Remember when the Greens were sandal-wearing idealists worried about koalas? Now tree planting can be “a tool of ethnic cleansing” according to their conference programme. But only in Israel, of course. In a new low for British politics, Green members voted that “Zionism is racism”, making theirs the first mainstream British party to adopt it as policy. They voted to destroy the world’s only Jewish state through “armed struggle”.
They had the opportunity to protect Jewish members from being disciplined for going to “Zionist” synagogues. They voted it down, while declaring that Zionism “will be treated as any other form of racism”.
In Labour we fought tooth and nail against racists. But if you walked the Green Party conference floor this year, you’d have spotted familiar faces: the same people who wrecked Labour.
Zack Polanski stitched this monster together, and now it has turned on its creator. He said he would back the motion if it had an amendment that protected Jewish members, but it passed without it. A motion that needs a clause protecting Jews is a motion that targets them. Polanski’s monster wouldn’t even allow him the fig leaf, deeming it “unnecessary”.
So what does this mean for British Jews living under Green councils or represented by Green MPs? They should write in and ask for an explicit assurance that their synagogues, schools and community organisations will be treated like anyone else's. The answer will be telling.
The Greens’ new slogan “Zionism is racism” has a terrible lineage. Antizionism was part of Nazi ideology from the start. Alfred Rosenberg’s book Zionism: Enemy of the State was on membership cards as recommended reading for proof of “Zionism's hostility to the state”. Then in 1944, with Europe's Jews largely murdered, Nazi propagandists aimed a new campaign at “wholesome” nations unmoved by racial ideology. Newspapers warned about the “danger of Zionism” in creating a nation that threatened the very order of nations.
The Soviets took up the same campaign and had decades to perfect it. It culminated in 1975 with UN Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism”. It was passed under the watchful eye of Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. A Nazi war criminal.
The resolution resulted in a campaign to ban Jewish societies at universities in Britain. The resolution was revoked in 1991. The Greens have now revived it. There will be no impact on the Israeli government, only on British Jews.
Antizionism, its defenders insist, is simply politics. Criticism of a state that has nothing to do with hatred of Jews. In 2006, two Yale researchers decided to test that claim. They surveyed 5,000 people across ten European countries and controlled for age, education, religion and political affiliation. The findings were unambiguous. Antizionist views didn't just correlate with antisemitism, they predicted it. The more extreme the antizionism, the likelier the antisemitism.
A 2026 paper in American Psychologist, tracking the same people over time across three studies, went further: prejudice against Jews came first, and hostility to Israel followed.
But we don’t need surveys – we can see where the marches go. For two years, protesters gathered every week in Swiss Cottage, not outside an embassy but in the heart of a Jewish neighbourhood, to intimidate Jews until police finally banned it. Organisers of a London march that police rerouted to protect synagogue-goers reportedly urged people to break the conditions. In Essex, anti-Israel protesters marched on a tiny Orthodox community while shouting “stop killing children” as families left the Pesach service. One protester was carrying a giant crucifix above their head. It was Easter weekend.
History is unequivocal. Every state that made antizionism official policy ended up persecuting its Jews, including states that claimed to oppose antisemitism. Across the Arab world, ancient Jewish communities were attacked and expelled until almost none remained.
In communist Poland in 1968, the state branded protesting students “Zionists” and turned on its Jews as a fifth column. Konstanty Gebert, a completely assimilated schoolboy, was expelled for his “Zionist extraction”. His mother had manned a machine gun in the Soviet trenches, shooting Nazis. Now she was “de-Zionised” from her job.
Jozef Dajczgewand was arrested and tortured. “The police ordered me to take off my pants, screaming ‘fucking Jew’ while interrogating me”, he said. “I closed my eyes, wondering for a second if it was Poles who committed these acts or the same Nazis who had persecuted my parents.” Thousands of Polish Jews were stripped of citizenship and possessions – effectively expelled.
“I could feel the echoes of history and decided to leave the country”, Dajczgewand said. Many British Jews now recognise that feeling. Emigration from western Europe to Israel, a country at war, has risen 138 per cent in recent years. Antizionism creates Zionists.
In East Germany in 1953, the purge came under the banner of antizionism. The Jewish population collapsed from 5,000 to a few hundred. Community leaders were arrested or fled west. All Jews and “half-Jews” were registered on special police rosters and barred from most jobs. Many had already been sent to Soviet slave labour camps.
This is not the first time “Zionism is racism” has appeared in British politics. In 1989 the National Front was selling posters bearing the slogan. Today Restore Britain talks about “remigration” while the Greens talk about “antizionism”. Different euphemisms lead to the same place: the removal of Jews. Either deported or driven out of public life.
Imagine a party declaring self-determination an “inalienable right” for one people and branding it “racist” for their neighbours. Then imagine it refusing to rule out punishing members of that minority for attending their place of worship. The Greens can call it a motion about a faraway state, but the record says otherwise. Zionism isn’t racism. The Green Party is.
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