This weekend, anti-Zionism’s mask may finally slip

When does anti-Zionism become antisemitism? It’s a question I get asked even more often than, ‘Where do you get your funky dance moves from?’ At what point does criticism of Israel stop being a legitimate political position and turn into something older and uglier?

This weekend we may finally get our answer. Because if the Green Party votes to back a tabled proposition that Zionism is racism at its spring conference, the whole semantic charade will finally be put aside and a dark new chapter will have begun.

A now mainstream British political party – currently polling in third place behind Reform UK and Labour – will have decided that the national aspirations of almost every single Jew is not merely open to criticism but inherently evil.

Jews are constantly told that a belief held by almost all of them puts them on the wrong side of acceptable opinion. They see the word “Zionist” do the work older words are no longer socially permitted to do

The transparent trick, up to this point, has been to doggedly pretend otherwise. Anti-Zionism, after all, provides a convenient moral safe zone. A nasty place where nasty people can say nasty things about Jews that they would never dare utter of other minorities.

Not that it needs repeating, but Zionism is the modest proposition that after a few thousand years of expulsions and pogroms that led to the gates of Auschwitz, the most persecuted people on the planet might reasonably conclude that relying on the goodwill of others is not an entirely foolproof long-term security arrangement. That’s all it is. Or rather, all it was, until the radical left broke bread with Islamists and deemed it uniquely wicked.

Jews are constantly told that a belief held by almost all of them puts them on the wrong side of acceptable opinion. They see the word “Zionist” do the work older words are no longer socially permitted to do.

That is why this grubby Green vote matters. Not because the party is on the brink of power. Perish the thought. But because it has wormed its way into the political mainstream.

When does anti-Zionism become antisemitism? If this motion passes, the answer will be: when a British political party declares Jewish self-determination beyond the moral pale.