The Green Party’s decision to exclude the Jewish-Palestinian peace group Standing Together from its annual conference under its BDS policy, as the JC reports exclusively, is a striking indication of how far the party has moved. The organisation unites Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel “to campaign against the occupation and for peace, equality, and social justice” and describes Israeli policy in the West Bank as “apartheid” and the war in Gaza as “genocidal”. Yet even that does not pass the ideological purity test.
That makes it increasingly difficult to describe the Greens’ direction simply as support for Palestinians, still less as principally concerned with peace. A movement genuinely committed to Palestinian welfare and self-determination ought to promote, not shun, Palestinians and Israelis who work together and advocate compromise. When such people are nevertheless treated as beyond the pale, the argument is no longer merely about Israeli policy but about Israel’s legitimacy.
The “Zionism is racism” motion proposed for the party conference makes that explicit. Zionism is the belief that Jews are entitled to national self-determination in their historic homeland. To declare that principle itself racist is not simply to oppose settlements but to reject Israel as a Jewish state and, in substance, to seek its dismantlement as such. It is rather troubling that Palestinian rejectionism, which lies at the heart of the conflict, has thus found a home inside a mainstream British political party. UK politics ought to have a moderating influence on foreign conflicts rather than import some of the Middle East’s most intransigent ideas.
The contrast between the Greens’ position on Israel and the party’s discussion of Iran is extraordinary. While activists demand ever harsher boycotts and sanctions against democratic Israel, motions have called for sanctions on Iran to be lifted, including the designation of the IRGC.
The argument is that sanctions harm Iranian civilians, yet no comparable solicitude seems to extend to Israeli civilians under the Greens’ BDS policy. That asymmetry is even harder to ignore when set against the antisemitic nature of the Iranian regime. That parts of the same political movement within the Greens that label Israel racist and illegitimate would advocate accommodation with a regime committed to its destruction is deeply telling.
If such motions have any practical effect in the Middle East, it will be to make the conflict even more intractable by encouraging Palestinian extremism and, in turn, strengthening those in Israel who argue that concessions will never bring peace.
But the most troubling question is what they say about the health of British society.
The problem unfortunately extends far beyond the Greens. Ideas that deny Israel’s very right to exist are increasingly popular in sections of academia and activist politics, while eliminationist slogans can be heard at so-called pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The language of alleged solidarity with Palestinians too often slides into a politics in which the disappearance of the world’s only Jewish state is presented not as extremism but as a progressive aspiration.
The consequences for British Jews are particularly serious. Most retain a strong attachment to Israel while holding widely differing views of its governments and policies. When Zionism itself is defined as racism, though, that attachment is recast as complicity in a racist enterprise and the line between hostility to Israel and hostility towards Jews becomes dangerously thin.
The wider danger is that once such extreme ideas are normalised in one area of politics, they rarely stay there. A worldview built around irredeemable oppressors, righteous violence and the rejection of compromise can readily feed other forms of sectarianism, anti-Western radicalism and political intolerance. What begins with Israel does not necessarily end with Israel.
Despite the widespread obsession with the Palestinian cause, Britain cannot resolve the conflict but it can decide whether its own politics will help moderate its extremism or reproduce it at home. When the most extreme ideas of the Middle East enter the British mainstream, the damage does not stop at the Jewish community – it corrodes the habits of liberalism on which British society itself depends.
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