Green motion that turns ‘Zionism’ into a judgement on Jews

The Green Party of England and Wales has accepted Motion A105 for debate at its Spring Conference in late March 2026. Public descriptions of the motion say it declares that ‘Zionism is racism’, commits the party to an explicitly anti-Zionist stance, endorses BDS-style pressure, and backs a ‘single democratic Palestinian state’ across historic Palestine with equal rights and the right of return. Those descriptions also say it rejects both the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, and calls for steps such as de-proscribing Palestine Action and the release of Palestinian political prisoners including Marwan Barghouti.

Even if you agree with its underlying anger, this is a bad way to write politics. The result is a word that holds a whole range of Jewish self-understandings is treated as if it has one fixed, damning meaning.

And then we act shocked when it plays out as a judgement on Jews.

Start with the obvious descriptive problem. Zionism has never been one thing. It has included: a refuge project after European catastrophe; a language-and-culture revival; socialist nation-building; liberal nationalism that imagined partition; religious messianism; and, in its ugliest strands, a politics of permanent hierarchy, oppression, occupation and supremacy politics. Treating all of that as ‘racism’ is like treating ‘anti-colonialism’ as an ideology responsible for every atrocity committed by anyone who ever invoked it, including people cheering on Assad or Putin.

You can say: the Israeli state has built and maintained systems that discriminate, dispossess, and entrench domination. You can argue that these systems are racist in effect, and often in design. Plenty of serious human rights reporting uses that kind of framework. The motion doesn’t do that. Instead of naming policies and structures, it condemns the organising idea and makes every Zionism answerable for its worst expression.

In Britain, ‘Zionist’ is not used like ‘Gaullist’ or ‘Fabian’. It’s used as a social category. In practice, it often means ‘the Jews I don’t like’, or simply ‘the Jews’, full stop. That slippage is part of how antisemitism adapts in public settings where explicit Jew-hatred is disreputable.

The motion isn’t targeting a tiny sect. A very large share of British Jews report emotional attachment to Israel, and many self-identify as Zionist, including plenty who despise Netanyahu and oppose settlement expansion, occupation and support Palestinian rights.

A party policy that brands ‘Zionism’ as racism does not land as a clear critique of an ideology out there. It impacts the community here. Because it isn’t only a label. It also points at an end-state: the dissolution of a Jewish state, without spelling out what guarantees replace it.

It tells a Jewish family in London, whose relationship to Israel might be grief, fear, shame, pride, cousins, and a long-running argument at the dinner table, that their inherited identity is racist by definition.

One link in the chain is usually left implicit. The motion doesn’t just say ‘Zionism is racism’; it backs a single state across historic Palestine. Whatever you think of that as an end-point, it is widely understood as ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. For many Jews, Zionism is, at minimum, the claim that Jewish self-determination includes statehood, and that a state matters because minorities do not get permanent guarantees. After the Shoah, Israel became, for many, a last-resort refuge in the imagination and often in practice. If you ask Jews to relinquish that, you need to say what replaces it. Otherwise you’re not offering a new framework for safety. You’re just removing the old one.

A lot of people have spent the last decade claiming ‘anti-Zionism is antisemitism’. That claim is sometimes true in specific cases and false in plenty of others. The error is making it broadly true, and using it to smear anyone who argues for Palestinian rights.

Motion A105 repeats the same structure in reverse. It turns ‘Zionism is racism’ into a blanket moral judgement, and treats mainstream Jewish attachment to Israel, including the peaceful versions of it, as a moral stain.

The strange part is that the motion rejects both IHRA and JDA together. These two documents exist because the argument people are trying to have is genuinely hard: hostility to Israel can be legitimate politics, and it can also slide into hostility to Jews, sometimes in the same sentence. The IHRA text is often criticised because it has been used by institutions as a blunt tool, but it also explicitly says that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’. The JDA was written in part to protect space for fierce criticism of Israel while still naming antisemitism when it appears.

If you’re serious about both Palestinian rights and Jewish safety, you don’t throw away every imperfect attempt at drawing that boundary and replace it with a slogan that makes the boundary harder to draw.

Supporters of ‘Zionism is racism’ often reach for the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution that used that phrase and note it was later revoked. UNGA Resolution 3379 did assert ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’, and UNGA Resolution 46/86 revoked it in 1991. But dragging that line into a UK party rulebook in 2026 doesn’t solve anything on its own. It doesn’t tell you how to distinguish between a Jewish refugee nationalism and a Jewish supremacy politics. It doesn’t tell you what to do with two peoples who both plausibly claim self-determination in the same land. It mostly tells you which team you’re trying to impress.

And that gets to the core political failure.

Anti-racism, when it’s functioning, is meant to protect minorities from being told their identity is illegitimate. It’s meant to stop the move where you take a complex group, pick its worst representatives, and declare the whole thing rotten.

Writing ‘Zionism is racism’ as party policy does that to Jews. It takes the most egregious reading of Zionism then hands every bad actor a get out of jail free card. The same thing happens on the other side when ‘anti-Zionism is antisemitism’ is used to smear anyone who demands Palestinian rights. The Green Party shouldn’t be choosing between two versions of the same mistake.

If the Greens want a policy that supports Palestinians and avoids laundering antisemitism, the fix is boring and specific. Name systems and laws, not identities. Say what you oppose in Israel-Palestine: settlement expansion, discrimination, military occupation, collective punishment, ethnic supremacy, denial of political rights. Say what you support: equal civil and political rights, safety for all civilians, Palestinian self-determination, and a future political settlement chosen by the people who live there, not by British activists playing with absolutes.

That kind of wording won’t satisfy the people who treat politics as a purity contest. It will do something more useful. It will let Palestinians be heard without turning British Jews into the villain of the story.