In a remarkable act of self-sabotage, Green party members have today passed a motion declaring that ‘Zionism is racism’ by 1022 to 813 votes. This motion, grotesquely passed on Simchat Torah – the Jewish holiday on which Hamas carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – makes the Greens the first party of electoral significance in the UK, and possibly in Europe, to adopt extremist, racist views as policy. This could end their ambition to enter mainstream British politics.

The motion goes well beyond criticising Israeli policy – it adopts a radical view that denies Jewish right to self-determination and reinvents Zionism as a ‘European settler-colonial’ project. It omits Jewish historical connection to the land, ignores Zionism’s origins as a response to persecution, and disregards the fact that about half of Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern or North African descent.

The motion defines Zionism as an ideology of exclusion and domination, a definition that bears no resemblance to what Zionism means to the vast majority of Jews: the belief that Jews, like other peoples, have the right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. This attempt to redefine Zionism as inherently racist vilifies a legitimate political aspiration and acknowledges only the right of Palestinians to statehood.

The Green party has lost its direction and its moral compass

The Green party has lost its direction and its moral compass

The motion is silent on other things, too. While it’s filled with admonition of Israel for violence and so-called apartheid,........

© The Spectator