The National Jewish Assembly condemns the Green Party’s adoption of the “Zionism is Racism” motion as a shameful institutional embrace of antisemitism. A party that professes opposition to racism has voted to brand Jewish self-determination racist and endorsed the replacement of the world’s only Jewish state.
As Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis explains in his essay What is Zionism?, Judaism and Zionism share an indelible bond rooted in millennia of Jewish history, faith and peoplehood. Jews pray towards Jerusalem; our religious life continually recalls Zion and our hope of return. Our connection to our ancestral homeland predates modern political movements by thousands of years.
To recast this bond as racism is an act of breathtaking arrogance: a political party presuming to tell Jews which parts of our identity are acceptable. Jewish emancipation does not become racism because Green Party activists vote to call it so.
The rejection of an amendment intended to protect Jewish Green Party members from expulsion because they belong to Zionist synagogues exposes both the poisonous implications of this policy and the profound ignorance behind it. The Greens and their fellow anti-Zionist agitators presume to condemn a connection they demonstrably fail to understand. Even an explicit safeguard for Jewish religious affiliation was too much for those voting against it.
Criticism of an Israeli government cannot excuse demonising Jewish peoplehood or denying Jewish national rights. Nor does endorsement by some Jewish members absolve a party of discrimination against others.
The Green Party is eating itself from within, allowing ideological extremism to consume its professed principles and proving itself unworthy of the public’s trust as a political party. Jewish members who affirm their people’s right to self-determination are left to ask whether they can remain in a party that brands a fundamental part of their identity racist.
This is a moral rot at its heart. It owns this disgrace, and no amount of righteous posturing can wash it clean.
