Greens See Red: The Black and “White” of Zionism

The political dust has settled somewhat after the UK Green Party’s adoption of the motion Zionism as Racism. It may yet be reversed.

What got lost in the story were the most revealing words of the Green Party’s conference:

“a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine”.

Israel gone. Erased.

What does it mean when a mainstream British political party decides that Israel should cease to exist as a Jewish state?

Let us not kid ourselves. This was a deliberate, in-your-face, two-fingered salute to almost every Jewish Israeli.

The motion is not just an explicit call to end Israel as a Jewish state, but also, implicitly, a call for the displacement of the Israeli Jews living there. To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

That the Greens couldn’t stomach the fig leaf of two states or a bi-national state says it all. The insertion of “equal rights for all” is slippery – a wink-wink offering political cover.

There is form here with the Green Party. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, Green Party Co-Deputy Leader Mothin Ali posted on social media:

“White supremacist European settler colonialism must end!”

White. European. Colonialism.

Three words doing an awful lot of work.

“European?”

Ali may not be aware that Jews of Moroccan heritage have historically constituted one of Israel’s largest Jewish communities.  Around half of Israeli Jews trace their heritage across the Middle East and North Africa, from Algeria to Iran and practically everywhere in between.

But let’s not let today’s facts get in the way of an intended pejorative.

“Colonial?”

Israel exists. Smaller than Vermont, about the size of Wales, half the world’s Jews live here. This strand of European anti-Zionism amounts to the erasure of 21st-century Middle Eastern Jewish life, disguised as a fight against a 19th-century European ideology. A sleight of hand performed under the shadow of 20th-century European antisemitism.

But “White” is by far the most interesting – and pernicious.

White superficially does little work here. It is partly an addendum to the European label; a word merely loiters in the sentence.

Except that it does rather more than loiter.

The white label is central to anti-Zionist rhetoric. It is the linguistic workhorse.

Israeli Jews need to be cast as white colonial oppressors for Zionism to be inherently racist. Calling a non-white group racist is simply too tricky. Bluntly put, Zionists need to be white so that any link to brown-skinned people in the Middle East can be severed.

For some Europeans, casting Zionism as a white movement offers a useful fringe benefit: a way to offload centuries of colonial guilt onto Israel.

Most of all, whiteness provides a permission structure for discrimination: to boycott, refuse to serve, exclude. If Zionists are simply seen as Jews, or heaven forbid, brown-skinned Jews, that discrimination becomes altogether too queasy.

Zionist is of course a neat code for Israeli – and, in much of this debate, for Israeli Jews.

A Zionist (Israeli Jew) is a racist, an apologist for genocide, a champion of apartheid, a defender of colonialism. Four of the great political sins of the contemporary left, neatly bundled into one word.

I married an Israeli. I live in Israel. My daughters were born here and are being raised as Jews. This month I will vote in my first election as an Israeli citizen.

I didn’t move here to make a political statement. My children are growing up here. This is their home. It is also now mine.

And yet people who have never met me – and certainly never met my daughters – can apparently decide what that makes us.

So here is my question for the Greens.

Are my young daughters Zionists, or should I wait until they are older to ask? Were they born Zionists, or do they have to choose?

As Jewish Israelis, are they expected to embrace or renounce Zionism at 18? How much time do they have to decide – a year or two – before it is legitimate to declare: “We don’t serve Zionists”, or to brand them racists?

Perhaps if they serve in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), as most Jewish Israelis do, it will simply be too late for them to decide. They will be forever branded as Zionists.

Perhaps that is the point. Branding Jews.

Today, calling someone a Zionist has become a visceral insult in parts of the political left, on university campuses and in wider public debate in the UK and Ireland.

But who gets to decide what the label means? Who gets to decide what my daughters’ Zionism means before they’ve had the chance to work that out for themselves? And what exactly is required of me – or my daughters – to deny or embrace the Zionist label? Who gets to demand that they disavow it – and what exactly are they supposed to renounce?

For millennia, every new generation of Jews has been expected to embrace or disavow one belief or another to win acceptance.

The irony is that I have spent much of my journalism doing precisely what the anti-Zionist test seems to demand.

Earlier this summer, in Haaretz, I called on Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats, to “simply declare that the occupation is an abomination and must end”.

In the past, I pleaded with my fellow Israelis: “Deniability of what has happened and is happening in Gaza in our name will not be ignored. Indifference will not be forgiven. Silence will not be forgotten”.

None of those words makes me anti-Zionist. Nor were they intended to.

The whole “you can’t be Jewish and democratic” argument is exhaustingly stale. A Jewish state can control immigration, as nation-states routinely do based on nationality; celebrate Jewish holidays; and guarantee full equal rights for all. Minus the occupation.

It has simply never been tried.

In this election, I am torn between the Democrats, a leftist, predominantly Jewish party that supports a two-state solution and defines itself as Zionist, and Joint List, a Palestinian-led, left-wing alliance that equally supports two states but rejects the Zionist label.

My voting choice will not be informed by the Z-word. The label feels abstract, detached, performative.

I will judge Israeli politicians by their positions on the conflict, public safety, secularism and settler violence, and their willingness to stand up to Jewish and Muslim theocratic bullies. Not by whether they pass an ideological Zionism test.

Like any other election, my vote will also be informed by cost-of-living issues, education and, as a gay dad, LGBTQ concerns.

In my experience, anti-Zionists outside Israel often show surprisingly little interest in what Israeli voters – Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim or Druze – want their country to become after the election.

Perhaps that isn’t surprising. Whoever wins will, after all, be Zionist.

I may not know whether I am a Zionist. I am certain others do. But I do know what kind of country I want my daughters to grow up in.

One final message to the Greens and their fellow travelers.

If you force Israeli Jews to choose between national suicide and Palestinian ethnic cleansing, don’t feign shock at the choice they make.