What the Green Party Resolution Actually Says
Delegates at the Green Party conference this weekend will debate a motion declaring that Zionism is racism. If passed, the resolution would immediately become party policy, holding that Zionism should be "treated as any other form of racism." The practical consequence follows directly from the party's own rules: the Greens do not admit members of self-described racist organisations. A movement that classifies the belief in Jewish national self-determination as a racist ideology thereby classifies a great many Jews as racists.
The timing is not abstract for anyone paying attention. The Guardian opinion piece that frames this debate opens with a personal scene: a writer preparing to attend synagogue to recite Kaddish, the mourner's prayer, for a father who died eight years earlier that week. His point is sharply drawn. If he belonged to the Green Party, that ordinary act of Jewish mourning could place him under suspicion of racism. It sounds like hyperbole until you read the reporting from Jewish News indicating that Jewish Greens could face investigation for attending synagogue. The motion does not merely criticise Israeli government policy. It recasts a core component of Jewish religious and cultural life as a form of bigotry.
Why Conflating Zionism with Racism Misreads History
Start with the numbers, because they dismantle the premise that Zionism is some fringe or extremist position within Jewry. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research, one of the most rigorous social research bodies studying British Jewry, has surveyed the community's attitudes toward Israel and Zionism repeatedly. Its 2015 and 2017 studies found that a majority of British Jews hold some form of Zionist identification — a sense that Israel is in some way central to their Jewish identity. That is not a radical minority. It is the mainstream of a community whose median age, demographic distribution, and religious profile span the full spectrum from secular to strictly observant.
Read next France Is Dragging the Eurozone Toward a Debt CrisisThe conflation also misreads what Zionism actually is. The IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, adopted by the UK government in 2016 and subsequently by dozens of institutions, councils, and public bodies across Britain, offers the most widely used framework for distinguishing legitimate political criticism from antisemitic rhetoric. The definition is explicit: criticism of Israel "similar to that leveled against any other country" cannot be regarded as antisemitic. But it identifies as examples of antisemitism the denial of the Jewish people's right to self-determination — for instance, "the claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor" — and the application of double standards by requiring of Israel behaviour not expected of any other democratic nation.
That distinction matters enormously. One can oppose this or that Israeli government, its settlement policy, its conduct in Gaza, without denying the right of the Jewish people to a state at all. The Green motion erases that line. It takes a national identity held by a majority of the world's Jews and repackages it as a form of racial hatred.
Scholars of Jewish studies have made this point repeatedly. Brian Klug, a philosopher at Oxford who has written extensively on antisemitism, has argued that anti-Zionism is not automatically antisemitic — but that it becomes so when it denies Jews alone a right of national self-determination that is granted to every other people. The Green motion moves from "Israel's actions can be criticised" to "Zionism itself is racism." That is precisely the crossing point Klug and others have identified.
The Threat to Jewish Party Members
Consider what the resolution would mean in practice. Green Party rules prohibit membership by those who hold racist views. If Zionism is officially classified as racism, then a Jewish member who belongs to a synagogue, supports Israel's existence, or participates in a Zionist youth movement or communal organisation falls into the prohibited category. The Jewish News reporting is stark: Jewish Greens could face investigation for attending synagogue. Not for making statements about Israeli politics. For attending synagogue.
The chilling effect is the point. A political party that tells its Jewish members their communal affiliations might be investigated is a party that is telling those members to either renounce their Jewish identity publicly or leave. That is not a theoretical outcome of the resolution; it is the predictable result of a rule that treats a widely held Jewish belief as an offence.
This is also not the first time such dynamics have played out. The UK Labour Party spent years grappling with allegations that antisemitism had been allowed to fester under its previous leadership, a period that saw the Equality and Human Rights Commission issue a formal finding of unlawful conduct in 2020. Many Jewish members left. The Green Party now risks repeating that pattern. Once a party's official policy positions a core element of Jewish identity as racist, Jewish members face a choice no one should have to make: their politics or their people.
Who Gets to Define Jewish Identity?
The deeper question the resolution raises is authority. Who has the standing to declare what counts as authentic Jewish belief? The motion effectively answers: the Green Party conference. That is a staggering overreach. A political party — any political party — does not have the competence, the experience, or the legitimacy to rule on the content of Jewish identity.
Jews have been told for centuries by outside authorities what they may believe and how they may worship. The Green motion revives an old habit in a new register. It tells Jews that Zionism — which emerged as a modern political movement in the late nineteenth century and became central to Jewish life and identity after the Holocaust — is not a legitimate expression of Jewish peoplehood but a racist ideology.
The 2015 and 2017 JPR surveys show how deeply embedded Zionism is in British Jewish self-understanding. Majorities describe Israel as important to their Jewish identity. That is not a political preference imposed from outside. It is a lived reality. When a party treats that reality as racist, it is not critiquing Israeli policy. It is overriding Jewish self-definition.
How This Fuels Rather Than Fights Antisemitism
Anti-racism that targets a minority's identity is not anti-racism. It is the opposite. The IHRA definition exists precisely because antisemitism mutates. It no longer always appears as crude slurs or explicit exclusion. It appears as the delegitimisation of Jewish national self-determination, the application of standards to Israel that no other state is held to, and the positioning of Jews as uniquely responsible for a category of wrongdoing.
The Green motion meets several of the IHRA criteria. It characterises Zionism — the belief in Jewish self-determination — as racism. It singles out the Jewish state for a moral classification applied to no other nation. It turns a Jewish communal and religious affiliation into grounds for suspicion.
The consequences for anti-racist politics are serious. When a movement that claims to fight racism adopts a framework that pathologises the majority of a minority community, it undermines its own credibility. It tells Jewish communities that their lived experience and self-understanding are not to be trusted. And it provides cover for genuine antisemites, who can now point to a mainstream party's policy as validation.
What Political Parties Owe Jewish Communities
Political parties owe every minority community a basic duty: to treat its members as full citizens whose identities are not suspect. That means listening to how that community defines itself, not imposing definitions from the conference floor.
The Green Party has every right to criticise Israeli government policy. It has every right to advocate for Palestinian rights. But it does not have the right to declare the identity of the majority of the world's Jews a form of racism. The distinction is not a debating point. It is the difference between political criticism and the denial of a people's right to exist.
If the motion passes, Green members who are Jewish will face a question no party should ever force on anyone: which part of who you are do you abandon? That is not anti-racism. That is a test of loyalty no democratic party should impose. And the answer to who defines Jewish identity is not a political conference. It is Jews themselves.
Source: Opinion | The Guardian
