Greens for Palestine, answered

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."

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, like the French, the Irish or the Palestinians, have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Surveys of British Jews have found around nine in ten support Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Writing "exclusion and/or domination" into the definition does not make it true of them; it makes it a caricature.

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".

One people's account of itself counts; another's does not. That is the double standard the motion claims to oppose.

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.

That is the belief of most Jews in Britain. A party that adopts this view has declared most of its Jewish neighbours racists. The same statement goes on to call even Martin Buber's plan for a shared, binational state of Arabs and Jews racist too.

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).

Racism is a disciplinary matter. If the belief that Jews may have a home in Israel is racism, a Jewish member who says so is exposed to complaint. That is exactly what the party's own Jewish Greens group warned, and the booklet calls their warning "fearmongering" (page 21).

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.

If a former leader is a target within days, so is any ordinary member who says Zionism is not racism.

The Telegraph, 12 October 2026

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.

Colonists are sent by a mother country and serve it. Zionists had no mother country: they were fleeing the countries that persecuted them, and the British Empire they are accused of serving blocked Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine during and after the Holocaust. Around half of Israel's Jews today have their roots in the Middle East and North Africa, not Europe.

Saying "all of Israel is a settlement" makes Tel Aviv and Haifa the same as an outpost in the West Bank. It is the language of removing Israel, not of ending an occupation.

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.

About one in five of Israel's citizens are Arabs. They vote and sit in the Knesset; an Arab party, Ra'am, was part of the governing coalition in 2021 and 2022; Arab judges have sat on the Supreme Court. Israel can be criticised for how it treats its Arab citizens, and is, by Israelis; that is not the same as a state founded on "race".

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.

Not one historian of Zionism, of Israel or of the Jewish people is cited anywhere in its 48 pages.

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.

That is the "exclusion and/or domination" of one group by another that the motion says is racism, aimed at Jews.

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.

And "Jews are not a nation" denies the Jewish people the one thing every other people is granted: the right to call themselves a people. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, adopted by the UK Government, gives as an example "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination".

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism

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.

Whatever words are used, that means the end of the only Jewish state, the one place Jews do not depend on others for their safety, and its replacement by a state in which Jews live on others' terms.

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.

The Jewish Agency accepted partition, an Arab state beside a Jewish one. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League rejected it, and in May 1948 the armies of five Arab states invaded. A Palestinian state could have been founded in 1948. It was not the Zionist movement that refused it.

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.

Apartheid South Africa's "homelands" were a device for stripping black South Africans of their citizenship, imposed on them; they are no model of two peoples agreeing to live side by side. And in Algeria, the example they choose, most of the country's roughly one million Europeans left within months of independence in 1962.

Two states for two peoples is the policy of the UK Government, the United Nations and, as the booklet itself admits, the Palestine Liberation Organization. By their account every one of them is ignorant or acting in bad faith.

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.

The booklet's 48 pages and the statements on their website speak of armed struggle, resistance and "all available means". Not one page of either mentions Hamas, the massacre of 7 October 2023 or the hostages. When a rival motion said the party "will always advocate for non‑violent solutions, wherever possible", they attacked it as "a caveat the Green Party applies to no other people or nation".

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.

Whatever anyone thinks of his trial, he is not a prisoner of conscience, and calling him one is false.

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".

The working definition of antisemitism adopted by the UK Government gives as an example "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis."

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism

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.

The Telegraph, 12 October 2026