This weekend, the Green Party of England and Wales crossed a line. A dangerous line. One that it is unacceptable to cross. It passed a resolution which effectively denounced the State of Israel’s right to exist.
By a vote of 1,022 to 813, the party passed a motion entitled “Zionism Is Racism,” which commits the party to a single Palestinian state covering all of historic Palestine—which is to say, to a world in which Israel, the state which contains the largest population of Jews on Earth, does not exist.
To understand the full depth of this shift, consider what the motion says. It defines Zionism not as the movement for Jewish self-determination in the historic Jewish homeland, but as an ideology demanding “an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population.” It instructs that Zionism will be “treated as any other form of racism” and rejects any attempt “to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.”
Since at least two-thirds of British Jews call themselves Zionists, the party has, in effect, branded the majority of the country’s Jews racists, while declaring that doing so cannot be antisemitic.
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