This weekend, at their spring conference, UK Green Party members are preparing to debate a motion titled simply: “Zionism is Racism.”

Motion A105 does not merely criticise Israeli government policy. It attempts to rewrite Jewish identity and Jewish history in order to deny the Jewish people the same right afforded to every other nation: the right to self determination. At the same time, it undermines the very anti-racist safeguards developed to protect Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

The incoherent, self-contradictory, and ahistorical mess that forms the text of this “anti-Zionist” motion is the resurrection of a discredited ideological campaign whose origins lie in Soviet propaganda – an effort designed to isolate and demonise the Jewish national movement.

Rather than become lost rebutting every distortion and fabrication line by line, it is more useful to focus on the core pillars upon which the motion rests. Examining them exposes the true nature of what the Green Party is proposing.

Denying the Jewish right to self-determination

The motion begins by redefining Zionism itself:

“Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation… of an ethnonationalist Jewish State… to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population.”

This is a false accusation, not a definition of Zionism. Zionism emerged as a national liberation movement of a stateless people. It was the conclusion reached after centuries of failed integration, persecution and expulsion. Israel is a nation built by refugees. Families of people who learned the hard way that their safety could never be entrusted to others. To label that project racist is as absurd as calling a refuge for abused women sexist. Both evolved as a means of protection, not domination.

Zionist is a Jewish label

Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people, rooted in their history, their vulnerability, and their need for collective security.

One of the frequently repeated defences is to present Zionism as a political ideology, detached from Jewish identity.

Technically, there are non-Jews who identify as Zionists, and there are Jews who do not. But this framing conceals something important.

A non-Jewish person living safely in the West who declares themselves a Zionist is not personally exercising Jewish self-determination. They are expressing support for the right of Jews to exercise theirs.

There is a distinction, and it matters. A Londoner who supports Scottish nationalism is not considered a Scottish nationalist in any meaningful national sense. He remains a Londoner expressing an opinion about another people’s national aspirations.

Zionism is not about its supporters abroad. It is about the national existence of the people who live it, and the aspirations of others who want to join them.

When the Green Party declare Zionism to be racism, they are not condemning a theoretical idea held by distant sympathisers. They are condemning the national legitimacy of millions of Jews whose identity, security, and future are bound up in that state.

The motion attempts to separate Zionism from Jews in theory, while targeting Jewish nationhood in practice. That contradiction is essential to how the argument works.

The Green Party and the destruction of Israel

Irish nationalism is not described as racism. Polish nationalism is not described as racism. Palestinian nationalism is actively supported.

Only Jewish national identity is treated as uniquely illegitimate.

This is followed up by calls for the establishment of “a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine”.

This is where the mask slips completely. Because this is a proposal of elimination. Israel has nearly ten million citizens. Seven million of them are Jews.

Yet this motion proposes dismantling their state. No other nation on earth is told its national existence must be undone. Only the Jews. This is not criticism of a government. It is a rejection of a people’s right to national existence.

The democratic Palestinian state

The motion presents the single Palestinian state as democratic and egalitarian. This is where the argument moves from ideological to fantastical.

This “democratic secular binational state” is largely a Western activist construct. It is not the central political programme of Palestinian political movements operating within the Palestinian territories themselves.

Palestinian political movements overwhelmingly define their struggle in national and, in many cases, religious terms. Their symbols are national or Islamic flags, and their most powerful political icon is an Islamic religious site.

Every major Palestinian faction speaks within a Palestinian national framework.

The Green Party and its colonial irony

The motion repeatedly accuses Zionism of colonialism. Yet it proposes imposing an externally-constructed political model onto an existing society thousands of miles away.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of ideological colonialism than this. A Western political movement declaring that a distant sovereign nation must cease to exist and be replaced with a structure of its own design, shaped by the moral and ethical frameworks its society upholds at this moment in time.

Not because the people living there have chosen it – but because activists in the West have decided it is morally necessary.

This is the imposition of ideology without consent, justified by moral certainty. It is a classic trait of the age of European colonialism.

Manufacturing Apartheid

The accusations against Israel, Jews and Zionism rely on more than a crooked definition or deceptive calls for change. In order to persuade people to support the dismantling of an existing democracy, the motion leans heavily on a long-standing campaign of demonisation and disinformation. Zionism has been associated with the worst crimes in human history, and the motion presents these allegations as if they were established fact.

The word “apartheid” appears twenty six times. “Genocide” is referenced twenty one times. This repetition is not accidental. It is intended to create the impression of guilt through sheer weight of accusation, rather than through substantiated evidence.

The motion assumes that most readers will not examine these claims closely enough to recognise how weak they are.

For example, the motion cites the database of the advocacy organisation Adalah as evidence of numerous laws that allegedly discriminate against non-Jewish citizens in Israel.

Yet those who take the time to examine the database quickly discover that its methodology is deeply misleading. Laws that reflect Israel’s Jewish national character, such as recognising Jewish national symbols or holidays, are presented as evidence of racial discrimination.

By this logic, any nation state that expresses its national identity in law would qualify as apartheid. The United Kingdom would be no exception. Its national flag contains Christian symbolism, and Christmas is recognised as a national holiday. Yet no serious observer would describe Britain as an apartheid state on that basis.

The Green Party rewrites antisemitism

Not content with just attacking Jews in Israel, the motion then turns to dismantling the protections set in place by nation states to protect Jewish citizens living in the diaspora. What makes this all the more troubling, is that this is occurring against the backdrop of a visible rise in deadly antisemitic attacks globally.

The motion attempts to treat the word “Semite” as if it were a political identity. It is not.

It was a linguistic classification that was later misused by antisemites to justify hatred of Jews.

A butterfly is neither butter, nor a fly. Antisemitism, is not about opposition to semitic languages, it is a word to describe a hatred of Jews.

The motion’s argument confuses etymology with meaning. “Antisemitism” was coined by Wilhelm Marr specifically to describe hatred of Jews, not Arabs. It was never a neutral term later “distorted.” Its modern use is entirely consistent with its original purpose. Claiming otherwise is not linguistic accuracy, it is political revisionism designed to deny the specificity of anti-Jewish racism.

Soviet origins of Zionism is Racism

The claim that “Zionism is racism” did not emerge from civil rights scholarship or anti-racist principle. It was popularised globally by the Soviet Union as part of its Cold War propaganda campaign against Israel and the West.

Soviet hostility to Jewish national identity predated the slogan itself. In 1918, the Communist Party established a Jewish section known as the Yevsektsiya, whose purpose was to dismantle Jewish religious, cultural, and national life and replace it with Soviet political loyalty.

The Soviet Union later became the principal military backer of Arab states seeking to defeat Israel, supplying arms, training, and diplomatic support. In 1975, the Soviet bloc successfully pushed United Nations Resolution 3379, formally declaring Zionism a form of racism. This was not a moral breakthrough. It was a political weapon. At the same time, the Soviet regime suppressed Jewish identity at home, imprisoned Jewish activists, and denied Jews the right to emigrate.

The resolution was repealed in 1991, as the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Once the political power behind the campaign disappeared, so too did one of its most successful ideological exports.

Motion A105 resurrects that same slogan, stripped of its Soviet branding but carrying the same objectives: to delegitimise Jewish self-determination and attack Jewish identity.

The Green Party supports violence

Once the false accusations have been made, and Zionism redefined as demonic, then all measures taken to oppose it become legitimate. The Green Party motion makes this absolutely clear in its text.

Motion A105 expresses support for Palestinian “resistance in all its forms.”

This is not neutral language. It is the same formulation used by Palestinian terrorist groups to describe violent attacks against Israeli civilians.

Those attacks include the atrocities of October 7, 2023, when Hamas gunmen crossed into Israel, massacred civilians, and took hostages.

By adopting this language without qualification, the motion removes any distinction between peaceful protest and armed violence against civilians.

No political party committed to democratic principles should blur that line. Yet Motion A105 does exactly that.

Behind the mask

Strip away the rhetoric, and the reality becomes clear.

Motion A105 does not promote peace. It does not promote coexistence. It promotes the elimination of Jewish self-determination while redefining antisemitism to ensure that elimination cannot be named.

This revives a discredited Soviet propaganda campaign and repackages it as moral progress.

We have indeed, seen it all before.

 

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