The Green Party is racist. Now the Board of Deputies must officially say so
British Jews have become fluent in the language of the supplicant. The people who voted against us in Brighton have learned that it costs them nothing.
On 10 November 1975, Chaim Herzog walked to the podium of the United Nations with a sheet of paper in his hand. It was Resolution 3379. It declared that Zionism is racism, and 72 countries had just voted for it.
He did not plead. “I do not come to this rostrum to defend the moral and historical values of the Jewish people,” he told them. “They do not need to be defended.” He called the resolution a thing of “hatred, falsehood and arrogance”. Then he tore it in half.
It took the world sixteen years to admit he was right.
On 4 October, in a conference hall in Brighton, the Green Party taped that paper back together. By 1,022 votes to 813, they decided that Zionism is now to be treated “as any other form of racism”.
So let me turn their formula around.
The Green Party is racist. It should be treated as any other racist party.
I know who their sentence is about. The man at the back of shul who turns to face Jerusalem when he prays. The family that ends every Seder with the same four words. Next year in Jerusalem.
Almost two thirds of British Jews call themselves Zionists. Three quarters feel bound to Israel. The Green Party looked at all of us and saw racists.
And they knew what they were doing. In the same debate, delegates voted to affirm the Palestinians’ “inalienable right to self-determination”.
Inalienable for them. Racism for us.
A right open to every people on earth except the Jews has a name. It is the oldest hatred there is, wearing a new badge.
They were offered a way back at every turn, and they refused each one. An amendment to leave room for two states. Voted down. An amendment to stop Jewish members being disciplined for belonging to a synagogue. Voted down. Their own leader claimed to want both changes, but he left Brighton before the votes on both the amendments and the motion itself. .
Herzog did not answer Resolution 3379 with a letter of concern.
British Jews have spent three years doing exactly that. Statements. Letters. Expressions of concern. Requests for a meeting. We have become fluent in the language of the supplicant. The people who voted against us in Brighton have learned that it costs them nothing.
They did not issue a statement about us. They took a vote. So will we.
Ashley Hirst and I have tabled a motion asking the Board of Deputies to determine that the Green Party of England and Wales is a racist party. We want it decided at the plenary on 25 October.
This Board has called parties racist before. It can do so again.
The motion asks one thing of every other party. No coalitions. No deals. No arrangements with the Greens, in any council chamber or after any election.
A party that does a deal with them is enabling racism.
Nor is rescinding the policy the end of it. It is the first step back, not the last. The Board will go on calling the Greens what they are until an independent investigation has rooted out the people who brought this to the conference floor.
To the 813 who voted no, and to the Jewish Greens who stood up in that hall and fought it: none of this is aimed at you. You will need your community more than ever. You have it.
For too long British Jews have been spoken for as a community that asks to be protected. Herzog’s first words at that podium were a refusal to beg. We are British citizens. We expect the standard this country applies to every other minority to be applied to us. Where it is not, we will enforce it ourselves.
A community that sets no price for being called racist will go on being called racist.
This vote is not the Board’s alone. It is yours. Your synagogue elects a deputy to speak for you. Between now and 25 October, tell them how you want them to vote. Write to them. Call them. Stop them after shul.
The UN needed sixteen years to undo 1975. We do not intend to wait that long.
Herzog needed one sheet of paper and the nerve to tear it. The Board needs one vote.
In Brighton the Greens passed judgement on British Jews. On 25 October, British Jews return the verdict.
Max Royston is a co-founder of StopTheHateUK and a deputy for St John’s Wood United Synagogue on the Board of Deputies of British Jews.