THERE was a time when fringe ideas had the decency to remain fringe. The UK Green Party has now decided to put them on its Spring Conference agenda. The Greens for Palestine have tabled a motion (referred internally as Motion 33 and co-signed by more than 300 delegates) to declare ‘Zionism is racism’. This motion is not merely unserious; it is indecent, and calling indecency moral courage does not make it so.
Criticising Israeli governments is ordinary political business. This is something else. The motion seeks to place the very idea of Jewish national self-determination beyond the pale. It takes a movement born of exile, pogrom, and genocide and pronounces it, in the abstract, morally suspect. It is a verdict delivered without history, and therefore without weight.
Zionism is not a monolith. It has been argued over by Jews with a level of internal disagreement that would give most British parties vertigo. Socialist, liberal, religious, secular: take your pick. None of this survives contact with the Green Party’s formulation. Everything is flattened into a slogan, because slogans are easier to chant than arguments are to sustain.
What makes the move objectionable is not only its ignorance but its selectivity. National movements are common currency in politics. Few are invited to justify their existence as such. The Jewish one, it seems, must answer for itself before it may even begin to be discussed. One need not look far to see what kind of standard that is.
None of this is accidental. The Greens have spent years exchanging environmental concern for ideological exhibitionism. Where there was once a focus on policy, there is now a fondness for grand moral declarations that cost nothing and prove less.
Their approach to religion is instructive. Islam is welcomed into public life with conspicuous enthusiasm, framed as pluralism. The Church of England, meanwhile, is treated as an anachronism to be gently dismantled. The asymmetry is hard to miss.
The same instinct drives their post-national posturing. Borders are an inconvenience, sovereignty a nuisance, the nation-state an embarrassment best outgrown. It is all very elevated, until one remembers that politics still happens in countries, not in seminar rooms.
British politics has endured many eccentric phases. This one is distinguished by its self-righteousness. If Labour looks threadbare, the Greens are the loose thread. If Labour flirts, the Greens radicalise. Labour trims; the Greens proclaim. Labour hints, the Greens declare. The result is not greater honesty but greater absurdity. Ideas that might otherwise be obscured by caution are exposed in their full, unhelpful clarity. The ‘Zionism is racism’ motion is the logical end of this habit.
The Greens do not merely get things wrong; they insist on doing so with the fever of recent converts to the Palestinian cause, mistaking fervour for thought and excess for truth.
This article first appeared in the Times of Israel and is republished by kind permission.
Editor’s note: It has since emerged that Labour activists expelled from their party because of anti-Semitism have been welcomed unvetted into the Green Party and some will stand for election in May. Housing Secretary Steve Reed said the fourfold influx of new members since Zack Polanski took over seven months ago have included ‘some of the worst anti-Semites that we kicked out of the Labour party’. He told the Guardian that ‘Zack Polanski has been very honest about the fact they carried out no checks on these people before they let them into the party or put them up as candidates’.
