The UK Greens are wrong – Zionism is not racism

No notion has been so cynically exploited and distorted by both its supporters and its detractors as Zionism. Just when you think you have seen enough in politics to stop being genuinely surprised, let alone shocked, the Green Party of England and Wales has managed to do exactly that. The decision at its annual party conference on Sunday to vote, albeit by a small majority, in favour of a members’ motion declaring Zionism – which, at its broadest, asserts the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination in their historic homeland – to be racist, while supporting a “single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”, was not only unexpected but deeply damaging: to the Palestinian cause, to the prospects for peace, and, to be completely honest, to the Green Party’s claim to be taken seriously as an emerging force in British politics.Even before addressing the decision itself, one has to ask why, for a party whose raison d’être has always been saving the planet from the cataclysmic threat of climate change, the headlines at the end of its annual conference were about Israel-Palestine. They should have been about how best the UK could contain and reverse global w...