Yesterday afternoon, the Green Party voted to ban me from membership. Not just me: they have also voted to ban the vast majority of Britain’s roughly 300,000 Jews from joining the party.
They didn’t put it like that, of course. Racism is rarely open. Indeed, the Greens’ racism is couched in the language of progressive, ‘anti-racist’ politics.
As is so often the case, it is these self-proclaimed progressives who turn out to be some of the most dangerous, bigoted and racist people alive.
On the final day of their conference, the Green Party debated a motion which declares that Zionism – the notion that the Jewish people have the right to self- determination in their historic homeland – is racist and should be ‘treated like any other form of racism’. It passed by 1,022 votes to 813.
Following the vote, the party announced that ‘this motion will be implemented by the anti-racism policy working group as appropriate and in accordance with its ordinary practice’.
Since the Greens do not allow people they consider to be racists or members of racist organisations to belong to the party, this effectively means that the overwhelming majority of Jews – including anyone who is a member of almost any synagogue or Jewish organisation – will be barred from Green membership. When you label the very existence of Israel as racist, you not only label Israelis as illegitimate – you label Jews worldwide as racist, because Israel is our spiritual home.
The Jews were known for centuries as Am Yisrael – the people of Israel – long before we were described as Jews. That is why almost every Jew, beyond the tiny number of self-caricaturing ‘anti-Zionist Jews’ who are regularly wheeled out by the Israel-haters, is a Zionist. We could not be otherwise. This motion is different from criticism of Israeli policy, which is an entirely legitimate political stance. But singling out the Jews’ right to self-determination is itself a form of racism and thus uniquely immoral and illegitimate.
It is purely anti-Semitic. It is a tactic for Jew haters to dress up their hate in the language of ‘anti-racism’ – a grotesque warping of what is an ostensibly admirable concept.
The party’s deputy leader, Mothin Ali, cried ‘Allahu Akbar’ on being elected a Leeds councillor
We live in dark times. The Greens’ average poll rating may have fallen in recent months but it is still around 10 per cent – and they are in control of councils where thousands of Jews live. With every possibility that the next election could lead to a hung Parliament, the Greens cannot be dismissed as irrelevant.
Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was a form of political petri dish in which anti-Semitism was allowed to grow and infect the Left.
Now Labour backbench MPs fear the rise of the sectarian Muslim vote and today’s Greens have built on Corbyn’s foundations and turned Jew hate into one of their party’s basic principles.
The party’s deputy leader, Mothin Ali, cried ‘Allahu Akbar’ on being elected a Leeds councillor. And the day after the October 7 massacre he wrote that ‘indigenous people have the right to fight back’ and called for an end to ‘white supremacist European settler colonialism’.
Meanwhile, Greens For Palestine, the group which is behind yesterday’s motion, has recently published a booklet, ‘Zionism is Racism: Why it matters’, urging members to support the motion and the ‘inalienable right’ to ‘armed’ Palestinian resistance against the ‘monstrous state’ of Israel.
Wednesday sees the third anniversary of just such armed Palestinian resistance – the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. This is what they defend.
The Muslim Vote, an umbrella group for independent Muslim candidates who backed 56 Green candidates in 2024, says it wants a ‘grand deal’ with the party.
The irony of yesterday’s vote is that no such deal is needed. The Greens are already an Islamist party, with Jew-hate embedded in its core.