Zionism Is Not Racism. And the Timing of This Smear Is Not a Coincidence.

This week, as Jewish communities around the world prepare to mark the third anniversary of October 7, the British Green Party formally adopted a resolution classifying Zionism as a form of racism. Not before this anniversary. Not after it. This week. The timing is not poor judgment. It is not coincidence. It is a choice. And choices, as I have written before, carry meaning.

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded immediately, stating that the Green Party had ceased to act as a political party and had become a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism, one that had adopted not only its own green, but the green of Hamas. I understand the anger behind that statement. I share it. But I want to go further, because what happened at that conference this week is not only an outrage. It is a symptom of something the Jewish community must be willing to name clearly and without apology.

What Zionism Actually Is

Let me state something plainly, because it has become necessary to state plainly what should be obvious. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, like other peoples, have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. That is its foundation. That is its core. Not supremacy. Not exclusion. Not racism. The same principle of national self-determination that the world affirms for every other people on earth.

No one calls Irish nationalism racism. No one calls the Palestinian national movement racism. The unique standard applied to Jewish nationhood, and only to Jewish nationhood, is itself the tell. When a right that is granted to every other people on earth is denied specifically to Jews, that is not a political position. That is a prejudice with a very long history.

I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I grew up understanding, not as an abstraction, but as family history, what happens to Jews when there is no Jewish state. I know what it means to need a place that is yours, that cannot be taken away, that does not depend on the tolerance of neighbors who may one day stop being tolerant. Israel exists because of that knowledge. Zionism is that knowledge translated into a national movement.

To call that racism is not a policy disagreement. It is a declaration about Jewish identity itself.

The Timing Is the Message

Three years ago this week, Hamas murdered 1,200 people in southern Israel. They kidnapped 250+, men, women, children, the elderly. They committed atrocities that were documented by first responders, journalists, and international investigators.

Jewish families around the world are sitting with that grief right now. They are lighting candles, attending ceremonies, reading names. They are thinking about the people who were taken, the families that were shattered, the communities that will never be the same.

And in this week, in this exact week, a major British political party chose to declare that the national movement undergirding the existence of the state those victims called home is itself a form of racism.

I have spent time thinking about why the timing matters as much as the resolution itself. It is because timing is a form of communication. When you choose this week to make this declaration, you are saying something about how you weigh Jewish grief against your political positioning. You are saying something about whose pain you consider relevant and whose you consider expendable. You are saying something about what kind of party you have decided to be.

Political leaders, at moments like this, should be building bridges, not creating new tests for which expressions of Jewish identity are considered acceptable. The British Green Party has done the opposite. It has told Jewish members, Jewish voters, and Jewish communities in Britain that their deepest connection to Jewish nationhood and Jewish survival makes them, in the party’s formal view, racists. That is not a bridge. It is a wall.

The Left’s Antisemitism Problem Has a Name Now

For most of the twentieth century, antisemitism in the West was understood as a disease of the far right. Neo-Nazis. White nationalists. Ethnic supremacists. The prism through which Western liberals understood Jew-hatred was the prism of the 1930s, swastikas, brown shirts, Nuremberg laws.

I have written in these pages about seven men in swastika armbands who stood near the World Trade Center on the anniversary of September 11, raising their arms in Nazi salutes and chanting “Free Palestine.” That image belongs to the old prism.

But there is a second strain of antisemitism now, and it has learned to speak in the language of human rights. It does not march with swastikas. It marches with flags. It does not call Jews subhuman. It calls Zionism racism. It does not ban Jews from public life. It simply declares that the central expression of Jewish identity for the majority of Jews worldwide, connection to Israel, support for its existence, belief in Jewish self-determination, is morally unacceptable. The effect is the same. The costume is different.

What the British Green Party did this week is not an isolated event. It is part of a pattern that has been building for years and has accelerated since October 7, the normalization of anti-Jewish rhetoric in spaces that present themselves as progressive, humanitarian, and rights focused. From stadium stages to swastika armbands to film festivals to political party resolutions. The venues change. The target does not.

Branding Zionism as Racism Crosses a Consequential Line

I want to be precise about what the Green Party’s resolution actually does. It does not say: we oppose Israeli government policy. It does not say: we disagree with how Israel conducts its military operations. It says that Zionism itself, the belief that Jews deserve a homeland, is racism. That is a statement not about a government, not about a military, not about a specific set of policies. It is a statement about the Jewish people’s right to exist as a nation.

There is a phrase I keep returning to, one that captures what this resolution demands: Jews are expected to apologize for it. To disavow the movement for Jewish national self-determination to be considered acceptable members of a progressive political coalition. To treat their own identity as something that requires justification before a party that chose the week of October 7 to make this declaration.

We will not. I am proudly Zionist. I support the State of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. I support a negotiated path to peace that honors the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. Those two positions are not contradictions. They are the only honest foundation for any future worth having.

But I will not accept the premise that the first of those convictions is racist. And I will not be silent in the week the world asks us to remember why it matters.

The Response That Is Required

I am not asking for elaborate rebuttals. I am not asking the Jewish community to spend its energy constructing footnoted arguments about why Zionism is not racism, as though the premise of the question deserves the dignity of extended engagement. The burden of proof has been placed in the wrong direction, and accepting that framing, even to argue against it, concedes too much. What is required is declaration. Clarity. And the organized, coordinated response of a community that has decided it will no longer absorb these insults in silence.

Jewish organizations in Britain should make clear to the Green Party that this resolution has consequences, electoral, relational, and reputational. Jewish voters should know what this party has decided about their identity. Non-Jewish allies who understand why Jewish self-determination matters should say so publicly.

And the Jewish community everywhere should use this moment for what it is: an opportunity to educate the next generation about what Zionism means, why Israel exists, and why the right to Jewish self-determination is not a political preference but a lesson written in history.

That is the work of Jewish Future Promise, investing in Jewish identity, continuity, and confidence so that the generation encountering “Zionism is racism” on social media and in political party resolutions has the knowledge and the grounding to respond. Not with defensiveness. With clarity.

The Anniversary That Frames Everything

The families of the murdered are still grieving. The communities of the western Negev are still rebuilding. And the world is still arguing about whether the Jewish state has the right to exist, whether the Jewish national movement is a form of racism, and whether Jewish grief deserves the same standing as anyone else’s. I know where this road leads when the world gets those questions wrong. My family’s history is the answer.

The British Green Party has reminded us, in the first week of October 2026, how much work remains. Not only in Britain. But in every space where Jewish identity is being quietly reclassified from something to be honored into something to be explained, justified, and ultimately apologized for.

We are Zionists. We support the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. We will not accept the premise that those convictions are racist. And we will not be silent in the week the world asks us to remember why they matter.