Light floods the room at the top of the Brighton conference centre. Twenty or so people sit in a circle for Simchat Torah prayers while downstairs the Green Party conference is under way.
There is a Torah portion to read and a hora to dance before the business of Jews fighting for a place in their own party resumes.
People wear keffiyehs, slogan T-shirts and Magen Davids. The first chapter of Joshua, which is read in shuls around the world on this date, is about entering the promised land, Israel.
Yet before the service comes a disclaimer from a Jewish Green for the non-Jews: Israel in the liturgy means the Jewish people, not the state.
Downstairs, the Green Party is preparing to decide what another word means.
By the end of the weekend, the Greens will have defined Zionism as racism, called for a single Palestinian state “all available means” and rejected an amendment intended to protect Jewish members who attend synagogue.
Some of those members will have sought refuge in a Jewish safe room.
There will be tears, resignations and the unified designation of the Green Party of England and Wales as a racist party by all mainstream Jewish groups.
The Jewish Greens has been at the centre of this row. As the party has surged, the group’s membership has doubled since January.
Most of its members are antizionist or non-Zionist, putting the group out of step with 65 per cent of British Jews.
But the Jewish Greens I spoke to – Zionist and otherwise – opposed the “Zionism is racism” motion, at least in its unamended form.
Yet the amendment that stated the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline members based on affiliation with Jewish community institutions” was voted down 1,026 votes to 648.
Jews in the party who have marched for Palestine said they felt “betrayed,” another said she was “totally taken aback that more than one thousand members would vote against keeping us safe with something that did not materially change the motion.”
The motion’s proposers claimed the amendment was unnecessary and that Jews would not be targeted for attending shul.
But antizionist academic David Miller, one of the motion’s backers, published an article naming Jewish Greens and their synagogues, while Lubna Speitan, its author, has said shuls in Britain need to be “confronted” and Zionists “hunted in the same way as Nazi oppressors.”
After the vote, the motion’s supporters chanted “Zionists not welcome here” while Jewish members wept.
Former Green councillor Andrée Frieze resigned from the party, saying: “I cannot stay in a party that demands the destruction of Israel, denies Jewish self-definition, and deems me racist.”
David Urban, a former Green candidate, said: “Jews are the canary in the coal mine, and it looks like the canary is dying.”
Elise Benjamin is embraced by a Green colleague after the vote[Missing Credit]
Founding Jewish Green, Elise Benjamin, said the party is “no longer the Green Party” because it has ceased to be a pacifist party.
At the Jewish Greens stall, laden with antisemitism-training leaflets and stale bagels, members step away to speak so that nothing they say can be construed as representing the group.
It initially opposed the motion but ultimately took no official view, following what members described as a “takeover” by antizionists previously in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
The Jewish Green stall[Missing Credit]
The stall is at the opposite end of the space from the tables for Palestine and the Global Majority Greens, a group that Jews used to belong to but were ejected from.
Books sold at a conference bookshop include The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand, leaflets proclaim “Israel is not the Jewish State, it is the Zionist colonial, apartheid, genocidal state”, and thousands of professionally bound copies of the booklet Zionism is Racism Motion: Why It Matters are freely distributed.
Speaking to the stallholders, one woman explains that she wants Palestinians to be spared the West Bank sanctions.
There should be a way of “differentiating”, she says – I assume she means from the Jews – as she tries to sell her Palestinian soap.
As I walk away, she presses an “Antizionist Green” badge into my hand. Later, after the motion passes, she will be ululating in glee. Another supporter of the motion I get talking to suggests I am a “Holocaust denier”.
A Green Party conference panel, 'How it is all connected: what links the fight for a free Palestine, the environment and social justice in the UK,' featuring Zak Khan, Shahd Hammouri, Kieran Andrieu, Andrew Feinstein, Mikaela Loach[Missing Credit]
Sessions at this conference include a discussion with motion supporters and ex-George Galloway ally, Salma Yaqoob, a panel on “Israeli sportswashing” and “normalisation” in football, and an event titled “Palestine is still the issue” hosted by Friends of al-Aqsa, and featuring Green deputy leader Mothin Ali. Former Labour MP turned Press TV presenter Chris Williamson stalks around the media zone.
On Saturday evening, I attend a packed panel in the main hall titled “How it is all connected: what links the fight for a free Palestine, the environment and social justice in the UK”.
Influencer Mikaela Loach encourages the audience of at least one hundred to feel less “distracted” by chanting “free Palestine”, while antizioinist Israeli historiaan Ilan Pappé celebrates the 1975 United Nations resolution declaring Zionism racism and calls for “de-Zionising Israel”.
University of Kent lecturer Dr Shahd Hammouri says Zionists are useful only to “uphold the dominance of the petrol dollar”.
She adds: “International law was defined by those who won the Second World War – they just happened to be the biggest colonialist in the world.”
She gets the largest cheer when she says, “the only solution” is the “one state solution”. Behind the panel hangs the Stitch in Time tapestry, weeks after it had to be removed from Leeds Minster for commemorating the names of “at least 18 known terrorist fighters”.
A ten-minute walk away, a very different conversation is beginning. Standing Together, a Jewish-Palestinian coexistence organisation that campaigns against the occupation, has a Green friends’ group.
But its session with Palestinian panellists has to take place outside the main conference and is absent from the fringe guide because the Greens have banned Standing Together, which is on the BDS boycott list and faces accusations of “normalising” the Jewish state.
On that panel, Sabreen Msarwi, a Palestinian teacher, tells an audience of thirty about the protests against her employment at a Jewish school in Israel after she attended a Nakba Day march. Standing Together defended her back then, and now she wants to educate Palestinians and Israelis towards shared responsibility and “keep imagining another path” towards peace.
Green friends of Standing Together[Missing Credit]
Tareq Qazzaz, who moved from Gaza to north London in 2023, describes how he initially felt “alienated” in an area with so many Jews. “I thought it was an Israeli settlement.”
He tells the room: “Most of my life I had never encountered Jewish people… I found peace somehow living in north London when I joined Standing Together.”
Much of the discussion centres on the absurdity of this conversation being excluded from the conference. Local Green councillor Mark Strong, whose parents survived the Holocaust, says his Green council colleagues in Brighton support Standing Together. But he describes a “fear of being perceived as pro-Israeli” within the party for supporting it.
He reads a statement from Brighton Pavilion MP Siân Berry, who says Standing Together is “important in my understanding of what opposition there is inside Israel”. But she does not attend the session in person, nor does any other MP.
The next day, Waveney Valley MP Adrian Ramsay will wear a Standing Together pin badge as he tells broadcasters that he opposed the “Zionism is racism” motion. It will be too late to make a difference.
Palestinians Sabreen Msarwi and Tareq Qazzaz at the Standing Together panel which was banned from conference[Missing Credit]
Outside the conference, rival flags fly as the world’s media arrive to report on this extraordinary motion. Among the Jewish antizionist protesters, I speak to Charlotte Prager Williams, who criticises the Zionist nature of shuls in Britain.
Asked whether she says “next year in Jerusalem” at Pesach, she replies: “We say next year no racism, next year free Palestine.” Another demonstrator, Ori Neumann, tells me: “Next year in Brighton”.
Antizionist activists outside Green conference[Missing Credit]
Back at the Simchat Torah prayers, my thoughts turn to another Simchat Torah three years ago when keffiyehs-wearing Hamas terrorists murdered Jews at a music festival and in their homes.
Now the Greens have voted that the very existence of those 1,200 souls slaughtered on October 7 was unfounded, was racist, and that their homeland should be defeated by any means.
In the Brighton conference centre, the Torah cycle concludes with a dance around the scroll, and for many of the Jews here, their cycle in the Green Party is also coming to an end.
To get more news, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.