British Anti-Semitism Has Made a Distressing Return

This week should have been a triumph for the UK’s Green Party. Instead, it finds itself a pariah; riven internally, isolated politically and condemned globally, thanks to a toxic embrace of hardline anti-Zionism. Its stance has brought shame to one of the world’s oldest environmental parties, a once admirable movement dedicated to confronting the climate disaster long before it was fashionable.

Following the election of a dynamic young leader, Zack Polanski, a year ago, the Greens had been riding high. Membership has more than tripled to 230,000, making it the UK’s third-largest party. At one point the Greens were second in the polls, having picked up hundreds of council seats plus a couple of mayoralties in the spring’s local elections.

And after a striking success in a special election in February, the party had hoped Polanski would become its sixth member of Parliament. That would require winning a contest taking place Thursday in the North London constituency of Holborn & St Pancras, triggered by the departure of Labour ex-Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Victory would have been transformative, confirming the Greens as a possible player in future coalition talks and even, potentially, a viable replacement for Labour as the left’s dominant force.

But on the cusp of all this, the party has disgraced itself by approving a motion at its annual party conference that equates Zionism with racism and calls for “ the establishment of a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine.” Thanks to the Greens’ commitment to Athenian-style participatory democracy, this objectionable stance is now official policy. The de facto result is that most Jews will feel unwelcome in the party. It’s hard to argue with Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’ view that this is anti-Semitic.

A self-styled “eco-socialist,” Polanski won the leadership on a radical, populist platform that downplayed the centrality of climate policy. Many new recruits were former hard-left activists, including ex-Labour members from the dark days when Jeremy Corbyn led that party. Like Labour between 2015 and 2019, the Greens appear to have fallen victim to entryism, with radical leftists displacing its original environmentalist base. Along with taxing the wealthy and ameliorating inequality, many new members are motivated by the war on Gaza.

Yet Motion A105, proposed by the Greens for Palestine grouping at the Brighton conference, goes way beyond legitimate alarm over the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Indeed, in explicitly rejecting a two-state solution it outflanks what the Palestinian Authority and most Palestinians reckon is the best outcome for their troubled home.

By labeling anyone who doesn’t support a single-state solution as racist, the Greens have turned on most of Britain’s Jewish population. Most synagogues attended by religious Jews can be considered “Zionist,” in that they support Israel’s right to exist. Even non-believers often have a deep relationship with Israel and Zionism. Many would recoil at the idea that raising the traditional toast “next year in Jerusalem,” or feeling that since the Holocaust Jews need a homeland, makes them guilty of racism.

A new report from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that two thirds of British Jews identified as Zionist and nearly half felt supporting Israel was a “very important” part of their identity. Those numbers have swelled since Hamas’ murderous assault on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Polanski had supported amendments that would have watered down the motion. One would have confirmed the right of those actually living in Israel and Palestine to democratically determine their future, including a two-state option. The other sought to protect Jewish Greens from expulsion from the party even if they continued to attend so-called Zionist synagogues. But he skipped the vote, choosing instead to campaign in Holborn. Given that a tiny proportion of the membership bothered to vote, and the motion passed by about 200 ballots, the result might have been different had Polanski stepped up. Washing his hands of the measure is unconscionable.

Worse, the vote took place on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when Jews and leftists (many there were both) drove Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts out of London’s East End — and three years after some 1,200 people were murdered in the Hamas-led attacks in 2023.

Condemnation of the Greens’ Jewish purity test has been emphatic, rightly. Polanski was barred from Israel. The European Green movement, representing 47 environmental parties, said it was seeking “urgent clarification” about a motion that breaches its support for a two-state solution. Greens both Jewish and gentile have been resigning their memberships. Four of the party’s five MPs condemned the vote. In local government, some councilors from rival parties have been withdrawing from a pact with the Greens.

Polanski himself has not substantially criticized it, instead issuing a mealy-mouthed statement: “It’s our role as a movement for justice to protect both the rights of Palestinians and our Jewish communities here in the UK .”

But declaring Jews racist does nothing to improve the lot of Jews or Palestinians at home or abroad. Instead, many British Jews fear that the increased conflation of Jews with the actions of the Israeli government is normalizing the deeply troubling return of anti-Semitism.

Many on the left were unhappy with Starmer’s missteps on Israel, particularly his failure to condemn Netanyahu for denying water and medical aid to people Israel was bombing. In part, this was an overcorrection to the anti-Jewish feeling that tainted the party under Corbyn. In 2020, the Equalities Commission found Labour in breach of the law over not tackling anti-Semitism.

New Labour PM Andy Burnham and his Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband (whose grandmother moved to Israel after losing relatives in the Holocaust) have already recalibrated, imposing sanctions on goods from illegal West Bank settlements and condemning Israel for failing to stop them. Israel mooted closing the UK consulate in Jerusalem in response, but has instead moved to downgrade the base to a diplomatic mission with a limited staff.

Such moves may go some way toward winning back voters who defected to the Greens over Palestine, without returning to Corbyn’s days when the party embraced violent Islamists and ostracized Jews.

The Greens have gone much further than Corbyn’s Labour. In equating Zionism with racism, Polanski and his party have put themselves beyond the pale. Who would now vote for the Greens or work with them, in local or national government? The voters of Holborn and St Pancras might send Polanski packing on Thursday. Maybe then his party can go back to worrying about their original mission of saving the planet.