Due to a combination of infighting and technical failure with the online platform, the Green Party’s vote on declaring Zionism to be racism did not, in the end, take place. Whether the motion, which also calls for Israel’s abolition, ultimately passes at a future conference is almost beside the point. The mere fact that a mainstream party polling in second place has entertained the proposition that the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, alone among such movements, is inherently racist, marks a grave political and moral regression.
The reintroduction of this poisonous idea into British political discourse represents a return to a discredited strain of Soviet-era propaganda, which culminated in the notorious 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism – rescinded in 1991 after the collapse of communism.
The Harvard scholar Ruth Wisse has defined antisemitism not as a mere prejudice, but as “the organisation of politics against the Jews”. In its contemporary form, that political organisation is increasingly directed against the Jewish state.
What has unfolded over the past two years is not simply criticism of Israel, nor even obsessive hostility. It is the emergence of a totalising worldview in which Israeli wickedness becomes an all-encompassing explanation for global ills – and the struggle against the Jewish state thus a moral obligation. That is why it now appears so insistently in places where it has little or nothing to do with the matter at hand: in trade unions, professional bodies, universities, cultural institutions and activist networks of every kind.
The immediate victims of this phenomenon are not Israelis in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem who, despite grave threats, continue not only to successfully defend themselves but to prosper. Rather, the consequences are borne by Jewish communities in places such as Golders Green, Manchester, Sydney, Rotterdam, Liège and across North America. For most Jews in Britain and the rest of the diaspora, Zionism is integral to their identity. Recast that identity as racism, as something uniquely evil, and Jews become legitimate targets in the eyes of those who supposedly “just” hate Israel.
The political response has been disappointing. Casting blame on successive governments, including Conservative-led, Kemi Badenoch writes in our pages: “We have allowed the poison of antisemitism to spread for too long, because too many politicians have been too weak or too cowardly to even say what they see, let alone confront it. That must end.”
After each attack on their Jewish communities, political leaders in Britain and across the West issue condemnations and reaffirm their commitment to combating antisemitism. Yet the political response remains oddly evasive. Governments denounce antisemitism in the abstract while refusing to confront the form in which it now most often presents – and justifies – itself.
As Tony Blair has recently observed, efforts to combat antisemitism cannot succeed “without a challenge to the ideology that encourages” it. He identifies, in particular, a troubling development within parts of the Left: an alliance with Islamist movements, united by their hostility to Israel, which has become an animating cause. That diagnosis points to a broader truth. Antisemitism is not only an assault on Jews but on British society itself. It corrodes the basic norms on which democracy depends – and once those norms are eroded for one group, they rarely remain confined there. A political culture saturated with conspiracy thinking cannot function properly or make sound decisions. As Blair further noted: “There is more at stake than simply defending Israel. It’s about defending reason.”
If Labour is serious about reversing the rise of antisemitism, it must therefore be prepared to confront not only its symptoms but its sources – chief among them, today, antizionism. Yet recent actions suggest a troubling ambivalence. Labour’s decision last week to abandon a long-standing policy of opposing a particularly discriminatory treatment of Israel at the United Nations Human Rights Council signals a willingness to acquiesce in the very practices it claims to resist. To participate in the ritualised singling-out of Israel in international fora is not to uphold a rules-based order, but to undermine it. Moreover it lends, however unintentionally, credence to the notion that there is something uniquely malevolent about the Jewish state – the very narrative that fuels hostility against Jews at home.
If Britain is to confront the resurgence of antisemitism with seriousness and resolve, it must do more than police its symptoms at home. It must challenge the ideology that sustains it – both in domestic politics and in the international arena where it is so often legitimised.
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