The Green Party cannot redefine Jewish identity

I was pleased that Max Royston and I were able to submit a motion to the Board of Deputies’ plenary session last Sunday and secure the overwhelming backing of the deputies present. In preparing the proposal for the motion, I reflected on the core role of Zion for our people, the Jewish people, over thousands of years – and how alien a Jewish identity without Zion, without Zionism, would be. My goal was to distinguish Zionism – the centrality of a homeland in our tribal identity – from political commentary on Israel. You may yourself judge whether the below (an edited version of the remarks on the day) covers the former, without the latter.

We are a people, a tribe: tied together, as tribes are, by descent, culture, memory, language, law, literature, practice, and a place.

People and tribes have all of these: the Maori in New Zealand, Native Americans, and Aborigines in Australia. We are the same, and our place is sometimes called Zion.

For at least 2,500 years our people has told our stories of David taking Zion. Later in exile – ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. ‘Three times a day our prayers turn to Zion. For two thousand years the Amidah has asked, ‘Let our eyes behold Your return to Zion.’ The Shema’s second paragraph is about the land itself: its rain, its season, and the good land we must not lose. At every wedding we break a glass to remember Jerusalem.

The world understood this too. William Blake wrote of Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. Boney M turned Psalm 137 into a hit.

Now a UK political party tells us Zionism is racism.

They will say they mean only modern, political Zionism. There is no such line. In every age we have spoken our bond with Zion in the language of the day: psalms in the age of kings, prayer in exile, and, in the age of nation-states, politics. Modern Zionism is that same bond put into action: a people returning to its own land after two thousand years of praying for it. Now read what they passed: a single state in all of historic Palestine, by all available means. That is not a critique of a policy. It is the erasure of a nation’s home.

To tell the Jewish tribe that our bond with Zion is racism is to say we must be separated from our own land, history and name. “Zionism is racism” is a slogan half a century old: the UN adopted it in 1975 and revoked it in 1991. It is being used to redefine a three-thousand-year identity. That is obscene.

This is not a religious argument, nor a nationalist one. It does not depend on who governs Israel or on any policy. It is about who gets to define who we are: a people, in the plain sense in which every other person is one.

We are Jews. We know what we are. Whether we prayed for Zion or built in Zion, we are one people, and the return was our own prayer answered. We disagree about a lot. But we can all agree that Zionism, ancient and modern, is part of who we are, and that our tribe was bound to Zion long before the Green Party had heard of it.

This motion is measured. It protects local engagement, welcomes any Green who repudiates the policy, and lapses once it is rescinded and antisemitism is credibly addressed.

The Green Party has crossed the Rubicon. A major UK party has written into its platform that a core part of Jewish identity is racism. The time for quietly asking nicely has passed. The time for British Jews to stand for ourselves, with pride, is now. We will be as loud as they are, openly, and without apology.

We held our heads high against the National Front and the BNP. We do so again. I commend this motion.