Why the Green Party’s argument about Zionism destroys itself

In TV and radio interview over the past few weeks, various Green representatives and outriders have sat in TV studios and have attempted to explain their party’s rationale for labelling a majority of the world’s Jews as racist. 

There are two main points such people have repeatedly attempted to make. The first is that, as they see it, how Zionism has manifested (with the destruction of Gaza) proves its essentially ideological malignity. The second is that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism (and that in fact, it is the people who try and conflate Zionism with Judaism who are themselves antisemitic).

What the individuals making these arguments seem less keen to comment on is that, by their own logic, anti-Zionism is both racist in general and antisemitic in particular – precisely because of how it has continuously manifested. We have a dozen different examples, each on a national scale, which show exactly what happens when anti-Zionism is adopted as a public policy. In every single one – whether in Poland in 1968, the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, or fledgling Arab nations from the late 1940’s through to the 1960s and beyond – it has led to the widespread antisemitic persecution and repression of Jews, regardless of their ideological beliefs.

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I have written before about how in 1968, a government-run “anti-Zionist” campaign in Communist Poland saw the targeting of all Jews, leading to tens of thousands fleeing the country. The fact that many of these were Holocaust survivors makes today’s comments from elements of the pro-Palestinian movement suggesting that Jews should “go back to Poland” particularly nauseating.

However, in the Soviet Union, the “anti-Zionism” was conducted with a level of unparalleled cynicism. Officially, antisemitism was a crime. In reality, the USSR, under the pretext of anti-Zionism, conducted a policy of institutional antisemitism. Jews were barred from a variety of professions and largely prevented from studying at prestigious universities, as well as being rejected from travel, even internally within the Eastern Bloc. Jews living in the USSR had “Yevrey” stamped in their passports and official documents on the “nationality” line – they may have lived in Moscow, Kyiv or Chisinau, but they were not considered “Russian”, or “Ukrainian” or “Moldovan” . A notorious 1970s Soviet propaganda film about the evils of Zionism, Secret and Explicit, literally re-used footage from a 1940 Nazi propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).

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But it is in various Arab nations that the conflation between Judaism and Zionism was made so unambiguous. The ethnic cleansing of three quarters of a million Jews from Arab lands is an inconvenient truth for much of the far left, so much so that they have had to resort to increasingly desperate attempts to try and explain it away by alleging some vast Zionist conspiracy designed to inculcate fear into local Jewish populations in order to convince them to flee to Israel. Of course, to believe that you would also have to believe that “the Zionists” managed to infiltrate the governments of all Arab states which instituted sweeping campaigns of repression against Jewish communities, confiscating their homes and possessions and stripping them of their citizenship. You would also have to believe that the fledgling state of Israel wanted nothing more than having to deal with a mass humanitarian situation, year-after-year, in which hundreds of thousands of people with little more than the clothes on their backs were arriving in the country. But once you have convinced yourself, as so many Green party members apparently have, that Zionism is the ultimate evil, it is only a short onward step to entering a fantasy land where Zionism is not only capable of, but likely to have conducted, any evil you can imagine.

But we do not have to look so far afield, of course, for a prime example of an anti-Zionist policy leading to antisemitism. After the passing of the UN’s infamous “Zionism is Racism’ motion in the mid-70s, which was pushed by the Soviet Bloc and the Arab League, various far left groups in the UK attempted to use it at universities to shut down campus Jewish Societies. Not Israel Societies, not Zionist Societies; Jewish Societies. The “argument” made at the time was that such groups had links to Israel, or to Zionism. That argument was precisely the one which the Green Party had the opportunity to separate itself from earlier this month, when an amendment proposed that the party make it clear that Jewish people who attended Synagogues seen as “Zionist” would not be targeted. Members at Green party conference resoundingly rejected this amendment.

So if we are indeed to judge an ideology solely by its real-world manifestation, as the Green party would have us do, then anti-Zionism is unambiguously antisemitic, even if many of its ‘anti-racist’ adherents might be horrified by that notion. So I would respectfully suggest that if they are going to continue to defend the indefensible, they’re going to need a better argument.