The tide is turning as anti-Zionism reaches the mainstream

England’s Green Party has declared itself an anti-Zionist party, fighting off the inevitable backlash, paving the way for a wider reckoning against the cult who falsely claims to speak for all Jews. Judith Treanor reports from London.

On Sunday 4 October I happened to land in London to news that genuinely lifted my spirits. What a momentous day to be there. The Green Party of England and Wales had just voted at its autumn conference to become an anti-Zionist party, the first major party in Europe to do so.

The motion, introduced by British-Palestinian Green member Lubna Speitan, formally defined Zionism as an ethnonationalist political project and a form of racism. It reaffirmed Palestinian self-determination, the right of return, BDS and a full arms embargo against Israel. It also supported a single democratic Palestinian state across historic Palestine.

It also forced the word Zionism and the reality of it into the mainstream political conversation since 4 October. Even after three years of genocide, “Zionism” is a word many people outside Jewish, Palestinian and political circles may barely have encountered. I’d wager most disengaged Brits, even if they had heard the word, still wouldn’t know the difference between Zionism and Judaism. But its racist ideology is now being discussed in legacy and social media.

The backlash

The response to the motion was immediate, starting with the Chief Rabbi and the Zionist Jewish organisations condemning the motion. Some Jewish Greens said they felt unsafe, even suggesting that members could find themselves in conflict with party policy simply because they attend a synagogue or belong to a Jewish organisation that identifies as Zionist.

Three words, “Zionism is racism”, and a proposal for one state with equality for all are interpreted by some as a genocidal threat to Jews. Here we are again, in the never-ending “we’re back in Germany in 1939” narrative.

I won’t completely dismiss somebody’s fear, irrational or otherwise. It’s how they feel. But I dunno, perhaps their synagogue could stop praying for the IDF? Just a thought.

After receiving multiple complaints, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it recognised that “many Jewish people will be feeling vulnerable” following the motion and wrote to the Greens asking for more information on its “practical implications and potential impact”. Importantly, the EHRC did not find the motion breached the Equality Act.

Zionism and Palestine

In amongst the outrage, Palestinians, the primary victims of the Zionist project, have not been asked for their thoughts on Zionism. Twelve days after the vote, Greens4Palestine held a press conference to centre Palestinian voices.

Journalist Ahmed Alnaouq stated, “Ever since I came to the UK, I’ve been hearing some bizarre ideas: ‘Zionism means different things to different people’. Zionism means only one thing. And it means one thing to the people that it was manifested at.

Zionism means genocide and death.

In her speech, Dr Ghada Karmi, driven from Jerusalem as a child during the Nakba, said:

“I don’t know what the fuss is about. Zionism is of course racist. …. Zionists … decided to establish their self-determination on the territory of another people. …. There’s no way that the state of Israel could have been established without the expulsion of the people already living in the territory … Why is this so difficult to understand?”

Jews supporting the motion

Jewish Greens conducted their own survey immediately before the conference. Of the 108 respondents who answered the question about Zionism, 81% did not identify as Zionist. Seventy described themselves as anti-Zionist. That doesn’t mean they all supported this motion. They didn’t. Jewish Greens were so divided over it that their group decided it could not take a collective position.

Regardless, it is Jewish opponents of the motion whose voices are being heard and who are dominating the headlines.

When Green Party leader Zack Polanski appeared on the BBC, he was asked whether he understood why the motion was “deeply offensive to many Jews”. Incredibly, the interviewer never acknowledged that it wasn’t offensive to many others.

One of those others is Stephen Kapos, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who stood beside Lubna Speitan at the Greens Brighton press conference after the vote and said:

“It is the Zionist ideology and tactics that led to this, inevitably… Zionism is linked up with an ultimate conclusion which is a genocide, and therefore Zionism self-destructed, in my opinion. And from now on, I don’t think that we can accept and tolerate Zionism.”

Greens Leader Zack Polanski is Jewish. He has repeatedly pointed out that he is the only Jewish leader of a major British political party.

BBC “questioning”

On 18 October, the BBC posted on X that Polanski was to be “questioned” by presenter Laura Kuenssberg. Peculiar choice of wording. It sounds as if he was being dragged into a police interrogation room rather than appearing on the UK’s version of Insiders on a Sunday morning.

Kuenssberg grilled him for 14 minutes, throwing every criticism against the motion in the book at him. Polanski calmly returned serve.

“Zionism? In its practical application,” he said, “it is racist”.

Israel’s “right to exist”? “No state has an inherent right to exist. People do.”

On self-determination: “I support everyone’s right to self-determination, but not at the expense of another group, because that’s racist.”

He talked about the Nakba. He talked about genocide. He repeatedly dragged the conversation back to the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Zionists.

“Palestinians have been murdered because they are Palestinian.

That is very clearly racist”.

And when Kuenssberg attempted to pin the Greens’ falling polling numbers on the motion, Polanski reminded her that the political landscape had changed.

Immediately after Polanski’s BBC ‘questioning’ came a jaw-dropping television moments as broadcaster Jo Coburn declared saying “Zionism is racism” was “offensive”, “antisemitic” and “dangerous” and declared she had watched “in horror” as the motion passed.

The real horror

For three years we have watched in horror as Gaza has been decimated in the name of Zionism. We have watched children pulled from rubble. Children burned alive in tents. Children losing multiple limbs. Entire families wiped out. Doctors tortured to death. We learned from released detainees of dogs trained to rape in torture camps. We heard Hind Rajab’s cries for help before she was killed.

In the past week alone, we’ve watched the horror in the West Bank, during the olive harvest, at the hands of violent masked Israeli terrorists who the media and political class still call “settlers”.

That is horror.

Yet, the backlash to the motion has gone on and on. On Monday, Greens spokesperson Ashok Kumar faced with aplomb a four-person BBC panel challenging him over the motion, including accusations of “entryism”. ‘Human Rights Activist’ Baroness Shami Chakrabarti called the motion “wrong and highly inflammatory”, adding that it wasn’t “even fair to student unions to call this student union politics”.

Anti-zionism in Jewish history

Jewish opposition to Zionism is not some new phenomenon invented in response to Gaza. From the Jewish Labour Bund to socialists, renowned intellectuals and Orthodox Jews, opposition to Zionism was widespread among Jews from its emergence as a political movement in the late nineteenth century.

Judaism has existed for 3,000 years. The State of Israel has existed only since 1948. Jews managed to be Jews for a very long time before Israel or Zionism existed, demolishing the idea that Zionism and Jewishness are somehow interchangeable.

Not all Jews are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jews.

Yet we are repeatedly told that criticising Zionism amounts to attacking Jews. New Statesman Associate Editor Rachel Cunliffe told the BBC in an emotional tirade that “belief in a Jewish homeland is fundamental to the Jewish identity of most Jews”.

You cannot insist that Israel does not represent Jews when Israel is criticised and simultaneously insist that rejection of the Zionist project that created it is an attack on Jews. Even the contested IHRA definition of antisemitism, adopted by the UK, says that holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of Israel is antisemitic. Make it make sense!

Zionism’s defenders consistently try to convince us that Zionism means different things to different people, that it is nuanced, that it simply means belief in a Jewish homeland. That being a Zionist doesn’t mean supporting Netanyahu, the settlements or Israel’s far-right government. Lovely sentiments. But Zionist leaders have never been so coy about what Zionism means.

Let’s ask Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism.

He was remarkably clear about the political project he was proposing.

In The Jewish State in 1896, Theodor Herzl referred to “experiments in colonisation” and warned that gradual Jewish “infiltration” would eventually reach the point where “the native population feels itself threatened”. In his diary, he wrote: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,

while denying it any employment in our own country.

We have seen enough apartheid, enough ethnic cleansing and dispossession to reject ‘Zionist nuance and justifications.’ And we have watched a genocide unfold in Gaza. “Zionism is racism” is an understatement.

What about Australian Greens?

On his first day as leader, David Shoebridge’s words echoed Polanski’s: “We’re not here to make the Labor Party any better. The Greens are here to replace them.”

Zack Polanski is Jewish. Zack can at least remind reporters he is the only Jewish leader of a major party. David Shoebridge isn’t. Australia has a deeply entrenched Zionist establishment, so the response will be brutal. There will be accusations of antisemitism. There will be Jewish organisations crying wolf. There will be demands for resignations.

But Australians who have never paid Zionism any mind might start asking what it means. Anti-Zionist Jews and Palestinians should be instrumental in making that happen here.

The outrage will come. And after a few long weeks, it will die down.

So let the anti-Zionist dominoes fall across the world. Thank you, UK Greens, for having the courage to be the first.

Never again. Worst antisemitism comes from Zionists says Australian Jew