Zack Polanski: ‘Zionism is racism in the practical application of it’

Earlier this month, Green party members at the party’s Brighton conference passed a motion defining Zionism as a form of racism, by 1,022 votes to 813. Zack Polanski did not take part in the vote, and four of the party’s five MPs opposed the motion. Israel’s foreign ministry said the motion was ‘a stain on the history of the United Kingdom’.

On the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg noted the controversy and asked Green party leader Zack Polanski whether he believed Zionism was inherently racist. Polanski said the real controversy was that 75,000 Palestinians had been killed, which he claimed was the result of a ‘very obviously’ racist ideology. Kuenssberg pointed out that he had answered a different question, and pressed him on his own view. Polanski said the debate over words was about ‘semantics’, and that he had already said in several interviews that Zionism is racism ‘in the practical application of it’. Kuenssberg asked whether he accepted that, for many Jewish people, Zionism simply means the right to a safe homeland. Polanski said that is what people ‘think it means’, but claimed that in practice the homeland had come at the cost of the Palestinian people. Kuenssberg pointed out that the chair of the Jewish Greens, Vivien Lichtenstein, has called on Polanski to apologise for his handling of the debate. Polanksi said he is ‘not sorry at all’.

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