I joined the Green Party of England and Wales in 2014.

It was good to have a political home again. I had once been a member of the Labour Party, but left in 1994 after Tony Blair became leader; it was immediately clear to me that a Blair Labour party was nothing I wanted to have anything to do with. That was not a choice I ever came to regret.

Screenshot from Greens4Palestine Insta encouraging people to join the Green Party just to vote Zionism Is Racism through, QR codes and all

While my politics have always been broadly socialist, it was by 2014 very obvious to me that the single most important political issue facing the world in general and the UK in particular was the climate emergency.

As the only party putting this front and centre, the Greens were an obvious fit. The structure was democratic and the rest of the policy platform was all stuff I could enthusiastically get behind. Public ownership of utilities, properly funded local authorities, LGBTQ+ rights, drug law reform and so on? Yes please.

Best of all - the party was clearly on the rise. Voting Green in local elections was by that point never a wasted vote anywhere, and there was - it seemed to me - a likelihood that the success of Caroline Lucas in Brighton could be repeated in other broadly left-leaning constituencies where the Labour party had abandoned the left-wing vote.

I was right. The Green Party now has five MPs, nearly a thousand local councillors, and either runs or is part of coalitions running dozens of local authorities across England and Wales.

I am not usually a particularly active political animal. I am extremely shy and don’t tend to get involved in meetings and committees and so on. Despite this, I even found myself motivated to go so far as to deliver leaflets for my local Green Party branch, then Brent, which I have continued to do, on and off, ever since.

However, there was one political issue where I had always been fairly involved: Zionism. As a child I’d been a member of a Zionist youth group affiliated to my family’s synagogue. I’d spent quite a bit of time in Israel, learned to speak Hebrew, and ended up studying Jewish History and Hebrew Literature for my degree.

To be clear: I’d always been on the extreme left of Zionism. I always argued that there was no reasonable way to be in favour of Jewish self-determination in Israel without also being equally strongly in favour of Palestinian self-determination in Palestine. And the Zionism of an exclusively Jewish state never quite added up in my mind: the pre-1948 platform of the Socialist Zionist group HaShomer HaTzair - explicitly advocating a binational Jewish/Palestinian state - made a lot of sense to me and still does, albeit that supporting this now makes you both Zionist and anti-Zionist at once!

While it was increasingly difficult, in the 1990s and 2000s, to see the trajectory of the Israeli state as leading anywhere good, I had the youthful hope that somehow, maybe, things could turn around.

Instead, things just got worse. Following Operation Cast Lead in 2008, during which the brutality of Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on Gazan civilian infrastructure became glaringly obvious, I found myself unable to find any way to continue to defend either Zionism in general or Israel in particular.

Four years later, in 2012 I published a blog post entitled Why I Am No Longer A Zionist. This was later reprinted in The Independent, and caused absolute ructions in my personal life. Many of my Jewish friends have not spoken to me since, and I began to receive hatemail, including from members of my own family.

But never mind me.

Not only has nothing has improved since then, it has worsened dramatically. The Israeli government is now openly run by extreme-right Jewish supremacist Kahanists, and the Basic Law of 2018 explicitly enshrines Jewish supremacy as part of the Israeli constitution. The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th are utterly indefensible, but the clearly genocidal response of the Israeli government since then - reducing 75% of the already tiny territory of Gaza to rubble - is equally indefensible.

In the face of this, the convoluted attempts by some Zionists to deny that Israel is now a genocidal apartheid-like state are increasingly laughable and consistently undermined by clearly racist statements from the likes of Israeli government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

Given all that, you might have thought I would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionism Is Racism motion passed yesterday at the Green Party conference.

I am not.

The motion was a complete disaster from beginning to end. Now that it has passed, I find myself unable to remain a member of the Green Party; unless it is rescinded, I don’t think I’ll be able to even vote Green again.

Firstly, in practical terms, there was absolutely no need for the motion to be passed in the first place.

Until yesterday, Green party policy on Israel / Palestine was very clear and reasonable. (NB: link goes to a local copy of text originally found on the Green Party website here, which may have changed by the time you read this)

It called for a one or two-state solution, to be decided upon by both Israelis and Palestinians, for an immediate cessation of violence and de-escalation of hostilities, for Israel to respect international law and the various UN resolutions regarding the occupied territories, for the dismantling of illegal settlements in the West Bank and in particular for Israel to rescind its claim to the whole of Jerusalem.

It called on the United Nations, the United States and the European Union to apply pressure on Israel until these things happen, recognising that at the present time it is Israel, not the Palestinians, that is responsible for the increasingly untenable status quo and is the blocker to a just and lasting peace.

In particular, it stated:

A fair choice needs to be made and accepted by both Israelis and Palestinians for their common future in Palestine. Exclusive possession of Palestine by either side is never going to be an achievable and just solution.

A further update on the Green stance on events since October 7th appeared in Left Foot Forward here:

As the war continued, we witnessed war crimes committed by Israel, including the disproportionate killing of civilians and the collective punishment of the Palestinian people by the denial of food, water, fuel and other humanitarian necessities. We called out those war crimes, and now the prosecutor of the ICC has sought the arrest of Israeli leaders, as well as Hamas leaders, for those crimes, a demand we support.

We supported the South African case at the ICJ alleging that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. We await decision on that case, but believe there is significant evidence pointing to that conclusion.

Nothing unreasonable in any of that.

This is the politics of the Green Party which I joined: sensible, serious, practical, inclusive, striving for consensus even over the most difficult of issues, and founded on humanitarian principles of justice and equal rights for all.

The Zionism Is Racism motion drives a coach and horses directly through this.

It calls for the violent overthrow of the Israeli state and for the establishment of a single Palestinian state in the entire territory of Palestine (international law on this is not taken into consideration):

The Green Party affirms the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self- determination, including the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation, and acknowledges that the struggle to achieve that liberation by all available means under international law is legitimate

It rejects entirely the idea of Jewish self-determination and defines Zionism to be limited to the idea of a Jewish supremacist ethnostate. It rejects the possibility of any other kind of Zionism, either in the past or the future:

Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation – and, now it exists, the continuity – of an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population. The real, material manifestation of Zionism has been the historic and ongoing dehumanisation, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement and destruction of Palestinians. This is based upon European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression which has also created racial hierarchies between Jews of different ethnicities in Palestine.

Then it reduces the whole lot to the three word slogan “Zionism Is Racism”, declares the Green Party to be an anti-Zionist party, and, in the original submission, calls for the following action:

Zionism, as defined above, will be treated as any other form of racism, and this motion will be implemented by the Anti-Racism Policy Working Group as appropriate and in accordance with its ordinary practice.

The second clause here, from “and this motion”, was removed in the version passed by the conference, but the first clause remains.

So, from now on, the Green Party will treat Zionism as any other form of racism.

Note the circular logic of the motion. First Zionism is defined in terms that no reasonable person could deny makes it intrinsically racist. Then, Zionism is denounced for being racist. Finally, the call is made for Zionism and any trace of Zionism to be expunged from the party.

I am not a Zionist, but I am a synagogue member, and now I, along with any other Jewish Green who is also a synagogue member, have an immediate and very obvious practical problem.

My synagogue is affiliated to the Movement For Progressive Judaism, which, in common with most of the umbrella groups for Jewish communal organisations, has an explicitly positive, if slightly woolly, position on Zionism. It recognises the historic connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, recognises the wide diversity of views on Zionism within the Jewish community, and calls for a two-state solution where Jews and Palestinians live in peace, with dignity and equality for all.

More recently, the MPJ released a statement condemning the ongoing occupation, settler violence, and condemns Ben-Gvir and Smotrich by name, accusing them of attempting to make a Palestinian state unviable.

This all is not too far removed from the original Green Party policy on Israel / Palestine, in fact.

It could not be more different from the definition of Zionism given by the Zionism Is Racism motion.

However, the new Green Party policy is that whatever the Movement For Progressive Judaism says about Zionism is completely irrelevant. Only the Green Party has the correct definition of Zionism, and that Zionism is racist.

So the Movement For Progressive Judaism is racist.

So my synagogue is racist.

So I, along with the vast majority of synagogue members in England and Wales, am now a member of a racist organisation.

My own views on Zionism are irrelevant here: I would expect the Green Party to expel any member of an openly racist organisation.

I was not expecting my synagogue to ever come under that definition.

Intentionally or not, and despite its laboured attempts to distance itself from antisemitism, the practical consequence of the Zionism Is Racism motion is that the Green Party should, to be consistent, expel all the Jews who are synagogue members or who are affiliated to any other Jewish communal organisation that takes a positive view on Zionism.

Here is a further paradox: while the Zionism Is Racism motion defines itself as not antisemitic, the consequences of it passing are self-evidently so.

I should note that repeated assurances were given to the Jewish Greens that this would not happen and this was not the intent of the motion, despite the original text including a reference to the Anti-Racism Policy Working Group. Those assurances however, were thoroughly torpedoed by events: an amendment to the motion putting such assurances in writing was roundly voted down at conference.

Regardless of whether or not official disciplinary measures come into play, the consequences of the motion are that any Jew remaining in or joining the Green Party could be required at any time from now on to pass a purity test whereby they must first denounce Zionism in the same terms as the motion (advocating binationalism would imply Jewish self-determination is a thing, and is thus racist Zionism) and must also show that if they are a synagogue member, it is one of the few which is not affiliated to a pro-Zionist organisation.

Any Jew allowed to remain in the party is only there on sufferance unless they can present absolutely unimpeachable anti-Zionist credentials. I’m not sure what those might be, precisely but they would have to be unimpeachable.

This is obviously ridiculous, antisemitic, and unacceptable.

In terms of changing the world, it’s also incredibly bad practical politics.

As I argued in 2012, the actions of the State of Israel do indeed implement a racist version of Zionism and are completely indefensible from any moral perspective that includes the idea of Palestinians as human beings equally as deserving of peace, justice, human rights and self-determination as anyone else. The genocide in Gaza is ongoing. The apartheid in the West Bank continues. It is urgent that this be stopped.

What can the Green Party of England and Wales do about this, from more than two thousand miles away?

With five MPs and control or partial control of several dozen local councils, probably not very much.

BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) is one avenue. But the Greens were already doing that, though extending BDS to the Israeli grassroots binational anti-genocide, anti-apartheid, anti-occupation group Standing Together was, in my view, a nonsense.

Continuing to grow as a serious political force, building consensus and finding points of commonality between diverse views, gradually increasing the number of MPs and pressuring towards implementation of sound policy - I know it sounds long and boring, but, it seems to me, this what political parties are supposed to do.

Conversely, putting all Jewish members at risk of expulsion and handing the right-wing press a massive stick marked ‘antisemitism’ is hard to defend as a practical step either towards ending genocide or relieving the suffering of the Palestinians.

Or, indeed, towards growing the Green Party as a serious political force.

I was, let’s be frank, fairly useless as a member, so the Green Party will not miss me or the £5 a month I will no longer contribute one iota.

But I am not alone. Today’s Guardian reported that Vivien Lichtenstein, head of the Jewish Greens group, is considering leaving the party over this. Many other members - Jewish and non-Jewish alike - are also currently considering whether they wish to remain in a party that has managed to vote itself into an explicitly antisemitic position.

If Lichtenstein should leave, that would be genuinely be a great loss both to the Green Party and to the Jewish Greens. She managed the Jewish Green group - an enormously argumentative bunch with a wide range of conflicting views on Zionism - with great wisdom and infinite patience.

It is utterly galling to find myself in agreement with Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the Israeli foreign ministry under any circumstances, but both have denounced this motion as antisemitic, and both, sadly, are correct.

All too often, perfectly sane and sensible expressions of anti-Zionism are accused of being antisemitic, and this has devalued the term ‘antisemitism’ in the eyes of many.

But this one?

Gaah.

Anyway. I’m no longer a Green.

How are you?