Everything wrong with Greens for Palestine

This is a definition written by Zionism's opponents, not one any Zionist would recognise. The movement's founding text, the Basel Programme of 1897, says: "Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured under public law." Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948 promised "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex."

On the same page the booklet complains that others "deny the Palestinians the right to define their own oppression". Palestinians may define their own experience, it says, but what Jews say Zionism means to them is "irrelevant".

Here the mask slips. Not a policy, not a government, not a settlement: the basic idea that Jews may call the Land of Israel home is, they say, racist, even when the person holding it does not know it.

The booklet tells members that respectful disagreement with the motion "should not be a problem" (page 23). Their own statement says the opposite: Zionist "statements" are to be dealt with as racism under the code of conduct, and "Disciplining the advocacy of a political ideology that mandates ethnic supremacy is a core function of any anti-racist organisation." The motion itself orders that Zionism "will be treated as any other form of racism" (page 31).

Their website tells members to copy Greens for Palestine into every complaint they make to the party. On 12 October 2026 The Telegraph reported that members of the group had shared advice on submitting complaints to the party's disciplinary panel about Caroline Lucas, the party's first MP and a former leader, who has criticised the motion and its author, and that a template letter of complaint had been created.

Jews are a people of the Land of Israel: their language, their religion and their history come from it, and Jews lived there through every empire that ruled it, in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. Jews have been the largest community in Jerusalem since the nineteenth century.

The 1897 programme speaks of "the Jewish people", not a race. Anyone can become Jewish by conversion, and Israel's Law of Return applies to converts too. Israel's Jews came from Ethiopia, India, Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Russia and everywhere between.

The booklet's whole case for calling Zionism "settler colonial" and racist rests on one report by a Palestinian advocacy organisation, quoted at length. Its further reading has four items: that report, a 1981 UN study of self-determination, the boycott movement's founding call and an opinion piece in a magazine.

Equal citizenship does not come with a condition attached for one religious or ethnic group. Here it does: Jews may stay "as long as" they submit to a process run "by and for" others.

Their own answer to "what happens to Israel's Jews" is in their own words: those who object leave, and those who "partook" are prosecuted, in a country where military service is compulsory for most Jewish citizens.

The motion's answer is "a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital" (page 30). Their home page promises "Freedom and Full Equality for all from the River to the Sea". The foreword, by the motion's lead author, calls Israel "the monstrous State" to be brought to an end.

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, by 33 votes to 13. Latin America did not stand with the Arab states: thirteen Latin American countries voted for partition, and only one, Cuba, against.

Antisemitism is not only European. In 1929, 67 Jews were murdered in Hebron, in Palestine itself. In 1941 about 180 Jews were murdered in the Farhud in Baghdad. After 1948 some 850,000 Jews left or were driven out of Arab countries, most of them to Israel, where their children and grandchildren now live.

Ireland has had two states on one island since 1921, and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, approved in referendums North and South, rests on the principle that Northern Ireland's status changes only with the consent of its people.

General Assembly resolutions are recommendations, not binding law. No rule of international law permits deliberately attacking civilians or taking hostages: the Geneva Conventions forbid both, whoever does it and whatever their cause.

In 2004 a Tel Aviv court convicted Marwan Barghouti of five murders, for his part in attacks during the Second Intifada, and sentenced him to five life terms. Amnesty International keeps the term "prisoner of conscience" for people imprisoned for who they are or what they believe who have not used or advocated violence.

They compare Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, to the Nazis who murdered six million Jews, invoking the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to do it. Elsewhere they call Gaza "an open-air concentration camp".

Jews "scheming" to bring about world conflict is one of the oldest antisemitic ideas there is. The same authors write "what does the liberation of Palestine have to do with antisemitism? The answer is nothing", and that "Only racists, genocidaires and supporters of apartheid can argue (and kill) for the continuation of Zionism": a description, on their own figures, of most of the Jews of Britain and of Israel.

That is the closing quotation of the booklet, from one of its endorsers. Its list of supporters includes Neturei Karta, the fringe ultra-Orthodox sect whose members attended Iran's conference questioning the Holocaust in Tehran in 2006, and Sami Al-Arian, who in 2006 pleaded guilty in a US federal court to conspiring to provide services to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group proscribed in the UK, and was deported in 2015.

The Telegraph reports that the motion passed at conference by 1,022 votes to 813, the backing of less than one per cent of a membership of around 230,000. Four of the party's five MPs have spoken out against it.