The Green Party has long presented itself as a movement united by concern for the environment. Increasingly, however, another cause appears to be defining its identity: an uncompromising antizionism that has moved from criticism of Israel into territory that should concern all those who value the norms of liberal democracy.
Documents obtained by this newspaper show that Greens for Palestine, an influential faction within the party, demanded that Jewish members seeking mediation over political differences first "liberate" their minds "from the supremacist grip of Zionism" before any such dialogue could be even considered. The group demanded that Jewish Greens apologise for the actions of the Israeli Embassy, retract media coverage for which they bore no responsibility, and condemn referrals of activists to the police.
Each of these demands carries troubling implications. To hold British Jews responsible for the actions of Israel is a classic antisemitic trope. To insist that Jewish party members answer for press coverage they neither authored nor controlled inevitably evokes the equally pernicious notion that Jews somehow exercise hidden influence over the media. And the requirement that Jews first free themselves from Zionism before dialogue can begin amounts to an ideological purity test. It is difficult to avoid the comparison with less enlightened eras in Europe, when Jews were expected to renounce their beliefs and convert to Christianity before they could be accepted in respectable society.
This is not merely a dispute between rival factions but points to a deeper problem within a party that increasingly appears consumed by a single obsession.
Lord Walney, a former Labour MP who was among the most persistent critics of antisemitism in his party during the Corbyn years, is right to sound the alarm. After reviewing the material, he concluded that "the Green Party seems as badly infected by prejudice as the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn" and called for a formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. That call should be heeded.
The EHRC's intervention in Labour was justified because the party had developed systemic problems that its leadership proved unable or unwilling to address. The question now is whether a similar process is underway within the Greens.
What is troubling is not merely the prevalence of these views but their increasingly comprehensive nature. For a growing number of activists, antizionism appears to function less as a political position about a far-away conflict than as a totalising ideology through which other political questions are understood. It offers a single explanatory framework for disparate injustices and grievances and increasingly serves as a marker of moral identity. In that sense, it resembles what Harvard scholar Ruth Wisse has described as the "organisation of politics against the Jews" – not a prejudice operating at the margins of politics but a political project around which politics itself is organised.
There are signs that such a transformation is taking place. Greens for Palestine openly boasts of increasing the number of antizionist councillors within the party as the controversial motion branding Zionism as racism remains on the agenda for the party’s October conference. Antizionism appears to have become not one campaign among many but an all-encompassing creed and a central marker of the Greens’ political identity.
Nor can the party leadership escape responsibility. From downplaying the threat to the Jewish community despite a succession of violent antisemitic incidents, to supporting calls for lists of British citizens who have served in the IDF, Zack Polanski himself has repeatedly chosen rhetoric and causes that deepen rather than ease communal anxieties. Far from acting as a brake on radicalisation, he has frequently appeared to encourage it.
The Green Party is entitled to criticise Israel but when Jewish members are told to apologise for Israel's actions, when they are blamed for media coverage beyond their control, and when they are instructed to undergo ideological re-education before they can participate in internal dialogue, the issue is no longer Middle East policy – it is discrimination.
Ideally, the Green Party would confront this problem itself. If it will not, the EHRC should determine whether the circumstances now warrant the same level of scrutiny once applied to Labour. The evidence emerging from within the party suggests that such scrutiny is no longer merely justified but unavoidable.
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