Latest

2026-10-05

Motion E02

I was at the Green Party Conference this weekend, and in the room for the vote on Motion E02: Zionism is Racism. The debate was surprisingly calm and good-natured for such a contentious topic. A member who had survived the Holocaust as a child spoke passionately in favour of the motion.

I voted against it, and I wish it hadn’t passed.

The motion passed on a margin of only 209 votes (1,022 for, 813 against) out of a membership of over 200,000. A member-led democracy isn’t all it should be if under 1% of the membership take part in votes.

The preamble states that

Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation – and, now it exists, the continuity – of an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population. The real, material manifestation of Zionism has been the historic and ongoing dehumanisation, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement and destruction of Palestinians. This is based upon European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression, which has also created racial hierarchies between Jews of different ethnicities in Palestine.

I agree with the sentiment. Perhaps there’s some theoretical version of Zionism that involves people from the Jewish diaspora moving to the region and living in peaceful coexistence, but that’s not what happened, and it’s not what is happening. Zionism as it actually exists is militarised expansion, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing. Ethnocracies are, ipso facto, discriminatory. That’s what they’re for. That’s what they do. Israel’s recently-passed Basic Law is explicit about its ethnic basis:

C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

If that isn’t enough, this is a state that imposes the death penalty only for Palestinians.

On a pedantic basis, I couldn’t agree with clause 3 of the motion:

3. Following from Motion E05, which affirmed that Israel is an apartheid State committing genocide, and Motion E07 supporting reparations and accountability, the Green Party supports the establishment of a single democratic 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.

As it happens, I do think that the only long-lasting stable solution is probably a single state – a two-state solution became untenable long ago – but it has to be a state that provides equal dignity to everyone within its borders: Palestinian, Jewish, Druze, and anyone else. But I don’t think it’s the place of a British political party to define a solution for other people. That kind of thinking is how we got into this mess in the first place.

My main opposition, however, is practical. I regret that the motion was passed because it will have no substantive impact on the conditions of Palestinians, but I fear that it takes the one party that would actually fight for the rights of Palestinians further away from power and the ability to do something about it – or the environment, or workers’ rights, or health, or the rights of trans people, or anything else that matters. It will be used as a stick to beat the Green Party, and it will crowd out discussion of other topics.

I don’t think many people have a positive impression of Israel any more. It’s a nuclear-armed state that uses its enormous military power, supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other parts of the declining Western hegemony – the defunct “rules-based international order” – to take territory through right of conquest, and to dispossess the people who previously lived in Palestine, Lebanon, or Syria.

I would very much like to annex at least up to the Yellow Line in Gaza and up to the Litani [River] in Lebanon.

Whatever moral high ground the Israeli state might once have been able to claim over the attacks of 7 October 2023 is now gone: the deaths and injuries from that event are now a mere rounding error compared to over 10% of the population of Gaza who have been directly killed or injured since then in the IDF’s campaign of retribution against Palestinians for what increasingly seems to be the crime of simply existing.

We’ve seen the hospitals being bombed. We’ve seen snipers shooting children as they try to get food – and making a game out of where they can hit them. We’ve seen the starvation and malnutrition resulting from the famine the IDF caused and perpetuated. We’ve seen the amputations and corpses. They’ve killed so many journalists, sometimes deliberately targeting them, sometimes as collateral damage while firing missiles at hospitals, but information still gets out.

And we’re seeing a particular pattern of injuries whereby particular body parts are being targeted on particular days. So one day we will see mainly abdominal gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see head gunshot wounds. Another day we’ll see neck gunshot wounds. So there is a very clear pattern that all, not just me but all of us, have seen in this hospital, whereby particular body parts are targeted on particular days […] I think seeing four young teenagers come in, in the space of one hour, with gunshot wounds to their testicles, which we have never seen before, is beyond coincidence.

We can now look on Google Maps’ satellite view and see with our own eyes that much of Rafah and Khan Younis have been reduced to rubble.

However, to the British establishment and the commentariat, Palestinians aren’t really people, and Palestinian lives are less important than preserving their own places in the status quo. Long after the scale of mass murder became irrefutable, they still hedge their criticisms of the Israeli state. That’s why it’s treated as a greater crime to hold a sign supporting Palestine Action than to organise a masked and uniformed mob to shut down a port. Given the choice between a left-wing party gaining power and implicit support of genocide, there’s no contest for them.

There will now be a full-spectrum assault on the Green Party, and on Zack Polanski specifically (even though he neither spoke in favour of nor voted for the motion). They will use the same tactics that worked against Corbyn, but this is not 2019. In the end, the effect depends on whether a high-intensity media campaign of spurious anti-semitism accusations can sway the public, or whether they’ll go on believing their eyes, the photos of maimed and murdered children, and the satellite images that testify to a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

I hope it’s the latter.