Anti-Zionist Jews will always ultimately fail the purity tests their allies set them

There is a lesson that parts of British Jewry have spent far too long refusing to learn; there is always another purity test.

You can condemn Netanyahu, condemn the Israeli government, condemn the war, condemn Israel, condemn Zionism. You can accept that the Jewish people alone have no right to national self-determination and perhaps, just perhaps, when you have finally travelled this long and well-trodden path of Jews through the ages; when you have disavowed a millennia-old covenant, disavowed generations who refused to surrender it, disavowed the millions who fought, fled, suffered and died while holding on to what you have been willing to toss away, perhaps then you will finally be accepted.

Except you won’t, because the problem was never simply what you believed, it was that you were Jewish.

Zack Polanski may be about to discover where the purity test ends, or rather, that it doesn’t.

In 2025, David Miller, the disgraced former Bristol University academic whose work has subsequently been funded by the Iranian regime, wrote this about Polanski:

“One of the many problems of the British left is its suicidal naivety. Many people seem to have forgotten that Zack Polanski is a rabid Zionist, who has repeatedly weaponised his Jewish identity to fight the left. A vote for the Greens is a vote for genocide.”

Put aside for a moment the grotesqueness of a Jewish politician being accused of “weaponising his Jewish identity”, concentrate instead on Miller’s opening sentence. Replace “the British left” with “British Jewry” and, buried within the bile, there is a warning our community should be shouting from the rooftops.

One of the great problems of British Jewry is our suicidal naivety. Our belief that there is always another denunciation we can make, another piece of ourselves we can surrender, another qualification we can attach to our Jewishness, another ideological purity test we can pass that will finally purchase acceptance.

History should have taught us otherwise and by this point no one should need me to list the examples. Yet here we are in 2026, with yet another astounding example of “suicidal naivety” in the latest form of the unholy alliance between the progressive left and Islamists; the Green Party.

At its forthcoming conference in Brighton, Green Party members are expected to debate a motion entitled, with breath-taking simplicity:

“Zionism is Racism.”

This isn’t some fringe event taking place above a pub. The motion came top of a members’ vote of policy motions to be debated at the party conference. Of all the subjects competing for the attention of a political party in Britain in 2026; climate change, poverty, housing, the NHS, education, the economy, Ukraine, national security, social care, this was the policy motion members placed first.

What is actually being proposed requires us to take a moment and consider. Not that Netanyahu or particular members of his government are racist. Not that settlements are wrong or that the pre-67 borders should for the basis of a two state solution. Not that the conduct of the war in Gaza has crossed legal boundaries or that Palestinians have been denied rights to which they’re entitled.

This is something fundamentally different, fundamentally more straightforward, simply that Zionism itself is racism. That the belief that Jews constitute a people, and that this people possesses a right to national self-determination in its ancestral homeland, is itself racist.

The proposed policy calls for a single Palestinian state, rather than Israel and Palestine existing alongside one another. Would anyone like to have a guess at how such a state would be achieved? If passed in its current form, members supporting Zionism would face party discipline for racism. Imagine the Greens forming a coalition Government in the UK…

Zionism does not mean believing Israel is always right. At its most basic, it means believing that the Jewish people possess a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. In one of Britain’s political parties, that belief could soon be classified alongside racism.

We’ve seen this movie before, the phrase isn’t new.

On 10 November 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It passed by 72 votes to 35, with 32 abstentions. Britain voted against it; whether they would today is a question that simply in the uncertainty of the asking is deeply worrying.

The coalition who stood behind it in 1975 included such renowned champions of tolerance and racial equality as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Gaddafi’s Libya, Assad’s Syria, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union. A veritable Who’s Who of global anti-racism whose moral legacy the Green Party has apparently decided, half a century later, is ripe for revival.

Now, more than half a century after the original resolution, members of a progressive British political party have put the same three words – “Zionism is racism” – back on the table.

That’s quite a tradition to resurrect.

There is something almost painfully symbolic about Zack Polanski being the man standing in the middle of all this. Polanski is hardly the standard-bearer for mainstream British Zionism. He has been fiercely critical of Israel, defended Corbyn and denied the explicit antisemitism within the Labour Party and aligned himself with some of the most repulsive people on the far left on British politics. He has occupied political territory a very long way from mainstream British Jewish opinion.

Judaism has never required political conformity. An anti-Zionist Jew remains a Jew, just as a Zionist Jew does. But there is a profound difference between having those beliefs because you genuinely hold them and believing that holding them will buy immunity from antisemitism, because it won’t, and Polanski’s “predicament” illustrates why.

For some of his political fellow travellers, everything he has already done is apparently insufficient. David Miller still called him a “rabid Zionist”, not merely a Zionist, but a rabid one!

Then came the accusation that reveals so much more, that he had “weaponised his Jewish identity.” There it is, eventually the adjective disappears and the noun remains.

Jew.

This is the trap, the purity test is never static. You may start by simply having to condemn Netanyahu, but eventually you will be required to accept that believing Israel should continue to exist is itself racist.

What is the next purity test?

That is the question Jews who believe they can negotiate their way out of antisemitism should ask themselves, because history tells us something profoundly uncomfortable.

The antisemite ultimately gets to decide who counts as an unacceptable Jew, not you. You can spend your life proving that you aren’t “that kind of Jew,” but someone else can move the boundary whenever they choose.

There is no ideological detergent powerful enough to guarantee that somebody who hates Jews will stop seeing the Jew in you. Eventually, you’ll discover that everything you sacrificed bought you nothing.

My grandmother escaped Nazi Germany, the majority of her family did not. They were murdered at Auschwitz. Britain became her refuge, this is the country in which I was born, the country in which I grew up, the country in which my children were born. I don’t recount that history because of some idea that Britain in 2026 is definitively Germany in the 1930s. I recount it because Jewish history teaches a lesson considerably more enduring than unconfirmed historical analogy.

Security based upon somebody else’s tolerance is not security.

For centuries Jews existed as minorities whose safety depended upon rulers, governments, neighbours and political movements continuing to tolerate them. Sometimes they did, until they inevitably didn’t.

England expelled its Jews, Spain expelled its Jews, across Europe Jews experienced pogroms, restrictions, dispossession and ultimately industrialised extermination. Across the Middle East and North Africa ancient Jewish communities dwindled dramatically in the decades around Israel’s creation amid persecution, violence, expulsions, state pressure, Zionist migration and war.

Jewish history contains an uncomfortable abundance of reminders of what happens when our safety depends entirely upon somebody else’s goodwill. That is a major, undeniable and historically essential reason Zionism exists.

Not because Jews believe ourselves superior to anybody else, but because after millennia of discovering how conditional somebody else’s protection could be, Jews concluded that our survival could not forever depend upon other people granting us permission to remain. And now that conclusion itself is being put on trial.

Ask yourself this crucial question. Why, among the world’s national movements, does Jewish national self-determination generate this particular obsession? Why is the answer to alleged crimes committed by Israel not merely to change its government, borders or policies but, uniquely, to question whether the country should continue to exist at all?

Britain committed atrocities during empire, nobody seriously proposes abolishing Britain. America was built through the dispossession of indigenous peoples and slavery, nobody demands the dissolution of the United States as the prerequisite for opposing racism. States throughout the world have disputed borders, bloody histories and governments that have committed terrible acts. Their citizens are not routinely required to renounce the existence of their countries before being permitted into polite society.

Yet somehow Jewish national self-determination is subjected to a different test.

Any political movement capable of imagining liberation and self-determination for peoples across the world but unable to imagine them for Jews should ask itself why the Jew is once again the exception.

That is why this isn’t really a story about Zack Polanski and it isn’t ultimately a story about the Green Party.

It’s about us.

For three years I have watched Jews desperately negotiate with people who despise Zionism, who are fueled by hate.

I’m Jewish, but…

Three words that have become almost a ritual incantation, three words that so many still think will guarantee them acceptance, save them from the mob. Three words that exemplify “suicidal naivety”.

Because there is always another purity test and eventually you run out of things to surrender. Except one, your Jewishness.

That is the lesson I want my children to understand. They do not need anybody’s permission to be Jewish. They do not need to apologise for Jewish history. They do not need to barter pieces of their identity for acceptance. They do not need to pass somebody else’s test of what constitutes an acceptable Jew and they should never imagine that making themselves smaller will make somebody else’s hatred disappear.

I cannot control the Britain in which my children will grow old, I cannot promise them that antisemitism will disappear, but I can teach them what generations before us learnt at an unbearable cost.

Never build your Jewish future around passing somebody else’s purity test.

The test will change, the line will move and eventually, whatever you say, whatever you condemn and however much of yourself you surrender, there will be one thing you can never wash off.

You are still a Jew.

So be one proudly, be strong, be unapologetic, be loud.

Do not whisper your Jewishness to make other people comfortable. Do not shrink it to fit inside somebody else’s politics. Do not bargain it away in return for an acceptance that history tells us was always conditional.

We are still here, after everything, we are still here and so we shall remain.