The Green Party’s proposed motion declaring Zionism to be racism is not an act of anti-racism. It is an attempt to make Jewish self-determination the one exception to principles otherwise claimed to be universal, and it is to be proposed at it Spring conference this coming weekend, 28th and 29th March 2026.
Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, like every other people, are entitled to self-determination. To describe that principle as racist only in the Jewish case is not equality. It is discrimination. Indeed, under the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a definition widely accepted across British political and civil society, the claim that Israel is a racist endeavour is cited as an example of how such claims can be deemed to be antisemetic. Furthermore, the claim that Israel was set up as an ethno-nationalist state has no basis in fact. Israel’s Declaration of Independence called upon all the non-Jews, mostly Arabs, to remain and help build a state for all its people. Today, over 20% of Israel’s population are non-Jewish, mostly Muslim, and all have equal rights and freedoms enshrined in law.
No other national movement is treated in this way. No other people are told that their right to collective security, memory, and political expression is inherently illegitimate. Only the Jewish case is singled out for this treatment. This is not a critique of government policy. It is a challenge to the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood itself.
The motion rests on a familiar evasion: Zionism is treated as detachable from Jewish identity in theory, only to be condemned in practice precisely because it is bound up with Jewish history, vulnerability, and survival. The result is to place Jewish national existence beyond the boundaries of moral permission.
This is not anti-racism. It is a double standard elevated into doctrine.
There is, too, a deep irony at the heart of this position. A Western political party presumes to decide that the one nation whose existence must be morally disqualified is the Jewish one. Others may lay claim to nationhood, sovereignty, and historical continuity. The Jews alone are told that their claim is uniquely suspect.
The We Believe Alliance rejects this motion in the strongest possible terms. It advances neither peace nor coexistence. It simply repackages the denial of Jewish equality in the language of virtue.
