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I am a Zionist. Call me a racist; I dare you
A mainstream British political party has taken a belief held by a huge proportion of British Jews and declared it inherently racist
I AM A ZIONIST.
A loud, proud and unapologetic Zionist and if you want to know what that means, ask me, I’ll tell you, but you do not get to tell me otherwise.
Zionism means that I believe the Jewish people have the right to a homeland in our ancestral land. That Jews have the same right to national self-determination as other peoples. That Israel has the right to exist and that Jews have the right to live there in safety.
That is my Zionism, it is bound into my history, my culture, my religion, my family and my identity – and yesterday, the Green Party of England and Wales voted to call that racism.
Understand the enormity of what has happened. A mainstream British political party has taken a belief held by a huge proportion of British Jews and declared it inherently racist. Not a particular Israeli leader, not a particular Israeli government, not settlements, not the conduct of a war.
Zionism, the principle of Jewish national self-determination itself and before anyone rushes to explain Zionism to me, perhaps they might first understand what it actually means, to Jews and therefore definitively.
Zionism was not invented by the current government of Israel, it did not begin in 1967, it did not begin in 1948, it did not even begin with Theodor Herzl. The yearning for Zion runs through Jewish prayer, ritual, language and memory. For two thousand years Jews ended Passover with the words “Next year in Jerusalem”. We turned towards Jerusalem to pray, mourned its destruction, broke a glass beneath the wedding chuppah to remember it even at the happiest moment of our lives. Generation after generation carried Zion with them through exile because exile only has meaning if somewhere is home.
Modern political Zionism gave political expression to something far older: the belief that Jews are not merely adherents of a religion who can be tolerated wherever others permit us to live, but a people. A people with a history, a homeland and the same right as other peoples to determine our own future.
For my family, none of this is theoretical. My maternal grandmother escaped Nazi Germany, members of her family were murdered in Auschwitz. My paternal grandparents met during the siege of Jerusalem in 1948. My grandfather fought in Israel’s War of Independence. One side of my family knew what happened when Jews had nowhere to go, the other helped fight for the creation of somewhere Jews could finally defend themselves.
So when you tell me Zionism is racism, understand what you are actually doing. You are not critiquing a government thousands of miles away. You are reaching into my family’s history and telling me that the determination of Jews to survive as a people, in our ancestral homeland, is itself morally illegitimate.
You do not get to do that and then explain to me why it isn’t antisemitic.
We have seen this language before. In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. It became one of the most notorious resolutions in the UN’s history. Sixteen years later, in 1991, it was revoked.
Today, 51 years after it was passed, the Green Party of England and Wales has resurrected its central proposition and has in fact gone further. The policy adopted supports a single Palestinian state across historic Palestine. The end of the world’s only Jewish state as a Jewish state, the end of Jews living in their homeland, the end of Jews having an escape, a safe haven and a means to defend Jewish life.
There is a deliberate dishonesty in pretending that this is simply criticism of Israel. Campaign for Palestinian statehood, demand investigations into military conduct, argue about borders, occupation, proportionality, aid, ceasefires and every decision made by every Israeli government. None of that requires you to deny Jews the right to national self-determination.
That is the line the Green Party has crossed, because anti-Zionism does not simply say this Israeli government is wrong. It says the foundational premise of a Jewish state is wrong. Once you support Palestinian national self-determination while declaring Jewish national self-determination racist, there is a question you cannot escape.
Why?
Why is Palestinian national self-determination a right while Jewish national self-determination is racism? Why does one people acquire a right that another must surrender? Why, uniquely among the nations of the world, must the Jewish state justify not merely what it does, but whether it is permitted to exist at all? And why, again and again, is it Jews who are expected to prove our acceptability by disavowing other Jews?
Perhaps eventually, when you have surrendered enough of yourself, you will be considered one of the good Jews. Perhaps then you will pass the purity test. Which inevitably brings me to Zack Polanski.
He can run away from this and hide on the campaign trail. He can describe the debate as a distraction. He can hope tomorrow brings another headline and that people move on. I will not, we will not.
He leads the party under whose banner this happened. He has enabled the construction of an unholy alliance between Islamists and the progressive left and acted as their token “as a Jew” figurehead. That responsibility will follow him beyond this conference, beyond the next election and beyond his political career.
History remembers names attached to moments like these. The name Polanski will forever be associated with the moment a British political party formally declared itself anti-Zionist and told Jews that our belief in Jewish self-determination is racism. The name Polanski will forever be tied to the series of betrayals that led us to this point.
Every Green MP, councillor, activist, member and voter has a simple choice. Resign, refuse, walk away. Or remain and accept what your party has chosen to become, the most openly antisemitic political party to emerge in this country since Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
That is an extraordinary sentence to write, but when, since Mosley, has a significant British political party so explicitly made hostility towards something so fundamental to the identity of so many Jews part of its political programme? If you think the comparison is offensive, imagine how it feels to be a British Jew being told by a political party that your belief in Jewish self-determination is racist.
Four of the Green Party’s five MPs opposed the motion, but now comes the test that actually matters. What will you do? Because opposition before the vote is no longer enough, membership after it is a choice.
There must eventually be a point at which antisemitism carries a price. You cannot tell Jewish colleagues that you stand against antisemitism and then shrug when your own political party declares their Zionism racist. You cannot put “ally” in your biography and remain silent when the people you claim to stand beside tell you that a line has been crossed.
History is full of people who privately disagreed with what their institutions became and publicly remained part of them anyway. Choosing to fall into that category labels you an antisemite, nothing less.
To our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Burnham and Miliband, do not wait. Do not spend tomorrow searching for the carefully calibrated sentence, do not equivocate, do not tell British Jews that this is complicated, do not pass the responsibility to comment onto others within your party, do not condemn antisemitism in the abstract while somehow avoiding condemning those responsible for what happened today.
Yes, politically, you may need Green votes, but you might just need your morals more. There are moments when leadership requires a line to be drawn irrespective of the electoral arithmetic. This is one of them.
Today a British political party told me that a fundamental part of my Jewish identity is racist. So let me answer them with absolute clarity.
I am a Jew.
I am a Zionist.
I am proud of both.
I will say it loudly, I will say it defiantly, I will not allow you to redefine that word, I will not allow you to turn it into a slur, I will not allow you to make Jews ashamed of believing in our own right to exist and I will not pass your purity test to earn your tolerance.
Neither Zack Polanski nor the Green Party of England and Wales gets to decide who I am.
That right belongs to me, to my family and to the Jewish people.
We have survived exile, persecution, pogroms and genocide to preserve it.
We have paid for that right many times over.
And we will not surrender it now.
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