are a people; one can oppose the first and defend the second. As a matter of logic, that works. Not every Jew is a Zionist, and nobody should have to adopt a national ideology by virtue of birth. But sociology is less obliging than logic. When 64% of British Jews call themselves Zionists and 81% back Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, the line the party has drawn does not separate an ideology from a community. It cuts through the community.

Before the vote, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust raised “acute concerns” with Green leaders about British Jews’ safety and welfare. Nothing in the resolution makes Zionism illegal, and talk of legal persecution would be an exaggeration. I do not doubt that many delegates meant well, and calling Zionism racist does not make someone an antisemite.

My worry is about how exclusion usually works in a liberal society. It rarely starts with a law. It starts with a norm. Once a party has officially declared an ideology racist, it can readily turn away those who hold it. People learn not to voice it, and respectable institutions stop associating with those who do.

The Green Party showed how short that road is. For example, the delegates rejected an amendment saying the policy must not be used to pressure or discipline members merely for belonging to synagogues or Jewish organizations that describe themselves as Zionist. After the main motion passed, supporters gathered before the cameras and chanted: “Say it loud, say it clear, Zionists are not welcome here.” The chanters were supporters of the motion, not the leadership, but the slogan came within minutes of a safeguard being voted down.

Now picture a Jewish student whose synagogue calls itself Zionist; an academic who backs Palestinian statehood but believes Israel should remain a Jewish state; a trade unionist who despises Netanyahu and still calls herself a Zionist because she thinks Jews, like Palestinians, are entitled to national self-determination.

None of them needs to be expelled from anything. They can still walk into the room. They will simply learn, in small ways, that they are not wanted in it. That is how a policy can be anti-racist in intention and exclusionary in effect. Those affected need only hold a conviction that has become a mark against them.

A simple principle avoids the trap: No Jew should be forced to be a Zionist, and no Jew should have to renounce Zionism to be accepted in respectable public life. The same applies to Palestinians, whose national identity should not be grounds for exclusion either. Settlements, occupation and the conduct of the Gaza war remain fair subjects of fierce argument. But condemning what Israel does is one thing. Declaring the principle underlying Israel’s existence—Jewish national self-determination—racist is another.

The Greens say their target is an idea, not a people. They may mean it. But ideas are held by people, and the real test of this doctrine will come when the ideology the party has declared racist turns out to belong to those already sitting in the room.