British ‘Anti-Zionism’ reaches yet another new low
Britain’s Green Party says its anti-Zionism has nothing to do with Jews. The motion it passed suggests otherwise.
In recent months, Britain and Ireland have witnessed a striking political phenomenon. Campaigns to boycott Israeli goods have moved from activist fringes into mainstream debate. Sporting fixtures involving Israel have become political battlegrounds. In Ireland, politicians, activists, supporters and public figures have rallied behind efforts to isolate Israel in ways rarely proposed for any other country. Across parts of European progressive politics, opposition to Israel is no longer merely a foreign-policy position. Increasingly, it is becoming a marker of moral virtue.
Criticism of Israel is legitimate and often necessary. Israel’s occupation, settlement expansion, treatment of Palestinians, and conduct during wartime all raise serious questions that deserve robust democratic debate. But as pressure to isolate Israel intensifies, a deeper question emerges: why is the Jewish state so often treated as a category apart? Why do standards proposed for Israel rarely find application elsewhere?
Sunday’s vote at the UK Green Party conference offered a revealing answer.
Delegates voted 1,022 to 813 to make anti-Zionism official party policy. The motion defines Zionism as an ethnonationalist ideology, treats it as a form of racism, and endorses a single democratic state across historic Palestine. Party figures insist this is merely a principled objection to a political ideology, not a position about Jews.
The strongest criticisms of Israel deserve serious debate. Advocating Palestinian statehood, opposing settlements, supporting a two-state solution, or arguing for equal rights between Israelis and Palestinians does not require denying Jews a collective political identity.
The Greens’ motion goes further. It declares Jewish self-determination inherently suspect and treats Israel, uniquely among the world’s states, as lacking a legitimate right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
The simplest test is consistency. If anti-Zionism is a universal principle, it should apply equally to comparable national movements elsewhere. It does not.
The modern world is filled with states born through conflict, partition, migration, conquest and displacement. Turkey emerged from the collapse of empire and the expulsion of populations. Pakistan was created through partition and mass bloodshed. Ireland was born from a struggle over sovereignty and identity. Few nation-states have clean origin stories. Yet no major British political party campaigns to delegitimize Turkish nationalism, Irish nationalism, or the legitimacy of dozens of other states whose histories are marked by violence and displacement.
Only one national movement is singled out as uniquely illegitimate: that of the Jewish people.
This is precisely the double standard identified by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism: denying Jews the right to self-determination or applying standards to Israel that are not expected of other democratic nations.
The Greens reject that charge. But history shows why anti-Zionism cannot always be neatly separated from hostility toward Jews.
In 1952, the Soviet-backed Slánský trial accused Jewish Communist officials of belonging to a vast “Zionist conspiracy.” In 1968, Poland’s Communist government used an “anti-Zionist” campaign to drive thousands of Jews from the country, many of whom had little or no connection to Israel. In 1975, the Soviet bloc successfully pushed through the infamous United Nations resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism.” The resolution was eventually repealed in 1991.
The lesson is not that every anti-Zionist is an antisemite, or that criticism of Israel should be silenced. It is that anti-Zionism has repeatedly provided a respectable vocabulary through which older prejudices can be expressed while avoiding responsibility for them.
That risk is especially acute because Zionism is not some fringe doctrine embraced by a radical minority of Jews. For most Jews, Zionism simply means that the Jewish people, like other peoples, have a right to collective self-determination in their ancestral homeland. It is embedded in Jewish history, liturgy, memory and identity. The longing for Zion appears throughout Jewish prayer and ritual. Roughly half of the world’s Jews live in Israel today, including many descendants of Jews expelled or driven from Arab countries, Iran and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa.
Calling Zionism inherently racist therefore does more than criticize a government. It condemns a central component of how millions of Jews understand themselves and their history.
The party’s response has been that no member will be disciplined for holding Zionist beliefs. But if a political party officially labels those beliefs racist, the stigma remains. Tolerance is not acceptance. A belief can be tolerated while those who hold it are marked as morally suspect.
The motion’s proposed alternative is a single democratic state across historic Palestine. Supporters may sincerely believe this would deliver equality and end decades of conflict. But a democratic aspiration does not resolve the question of national self-determination. If the proposal replaces Israel rather than reforms its institutions while guaranteeing equal rights, it would abolish Jewish national sovereignty altogether.
Jews would become a minority in a region whose recent history offers little reassurance to vulnerable minorities. The near-disappearance of ancient Jewish communities from Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Tripoli and elsewhere is not an abstract historical footnote. It is living memory.
No serious advocate of democracy proposes dissolving France, Greece or Poland into larger multinational entities on the assumption that constitutional protections alone will safeguard their national communities. That experiment appears to be demanded only of Jews.
The Greens may believe they are taking a courageous moral stand. But moral principles require consistency. Criticizing Israel, opposing settlements, condemning military conduct and demanding Palestinian rights are legitimate political positions. Denying Jewish self-determination while affirming it for every other people is something else.
A principle applied to everyone except one group is not universalism. It is discrimination.
And that is why the Green Party’s vote matters beyond the party itself. It arrives amid a wider political culture in which boycotting Israeli goods is increasingly celebrated, sporting contests involving Israel become targets of political campaigns, and public figures treat the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely undeserving of the assumptions routinely granted to every other nation.
The Greens insist their anti-Zionism is not directed at Jews. Yet they have now made party policy of a proposition demanded of no other people: that the national aspirations of the Jewish people alone should cease to exist. That is the thread connecting calls to isolate Israel in commerce, culture and sport to demands for the disappearance of Israel as a Jewish state.
The issue is no longer disagreement with a government or opposition to a war. It is the belief that one people alone possess a national right that can be revoked.
That is why so many British Jews heard Sunday’s vote not as a criticism of Israel, but as a judgment on themselves.
https://easthampshire.greenparty.org.uk/2025/10/13/greens