The attempt to define Zionism as racism is an attack on the Jewish people

My boyfriend was in a bar recently when a stranger told him what Zionism means. It meant supporting genocide, the man said. Then he added that Hitler was a Zionist.

Ten years ago a former Mayor of London said much the same, and it all but ended his career. Now a man in a bar says it and nobody blinks.

That is where we are. Zionism is a word too few people understand, used by people who have never tried to. And in Brighton, from 2 to 4 October, the Green Party of England and Wales will be asked to write that ignorance into party policy.

The motion calls Zionism “a racist ideology”. It calls for Israel to be replaced by “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine”. It was meant to be debated in March. It never came to a vote. The Zoom platform crashed under nearly 1,000 participants, the chair faced repeated no-confidence votes and the clock ran out. It was not defeated. It was delayed.

Greens for Palestine have since published a booklet to back the motion, Zionism is Racism: Why it matters. It says UN resolutions recognise “struggling by all available means, including armed struggle”. It says Palestinians have an “inalienable right” to use force against Israel. The March text of the motion used the same words.

We know what “all available means” looks like. We saw it on 7 October 2023. Around 1,200 people were murdered in a single day. Families were burned in their homes. Young people were hunted through a festival field. 251 were dragged into Gaza.

The Greens meet in Brighton three days before the third anniversary. Members will be asked to back a motion whose own campaign material calls that a right.

There is nothing green about that. Nothing non-violent. Nothing progressive.

That should end the debate. It will not, because the booklet is not the real fight. The real fight is over one word.

A simple idea

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. That is all it is.

It does not draw borders. It does not choose a government. It does not settle the fate of a single hilltop. Those arguments belong to the schools of Zionism, and they have argued for over a century. Religious Zionists and secular ones. Marxists and Labour Zionists who built the kibbutzim. Weizmann’s practical Zionists, who wanted a fact on the ground more than a speech. Jabotinsky’s Revisionists. Ahad Ha’am, who wanted a cultural centre before a state. They disagreed about almost everything except the core.

If you believe in a two-state solution, you are a Zionist. You believe a Jewish state should exist beside a Palestinian one. This motion rejects that. It does not want Israel reformed. It wants Israel gone.

Every people on earth is entitled to self-determination. The motion carves out one exception, and it is the Jews. Denying one people a right given to everyone else has a name. It is not Zionism.

Many hands on one word

The Greens are not the only ones trying to redefine Zionism. They are the loudest right now.

Our critics have done it for decades. They took a word meaning Jewish self-determination and turned it into shorthand for every wrong they attribute to Israel. Once “Zionist” means “colonialist”, anti-Zionism sounds like justice. And the Jew who calls himself a Zionist becomes the thing to be purged.

The messianic right in Israel pulls from the other end. They want Zionism to mean one map and one reading of the text. That is one school of Zionism. But so too is the opposition. Peace Now was founded by reserve officers. Rabin, the general who took the Old City in 1967, shook Arafat’s hand on the White House lawn. The kibbutzniks who drive sick Gazan children to Israeli hospitals are Zionists. The settler on the hilltop and the activist demonstrating against him both believe the Jewish people have a right to a home. They fight over what that home should look like. That fight is Zionism. Neither side owns the word.

We have redefined it too. Not by argument, but by silence. Too many of us stopped saying the word. We let it become awkward at dinner parties, then risky at work, then unsayable on campus. We tied it to whichever government was in office and defended the policy instead of the principle. When a people stop explaining their own ideas, other people explain them instead.

That silence left a space. The Greens are filling it. What is happening in Brighton is a kind of cultural appropriation. A minority community created an idea about its own survival. Now people who call themselves progressive are taking it, rewriting it and handing it back as a slur. They would not do this to any other minority’s account of itself.

Zionism is Jewish

Zionism was not invented in 1897. Herzl gave it a political form. The longing is ancient.

Jerusalem appears more than 600 times in the Hebrew Bible. Zion appears more than 150 times. The promise of the land runs through the Torah from Abraham onwards. For two thousand years Jews have prayed facing Jerusalem, three times a day. At every Seder we say: next year in Jerusalem. At every wedding we break a glass for it. It is in our liturgy, our calendar, our history and our law. Even our name comes from the land. A Jew is, literally, a person of Judah.

About two in three British Jews call themselves Zionists. This motion calls every one of them racist. In practice it closes the Green Party to most of Britain’s Jews. Its supporters have said they would expect it to proscribe Zionists. Jewish Greens warned members it would put Jewish members uniquely at risk of discipline.

Zionism is not identical to Judaism. But it cannot be pulled out of Judaism without tearing the fabric. The Greens are not only attacking a politics. They are telling British Jews that a central part of who we are makes us unfit to join.

Losing, but not lost

That a motion like this is quasi-mainstream means we are losing a fight. A national party with MPs and councillors is debating whether the Jewish state should exist. A man in a bar calls Hitler a Zionist and expects a nod.

But nothing here is lost.

The motion must be opposed, and opposed loudly, by Greens and by everyone who has ever voted for them. Then the harder work begins. We have to reclaim the word. We have to say it without apology and explain it without jargon. We have to tell the story so it lands with the man in the bar: a scattered people who went home, and who have the same right to a country as anyone else.

We have been here before. On 10 November 1975, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism”. It was the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Chaim Herzog, Israel’s ambassador, stood at the rostrum. He said the resolution was based on “hatred, falsehood and arrogance” and “devoid of any moral or legal value”. Then he tore it in half.

In 1991 the UN revoked it, by 111 votes to 25.

It was seen off once. It took sixteen years, and it took Jews who refused to stop saying who they were.

We will see it off again.

Max Royston is a co-founder and primary spokesperson of StopTheHateUK