Those who use the word ‘Zionist’ as an insult will fail

In 1906 the Daily Mail needed a name for the militant women heckling Cabinet ministers and storming political meetings. It settled on “suffragette”: a diminutive, a sneer, a way of making a movement sound like a children’s club. The women took it. They leaned on the hard g, suffra-GET, because they meant to get the vote. Within a few years it was the name on the masthead of their own newspaper. The insult did not survive contact with the people it was aimed at. The movement did.

On 4 October, the Green Party tried the same trick on us. By 1,022 votes to 813, its members declared Zionism a form of racism. The effect was meant to be simple. Any Jew who used the word would be confessing to a crime, and any Jew who wanted to stay respectable would quietly stop using it. It is not working.

Three weeks later the Board of Deputies, the elected voice of British Jewry, voted overwhelmingly to call the Greens a racist party. I seconded that motion, and argued for it in these pages. Labour then told every Green group sharing power with it to reject the policy or lose its coalition.

The retreat began almost at once. Green councillors in Lewes and Rother said they did not support the motion. In Hastings, the chair of the Green group resigned and left the party. And in Wealden, a council led by the Greens’ own deputy leader, the party put out a statement conceding that the word can mean different things to different people. It had taken three weeks for the Greens’ own councillors to start disowning their party’s definition of us.

The bigger story is not them. It is us.

JPR has followed the same 2,500 British Jews since 2020, through years of record antisemitism. Over that time the share calling themselves Zionist rose, from 59 per cent in 2022 to 66 per cent in 2025. The share calling themselves anti-Zionist barely moved, at around one in ten. Two years of being told the word was a crime, and more of us claimed it, not fewer. The slur arrived. The community moved towards the word.

Not everywhere. Among Jews in their twenties, just under a quarter now call themselves anti-Zionist, and another fifth non-Zionist. That is the frontier: the seminar room and the group chat, where a 21-year-old hears one definition a hundred times and ours not once. It is not a reason for despair. It is the address of the work.

And we should do that work knowing how these fights end. This country is full of names that began as insults. “Tory” was an Irish word for an outlaw, thrown at the supporters of a Catholic king; the party that kept it has governed Britain longer than any other. “Quaker” was a magistrate’s joke at the expense of George Fox; the Quakers went on to found Barclays, Lloyds, Cadbury and Clarks. “Methodist” was Oxford undergraduates mocking John Wesley and his friends for praying to a timetable. None of them won by begging their opponents for a kinder word. They won by wearing the cruel one until it meant them.

No people has more practice at this than ours. Our very name was won in a fight. Jacob wrestled through the night beside the Jabbok, refused to let go until dawn, and walked away limping with a new name: Israel, the one who struggles. We have carried a contested name for three thousand years, and we have never once handed it back.

We will not start now. We do not apologise for who we are, and we will not apologise for what we call ourselves.

I know what the Greens’ definition sounds like out loud, because I have heard it shouted. For months, Friday after Friday, as Shabbat came in, we stood opposite the weekly protest at Swiss Cottage, in the heart of one of London’s most Jewish neighbourhoods. From the microphone, a speaker called Zionism the cancer of the 21st century. Another told the crowd that Zionists needed to be put down. And one Friday in January, a demonstrator stopped bothering with the code word. In full view of the police, he told a Jewish counter-protester that being a Jew made him the scum of the earth. That is the journey the word makes. It starts as Zionist. It never stays there.

So let the Greens keep their definition. They wanted to hang the word racist on two in three British Jews. Now it hangs on them. Ours is older and simpler: a people with the same right to a home as every other people on earth. The women of the WSPU did not write to the Daily Mail asking for a kinder word. They printed theirs across the top of their own newspaper and sold it on street corners. Jacob did not ask for a gentler name. He limped away with the one he had fought for, and his children have carried it ever since.

Zionist is ours in the same way. The Greens wanted it whispered. We will say it out loud, in our own name, for as long as it takes. The one who struggles, and does not let go.

That is what Israel has always meant.

Max Royston is a co-founder of Stop The Hate UK and deputy for St John’s Wood United Synagogue on the Board of Deputies of British Jews