Green Party of England and Wales passes motion equating Zionism with racism

The Green Party of England and Wales, which over the last two years has gained extraordinary strength under the leadership of Zack Polanski, has approved at its annual congress, held this weekend in Brighton, a controversial motion that equates Zionism with racism, and that threatens to divide the party between its historical members and the wave of new additions of affiliates.

The motion, approved by 1,022 congressional participants against 813 votes against, also defends the creation of a single Palestinian State (not the formula defended by the British left of two States, one Israeli and one Palestinian), thereby implicitly suggesting the disappearance of the current State of Israel.

The main progressive Jewish organizations in the United Kingdom, such as the Movement for a Progressive Judaism, which represents more than 80 synagogues in the country, or the Campaign against Antisemitism, have accused the training of being “anti-Semitic in its formulation and intentionality”, and of imposing an “extremist purity test”. Many Jewish members of a party that already has a certain historical standing in the United Kingdom now fear that they could be expelled or discriminated against in the organization.

Four of the five deputies that the party has today in the House of Commons expressed their rejection of the motion in the debates prior to the vote, and cast a vote against when the time came to speak. Its own leader, Polanski, is Jewish and was absent from the debates this Sunday. He did not vote, to resume his electoral campaign in the by-election for the London constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras, whose seat he is trying to wrest from Labor.

The motion, promoted by the internal current called Greens 4 Palestine (Greens for Palestine), defines Zionism as an ideology that supports “an ethno-nationalist Jewish State”, and supports the creation of “a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historical Palestine” in which, they defend, Arabs and Jews would be citizens with the same rights.

“The real and material manifestation of Zionism [sic] has been the continued and historical dehumanization, displacement, dispossession, disempowerment and destruction of the Palestinians,” the approved text states.

Polanski has been accused by British Jewish organizations of lacking leadership in the debate. The two amendments to the motion that he tried to promote, one to reject the one-state proposal and another to defend Jewish members of the party who belong to groups sympathetic to Zionism, such as some synagogues, have been rejected by the participants of the congress.

“If your Zionism means the [forced] displacement of the Palestinian people, it is clear that it is racist [an ideology], and I say this as the Jewish leader of a British political party,” Polanski has defended himself, in an attempt to swim between two waters and not end up harmed by the debate.

A precautionary letter sent to the formation by two organizations as relevant as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the group that has the broadest representation of this community in the United Kingdom, and by the Jewish Leadership Council, attempted to explain that "modern Zionism was precisely a response to anti-Semitism, by creating a refuge for Jews in their ancient homeland after having been persecuted for years."