There is a comforting myth in modern Britain that the worst things that can happen to Jews belong firmly in the past. That the Holocaust was a rupture, an aberration, rather than a culmination. That it arrived suddenly, fully formed, rather than emerging slowly through decades of suspicion, caricature and social exclusion.

History tells a different story. The catastrophe of the 20th century did not begin with camps. It began with language. With the steady normalisation of the idea that Jews were not simply wrong, but corrosive: too powerful, too influential, too embedded, too alien.

You don’t need to be alarmist to recognise the pattern. You only need to be attentive.

Which is why the current trajectory of the Green Party deserves scrutiny, not because it is repeating history in any crude or literal sense, but because it is flirting with something more subtle: a political culture in which suspicion of “Zionism” increasingly risks bleeding into suspicion of Jews.

Symbolic of this shift is Mothin Ali, a figure who encapsulates the Greens’ evolution from a marginal environmental outfit into a louder, more morally absolutist force in British politics. And in a Britain in which many minorities have felt marginalised by mainstream parties, such popularism can appear very enticing.

The Greens were once the party of modesty. Their appeal lay in a kind of ethical restraint—a politics that sought to balance, not inflame. That identity has eroded. In its place is something more strident: a politics of moral clarity, in which complex conflicts are reduced to stark binaries: oppressor versus oppressed, truth versus lies, complicity versus resistance.

Ali’s rhetoric reflects this shift. His speeches and videos are saturated with moral urgency. Politicians are not just misguided, they are “supporting genocide”. Media outlets are not flawed, they are engaged in “propaganda” and deception. Power is not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)