The Green’s boycott of Standing Together exposes what that party has become

The Green Party has reportedly banned Standing Together, a grassroots Jewish-Arab peace movement in Israel, from holding events at the Green Party conference in October. This follows a similar decision to block a fringe meeting on antisemitism that the Antisemitism Policy Trust and the polling company More In Common wanted to hold; meanwhile, at the same conference, the party will debate a motion calling for Israel to be erased and fully replaced with a single state of Palestine. Add these together and you get a sense of the single-minded, destructive fervour of the radical anti-Zionists who have flocked to the party under Zack Polanski’s leadership.

Standing Together is hardly a Zionist mouthpiece. In Israel it campaigned for a ceasefire, blocked troop transports to Gaza and confronts violent settlers in the West Bank. They openly call the Gaza war a genocide and accuse the Israeli state of apartheid. These are positions that would put them well to the left of the vast majority of British Jews, never mind Israeli ones. You’d think they are exactly the kind of Israeli organisation that British leftists seeking to campaign against the Israeli government and its wars would want to hear from; but that is not what anti-Zionists want at all.

Last year the global BDS movement published a call by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) to boycott Standing Together for the crime of “normalisation”. This was backed by the UK’s own Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC). Standing Together published a response hoping, it seems, to persuade people against this boycott, but their patiently-argued explanation missed the point. The people who want to boycott Standing Together don’t care that they campaign for Palestinian rights or accuse Israel of genocide. All that matters is that Standing Together also recognise that Israeli Jews are people with rights and needs of their own; that Israeli Jews have a narrative about their history and their reality that is worth listening to, as do Palestinians; and that Jews and Arabs in Israel need to work together to build a common future. That’s enough to get them banned.

The message is that there are no Israelis pure enough or acceptable enough for anti-Zionists in the Green Party to talk to, hear from, or work with. The only acceptable Israelis are the ones who agree that Israel shouldn’t exist at all. The Greens For Palestine faction has even ejected veteran anti-Zionist Jews who fell under suspicion for being closet Zionists. This is the logical direction of anti-Zionism today, in which any sense of hesitancy, compromise or moderation is taken as evidence of “normalisation” with the hated enemy. Usually, the British Left will find partners and allies in other countries to work with, including within those countries they campaign against. But not Israel, because to work with Jews who live in Israel would admit messy, complicated reality into their simplistic, symbolic politics.

An important aspect of this is that the criticisms that pragmatic, mainstream politicians make of the Israeli government, or the steps they implement to oppose its policies, will never be enough. Call for an end to the occupation of the West Bank? You get accused of normalising Israel’s existence within the 1967 borders. Condemn the disgraceful violence of Israeli settlers? The riposte is that “All of Israel is a settlement”. If you accuse Israel of war crimes the demand is that you must go further and call it genocide. If you do that, the next step is that you must call for Israel to be completely dismantled. And if you baulk at supporting Hamas’s use of armed force – even after the atrocities of October 7 – you are treated as a backslider. The demands never stop.

There is a lesson here for all political leaders, not just Zack Polanski. Whatever you do to oppose Israel, whether it involves an arms embargo, settlement boycott, or sanctions on politicians, will never satisfy the activists who drive the anti-Zionist movement, because their campaign is fuelled by emotion and symbolism, not by practical policy asks. Only the complete destruction of Israel and the vilification of anyone and anything in Britain associated with Israel – whether that is an arms factory or a synagogue – will do. They will always push for more, and you won’t get any credit for what you have done.

This is where the “Zionism is Racism” motion comes in, which is being assiduously pushed by Greens For Palestine. The motion calls for the party to oppose a two-state solution, demanding instead that Israel should be erased and replaced by a single Palestinian state on all the territory of Israel and Palestine. It endorses the idea that armed force can be used to bring this about. It rejects not just the IHRA definition of antisemitism preferred by most mainstream Jewish bodies, but even the JDA definition that was created as an alternative (you don’t need to know the intricacies of the difference between these two definitions: just that objecting to both makes the proposers of this motion *way* more extreme than most anti-Israel activists). And finally, the motion indicates that anyone suspected of Zionism should be put through the party’s disciplinary processes for racist behaviour.

It looks very much like the Green Party is becoming a hostile environment for all but the tiniest fringe of Israel-hating Jews. Refusing to hear from Israeli peace campaigners or organisations working to reduce antisemitism is bad enough. If this motion passes and the party formally opposes a two state solution, it would put it at odds with the United Nations, the British Government, the European Union, and even the Palestinian Authority. This is the politics that increasingly holds sway in the party, and with the mood and direction as it currently stands, the most extreme position is always likely to win out if it comes to a vote.

The Green Party now has around 1,300 local councillors and controls five local authorities outright. It continues to attract lots of young voters. Its leadership seems worryingly relaxed about the antisemitic turn in the party, with dozens of allegations of antisemitic conduct by party members and activists mounting up, and evidence that antisemitism and support for violence are openly expressed in online group chats amongst some party activists. It’s all very reminiscent of Labour under Corbyn, which isn’t a coincidence: a lot of the people forced out of Labour when they cleaned up Corbyn’s antisemitic mess found a welcoming home in the Green Party.

There is some evidence that the party leadership can step in if it wants to: it has reportedly blocked a motion to Green Party conference calling for police officers to be stripped of tasers and pepper sprays. But, just as with Labour in 2016, the party machine is not set up to handle the huge influx of members with very extreme, and at times openly antisemitic, views, and the party structures make it easy for those new members to put forward motions that would turn their extremist ideas into party policy.

As ever, this kind of absolute anti-Zionism comes accompanied by other wild politics. One motion that is up for discussion wants to remove the proscription of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) and to end sanctions on Iran, even after the IRGC almost certainly directed arson attacks on the Jewish community in London. This support for Iran is not a one-off in the party. Eleanora Folan, an activist from East Anglia, was elected to the Green Party’s governing council two months after tweeting this tribute to the Islamic Republic:

Folan, who does not appear to be Muslim, has a habit of signing off statements with the Arabic term “Inshallah” while condemning “Zionist saboteurs” and the “feral Zionist press”. Reading these posts is like a throwback to Stalinist demagoguery, mixed in with contemporary Islamist rhetoric. “Our party has changed, and my election as a proud anti-Zionist trans woman symbolises that change”, Folan wrote on being elected to its governing council. She isn’t wrong about that. It is not only a different gender that Folan has adopted, but the trappings of another religion and national sensibility as well. And of course, the one campaign group she thanked for helping to get her elected was Greens For Palestine.

This is not about people who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, its conduct on the West Bank, or its broader treatment of Palestinians. People who want all of those things would happily work with Standing Together. Rather, this is a politics that seeks to purify the world and bring about a radical overhaul of society by eliminating the Jewish State. It is uncompromising by design and welcomes confrontation. As such, it follows a kind of thinking about Jews that has a long and ignoble history; but it is a far cry from the Green Party of old.