Antisemitism, Here And Green

At its autumn conference, the Green Party voted to institutionalize a Big Lie.

The Green Party’s national conference was always going to be hectic. Months ago, party leaders had narrowly staved off an attempt to classify Zionism as a form of racism, deferring it to the party’s conference. But today, despite several Green MPs declaring opposition to the motion, Zack Polanski’s party could no longer run from its own base.

Among the many policy proposals examined by the Greens, two stood out. The first, Amendment 3 on Jewish safety — a motion aimed at clarifying that Jewish Greens will not face discrimination or be targeted in any way for attending so-called “Zionist” synagogues. That motion was overwhelmingly defeated by a margin of nearly four hundred votes. The second: the infamous “Zionism is racism” motion. Despite Polanski choosing to miss the vote, a decision some have described as cowardly and unbecoming of a party leader, that motion passed, too, by a significant margin.

In the Jewish community, the uproar was immediate: journalists present at the conference described tearful Jewish members, with some already making plans to defect. One Jewish member “fashioned a yellow star out of her voting card in protest of the Zionism is Racism motion.” The Movement for Progressive Judaism which, as its name suggests, is the leading progressive strand within the British Jewish community, issued a statement condemning the motion as “antisemitic in its formulation and intention and sharply lambasting a party it says has “become a racist party.”

That is indeed an apt description of the situation. For many Jews, in the United Kingdom and beyond, Zionism is an integral part of Jewish identity and creed. It does not necessarily entail support for or indifference to specific policies or power structures propped up by the Israeli government; in fact, for many self-identified Zionists, vehemently opposing Israeli policies and relating to Zionism are not mutually exclusive, starting with the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets daily to protest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government.

The “Zionism is racism” formulation is not a 21st century novelty; it has a long history. In 1965, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racism (ICERD) was finalized, but not before Soviet representatives requested that Zionism be appended to the final document. This effort failed, but a decade later, in 1975, at the United Nations, the Soviets finally succeeded at giving their ideology institutional backing as Resolution 3379 was approved by the General Assembly, determining that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. Nearly two decades later, 3379 became the second UN resolution ever to be repealed, but the ideological impact of the resolution outlived its existence.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the charge resurfaced at the now-infamous 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, where over 3,000 NGOs called to reinstate Resolution 3379. Copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated on conference grounds, and ultimately, only pressure from EU delegations led to the removal of “Zionism is racism” language from the Durban Declaration.

The United Kingdom is not unfamiliar with what happens when a political institution outlaws Zionism. In 1974, the National Union of Students (NUS) adopted a “No Platform” policy barring support or recognition for openly racist or fascist organizations. When 3379 passed the following year, student unions around the country instrumentalized this policy to argue for deregistering Jewish societies around the country on the basis that, insofar as many societies broadly identified as Zionist, they qualified as racist under NUS policy.

Take York. In 1977, the student union led by Richard Burden, later a Labour MP, ruled that the university’s small Jewish Society did not count as Zionist and could not be banned. When the Society’s members boldly decided to rewrite their constitution to declare themselves Zionist, the Union deregistered the society.

SOAS went further. Its Student Union banned its Jewish Society outright and, when students tried to reconvene one in 1979, the SU withdrew its funding. No Jewish Society existed at SOAS for decades until an explicitly and vocally anti-Zionist one was created recently.

The NUS realized the adverse consequences of its own policy and its weaponization and, by the end of 1977, it began to rescind the bans and asserted the authority to suspend any member union that attempted to impose one. But the lesson from this era is without appeal: when an institution bans Zionism, irrespective of how righteous it may regard itself, those who inevitably bear the brunt are not architects of the policies the institution claims to oppose, but indeed the ordinary Jewish members who happen to hold a belief shared by the overwhelming majority of their own community.

That belief, the way many understand it, is the antithesis of racism. Racism establishes the superiority of one group and the subjugation of others to sustain it; Zionism, in its most elementary sense, asserts nothing more than the same right to national self-determination extended to all peoples — Algerians, Vietnamese, Angolans, Syrians, Armenians, and indeed Palestinians. To describe the national liberation movement of a people who were stateless for two millennia and subjected to genocide within living memory, and before that, to relentless, incessant persecution and marginalization, is racism disguised as anti-racism; to deny that inalienable right to self-determination as a racist quest for domination is blatant racism; a principle applied to every nation except the Jewish one is a double standard that can only be explained by bigotry. It is a demand that Jews, and Jews alone, forfeit a claim every other persecuted and exiled nation has been permitted to make. That is fundamentally a racist distinction.

Today, the Green Party has decided to adjudicate, from outside, what matters of self-understanding and self-definition actually entail; a non-Jewish institution has self-deputized as the final arbiter on what Jews are permitted to believe about themselves, about their own history, about their own culture — all of which are steeped in ancestral, national and indigenous ties, manifested in every Jewish holiday, every prayer, every custom, and the broader belief system.

Crucially, and rather grimly, the Green Party has now joined a very select lineage of political organizations that have adopted an institutionally anti-Zionist stance, alongside, notably, the National Front, the British Union of Fascists, the Imperial Fascist League, the Communist Party of Great Britain, among others. The common thread running from the Comintern to the Blackshirts to the Greens is a desire to launder an antisemitic conclusion through the noble vocabulary of anti-imperialism, anti-racism or national grievance. After all, antisemitism is one of few forms of prejudice that perceives itself as virtuous; the antisemite does not regard himself as hateful or vengeful, but as a martyr of a conspiracy of disproportionate Jewish power; that conspiracy is shape-shifting, depending on what a given political movement values the most. The content changes with the century; the pith does not.

Antisemitism is exhilarating because it allows the bigot to feel like a dissident rather than a bully; a silenced poet who ventures to wield his quill rather than an insipid, banal sycophant. Antisemitism never dies because it mutates, because it gives the antisemite a purpose, a cause bolder and greater; a sense of victory, the victory of having seen through a deception that everyone else is either too naive or too compromised to name. As historian David Nirenberg concluded, each era of Western thought conceptualizes a “Judaism” that is merely the photographic negative of whatever that era prizes most. Pious societies called Jews blasphemers; secular ones called them unsophisticated zealots. Capitalist societies persecuted Jews accused of Bolshevism; communist ones accused Jews of capitalism. Nationalist movements call Jews globalists; internationalist ones call Jews tribal nationalists. And a movement that has made anti-racism and anti-colonialism its North Star, has produced a “Judaism” cast as the world’s last colonial project rooted in racism. It does not matter that the movement has been careful not to name Jews explicitly; Stalin spoke of rootless cosmopolitans, Hitler sued newspapers for “falsely” accusing him of antisemitism — and won. What matters is the function, and that does not change across centuries.

The Green Party, and in particular those more than 1,000 delegates who voted to ostracize anyone identified as linked to Zionism, have merely joined this erstwhile tradition. They have singled out Zionism, a word capacious enough to encompass most of British Jewry, specific enough to sound like legitimate political disagreement and convincing enough that many will confidently assert that it targets an ideology, not a community or ethnicity, even as it voted on a separate motion declining to say that its own Jewish members will not be targeted for attending certain synagogues, and thus opening the door to the creation of lists of synagogues deemed too “Zionist.”

It is indeed a shameful, dark day for British politics, and another watershed moment for British Jewry. To echo the words of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, “Jews do not…have to disown their communities to participate in British politics.” Some will inevitably say that the Green Party cannot be antisemitic; after all, its leader is Jewish. To which they should reflect on other examples where this line of reasoning could be applied, such as to argue that Reform cannot be racist or Islamophobic since one of its highest-ranking officials and former chairman is a Muslim man of Sri Lankan descent, or that Germany’s far-right AfD cannot be homophobic since its leader is a lesbian woman. Once again, as Progressive Judaism wrote: “Support for this motion from some Jewish members does not excuse discrimination against other Jews.”