“Racism is the gentlest word” – Palestinians reply to attacks on the Greens

What Palestinians think about the Greens’ Zionism motion

Zionism is the ideology that has shaped every part of Palestinian lives, our displacement, our exile, the occupation and the genocide Israel has been carrying out in Gaza.

Edited highlights by Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi

1. The motion is not an extreme or fringe position. It is long overdue.

For us Palestinians it’s shocking to be told that the motion is a fringe position forced on a mainstream party. Nothing in the motion is new. Calling out Zionism as racism is not new. We’ve experienced the consequences of Israeli colonialism, occupation, oppression across  generations since 1948. We embody the reaction and the effect of the Zionism itself. Racism is the softest, gentlest way of describing it. It’s genocidal. It’s sociopathic. It’s terrorist. This is mass murder that we’re talking about.

The UN General Assembly in 1975 characterised Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. It was revoked because of US and UK pressure.  Why? Because Israel demanded it as a precondition for the “peace talks” that led to the Oslo Accords that actually instrumentalised our dispossession and our ethnic cleansing and the loss of Palestine itself.

There was nothing surprising about the Green  motion being passed. What was surprising was the backlash against it.  The fact that it’s even possible to think of it as a fringe position is the result of a kind of Zionist dominance over British, US, Western politics. Basically the question of Zionism wasn’t allowed to be discussed. But now we have one of the largest social movements in British political history challenging Zionism and its escalation of genocide. People became curious. They learned more and filled the streets week after week, day after day for three consistent years.

All the other political parties closed their doors to this conversation. They held fast to the kind of pre-2023 consensus position of we don’t talk about it. Any criticism of the state of Israel is antisemitism, full stop, as in the way that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was dealt with, the Israeli embassy smearing that entire wing of the British left as antisemitic for daring to just ask the question and to bring up the issue of Israeli violations, the issue of Israeli settler colonialism.

Would you like to have resolutions that talk only about Palestinian human rights, that have Palestinians only as humanitarian victims that you feel sympathetic to? Perfect victims only.

The Green Party was the only established political party that allowed a space for the real conversation to happen. So, of course, everybody went there and of course, this motion passed.

2. This is not just about Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich, it’s about every form of Zionism there’s been since the 1890s.

Some people say “we are Zionists, but we don’t support what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians.” So for example one of the responses to the motion was that we condemn the Netanyahu government, it’s this government or the current policies that is the problem.

But no. Zionism is racism is a statement of fact. There is no actually existing version of Zionism that matters that isn’t racism. So really, fundamentally, this resolution is just pointing to a fact that was always in the room and naming it what it is.

In the very early years, before 1900, there were variants of Zionism that were about self-emancipation inside Europe,  hold your head up high, you’re Jewish, this kind of Zionism, promoted by an Austrian called Nathan Birnbaum campaigning against antisemitism in Europe. The term was hijacked by political Zionism which said you couldn’t live with dignity as a Jewish person outside of Eretz Israel, outside of the settler colonial project. Zionism only made sense by portraying life in exile [diaspora] as a demeaning life.

Many Jewish scholars talk about Zionism having always been clear that it’s built on racial discrimination against the indigenous Palestinians.  Right from the beginning, whether you’re a socialist Zionist, or a fascist Zionist like Jabotinsky, card-carrying member of the fascist party, or the Ben Gurion kind of labour centrist Zionist, there’s a consensus position that this project is a project to create Israel as a Jewish colony, a Jewish nation state.

This is true from the earliest occupation and settlement of Palestinian territory, through the displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, decades of restrictions on movement, unequal access to land, denial of political self-determination and the right of refugees to return, through to the destruction of Gaza and Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians.

Zionism is premised on colonial erasure. Those who make the claim that Jewish self-determination is manifested in Zionism have a very skewed comprehension of what self-determination means, specifically when you are building that claim on  erasing a whole population

We also need to recognise that early Zionism was all about white supremacy. And this persists into today, into the way that Mizrahi, Eastern Jews, are treated as lesser humans. You can have a kind of socialist Zionism and a fascist Zionism and whatnot, but this becomes an internal debate for a settler colonial project.

The fact that you may have had Martin Buber or some people who ascribed to a certain kind of Zionism that allowed the possibility that the Arabs could remain on their land, doesn’t change the fact that what in fact happened was the total mass dispossession of the entire Palestinian people. It began as a genocidal campaign and now it’s clear for the world to see because of the bravery of people in Gaza documenting the violent systematic erasure that’s happening around them – the live-streamed genocide.

But these acts were being committed in 1948. They were being committed in Kufr Qasim in 1956. They were being committed in Gaza in the early 1970s. They were being committed in Lebanon. By this same Zionist entity, always under the ideology that treats those it’s killing as less human, pursuing a project that inevitably ended up fragmenting the whole of the region.

So let’s remember that “left-wing” and labour Zionism committed the Nakba, occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights. There’s a small interregnum where Likud is in power in the late 70s, early 80s. They invaded Lebanon, sure. But then it’s back to Labour which built the settlements, built the wall, masterminded the Oslo agreements.

So what is this Zionism that is benign? What is your version of Zionism that is not the mass expulsion of Palestinians in ’48? What is the version of Zionism that is not an ethno-state that’s for one kind of people only?

It’s premised on the claim that Palestinians do not have any historical relationship with this land. We are asked to cancel our memories on the basis of a complete fiction. And it’s an argument that is made in absolute bad faith, that you can build a homeland in a land that is inhabited on the premise that there is no people on that land. You refuse to recognise my humanity, you erase me, my family, as well as the future of my children.

It’s the same white supremacy that we see with the reaction of the motion. The feelings of some people are much more important than the slaughter of others.

If I believe that Jewish people should have a homeland in Palestine, if I realize that that specific belief has led to massive violence, then that is a self-reflection that I need to undertake. You don’t de facto have to be someone who has bad intentions, but self-reflection is good.

And this should never be forgotten – in the last three years during the mass eradication of Palestinians in Gaza,  Zionism in its most left-wing variant that was protesting against the Netanyahu government, and its most right-wing variant in the form of Smotrich and Ben Gvir, have never, ever had a difference of opinion about the systematic violence committed against the indigenous Palestinians.

3. Zionism is not Judaism

One of most important elements of the motion is the distinction between Zionism the political ideology, and Judaism or Jewish religious, cultural or historical identity. We refuse the conflation because we understand that not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. There are many, many Jews in our movement.  There is something very dangerous about putting all Jews under this Zionist criteria, making them take the blame for what Israel as a government and as a state is committing, the genocide, occupation, ethnic cleansing. Not all Jews have to suffer from that.

We’ve seen systematic attacks against anti-Zionist Jews. Jewish Voices for Labour who are now Jewish Voices for Liberation, how many of them were kicked out of Labour, were harassed by other members, called self-hating. Even Zack Polanski is now called an antisemite. Insane.

We didn’t choose the religion of our oppressors. To those who said  this motion put the safety of the Jews in the UK in danger, this argument is very connected to one about Israeli security. The idea that  oppression of Palestinians is necessary for Israeli security. The International Court of Justice responded to Israel when it said that and told them that Israeli security cannot be superior to Palestinian security. Jewish safety cannot be superior.

In the case of Palestine, reconciliation and justice is the only path to ending violence. Not putting the star of David on massively destroyed buildings, not committing a genocide and putting the name of your religion on it, by ending that, maybe then you would be able to actually make the claim that you are doing something that goes towards the welfare and the benefit of the Jewish population.

This is indeed a problem that we’ve had in terms of our education about understanding Jewish people.

Sadly, there are  books that can be traced to antisemites in Europe that were translated into Arabic and then popularised. A lot of that conflation starts with Israel.  You cannot find any historically traceable particular discourse in the region prior to Zionism.

Palestinian safety is something no one put on the table. Where is the safety of five generations of our families?

And now the word racism applied to what Israel has been doing to us is something that makes some people question their safety and feelings while our lives are being murdered in front of cameras.

I would say anyone who does not believe that Zionism is racism is a racist himself or herself. Knowingly or unknowingly.

A lot of Jewish scholars have actually made the argument that Zionism is inevitably harmful to Judaism because if you create a settler colonial state that is militarised and you justify your crimes in the name of the religion, then you create that space of hostility, associating the religion with  a political project that is the furthest away from any level of the spirituality proclaimed by the three Abrahamic religions.

Judaism had existed for 3,000 plus years without political Zionism, and now no one can think of it without a genocidal state which is the leading cause of Jewish unsafety in the world today. Basically, Israel has armed antisemites with all kinds of examples to use and put us Palestinians in this position where we’re having to defend Jews against antisemitism while also contending with Zionist genocide.

We’re always having to defend ourselves from a de facto “oh, you’re Palestinian, you must be antisemitic.” While our own people are being slaughtered. We have to be the humanitarians, studying thousands of years of history in order to answer all these questions. And then worry whether it’s antisemitic to put a motion at Green Party conference. All this just to be allowed to say it’s not okay to systematically kill us.

The first anti-Zionist in the British establishment was Lord Montagu, who also happened to be the only Jewish member of the British cabinet at the time of the Balfour Declaration. A British imperial bigwig! But he was basically saying, if we accept the argument of the Zionists, which we did by issuing the Balfour Declaration, you’re saying if you’re Jewish, you must move to Palestine in order to become a full human, and that is racist.

There’s nothing under international law that says you can claim a land based on your abstract belief that your ancestors belonged there in ancient biblical history and you were promised it by God. Whereas in the case of Palestinians our grandparents were kicked out of that place, in living memory.

Zionism played on and used the religious story so that it would be able to justify what is at its core a political colonial project.

Let’s also never forget, there was a sizeable part of the Palestinian community, especially in cities like Safad and Jerusalem, that was Jewish Palestinians, the way we have Christian Palestinians and atheist Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians.

Christian Zionism says there’s a prophecy through which Jewish people are going to ingather and this is going to involve the return or the coming of the Messiah. And then all these Jewish people are either going to convert to Christianity or die. Forget us Palestinians for a second. Christian Zionism is based on fundamental antisemitism while promoting a Zionist movement that can only be fulfilled through the erasure and eradication of the indigenous Palestinian population. Which version of this is not racist?

Surely Jesus is meant to be about love, not mass murder!

While it looks on the surface that it’s about religion, it’s not. You can get interpretations of religion that would allow you to put forward particular views of the world that serve those in power. Christian Zionism is a classic example of that, whereby you take people’s religious sentiment and then appropriate it into something that would fit a larger economic or political perspective. In the case of Israel it’s an imperial outpost to maintain dominance over the region with oil and gas at its heart.

There’s a very sinister kind of pragmatism from Zionists in the US using the same kind of Bible Belt support base that elects Republican presidents. So this is a direct route to power in Washington, very helpful to the multibillionaires with influence over media, public opinion and even what is said from church pulpits.

If you’re Jewish, wherever you land on Zionism, it should be extremely worrying that the major force in the United States pushing for allyship with Israel and Zionist policy is this kind of messianic mega church phenomenon.

4. The Palestinian right of return – a critical factor in understanding Zionism and the state of Israel

Zionism never intended to share the land with the indigenous people. Racism is built into the Israeli state with the Law of Return, which provides a route to immigration and citizenship for Jews from anywhere in the world while excluding Palestinians displaced from their homes and their descendants.

Herzl himself said they would spirit the penniless population across the border.  Jabotinsky in 1923, in his essay The Iron Wall, said the native population would never consent, colonisation had to proceed behind military force. And now we know that Israel declared itself in 2018 as a Jewish only nation. So only Jews all over the world can come to Israel and claim citizenship. We Palestinians cannot do that. Palestinians from Gaza can’t even go back to Gaza.

We have the right, under UN Resolution 194, but we can’t implement it. Why? Because we’re not Jewish under Israeli law. That’s the only reason me, my family, 7 million Palestinian refugees, two-thirds of the population of the Gaza Strip, a million refugees in the West Bank, all the Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon, etc. None of us is allowed home because we’re not Jewish.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed on December 10th, 1948, the founding charter of the UN. Article 12 says every person who’s from a place should be allowed to return to that place. December 11^th, Resolution 194 is issued by the General Assembly, specifically saying all the Palestinians who were expelled during the Nakba have the right to go home.

If you’re a refugee, you have the right to go home. Even if we accept all the Israeli mythology that Arab armies invaded and there were radio broadcasts telling people to flee, it doesn’t matter why they left. War is over. They have the right to go home. This is the case everywhere in the world. And it can be passed from generation to generation if it’s denied. Why are the Palestinian refugees not allowed to go home?

We shouldn’t start  Palestinian history at the Balfour Declaration, but going 100 years before that, with British imperialism and the entry of capitalism.

The dying Ottoman Empire brought in European property laws that would allow people to become really rich as part of  a growing capitalist class, giving privileges to some people over time, many different populations. You could have privileged access to water, access to land, access to work. The coloniser arrived with the ideology of a state like the British Empire which had done this many times, in Australia, New Zealand, America.

In 1948 people were thinking, Britain had promised that we’d have Palestine and the right of self-determination. They were waiting for the British soldiers to protect them.

After generations of displacement, family separation  and the loss of communities, Palestinians are still denied self-determination.

5. A single democratic state is no threat to Jews. A two-state solution has never been on Zionism’s agenda.

It’s incredible the way the one state solution is treated as somehow Jewish erasure. As if it’s impossible to imagine Palestine as a democratic place, that there can’t be Jewish people there. It has to be seen as a mirror image of the Israeli one state which is the erasure of Palestinians.

Because Israel has established itself by genocide as an ethnostate for only one kind of people, any notion of one Palestine must somehow come with all the assumed antisemitism we’ve been talking about.

Instead of the savagery of Zionist racism and Western racism in general, white supremacist racism, we ask for one secular democratic state, a state for all of the people on it, a state based on reparations and accountability. Our land back. Return of refugees. There needs to be an accounting,  an admission of guilt and an apology.

The political regime of apartheid ended in South Africa and none of those who benefited from it had to be pushed away. But those who committed a crime should be held accountable. It’s as simple as this.

That UN resolution recognising Zionist racism in 1975, that came at a time when Palestine was seen as a colonial issue. There was active Palestinian resistance that was recognised and deeply interconnected with other resistance movements. It was a moment of anti-colonial struggle across the world. Resistance movements in Palestine had a very persistent call – one democratic state that was not premised on erasure but was premised on –  God forbid – equal rights for everyone.

But then after the 70s, 80s, the Gulf States would no longer use oil as a tool to support us, we were told to put down our weapons – our stones actually – and go to the law books with the Oslo Accords.

We were coerced.  We never accepted Two States and Israel will never accept a Palestinian state on 1967 borders.

Some of our allies are talking about this idea of realism versus idealism. They say one state is an ideal position while two states is more realistic.

Ideal is a classless society, no borders, no nations. It’s actually much more realistic to think about equality, the liberal, basic, pragmatic, way Britain, the US and Europe imagine themselves, states for all their citizens, equal rights amongst those citizens. There’s nothing idealistic about them.

They say one Palestinian state would be racist, but they don’t see an ethno-nationalist state for a superior Jewish majority as racist. A state that has to constantly social engineer, play with demographics.

How is the two-state solution pragmatic? You want a West Bank that doesn’t have any economic backbone. They control the water resources and most of the agricultural land. Two states is about buying time to kill and murder us, the Palestinians.

Oslo was a defeat, surrender. Our parents’ generation are the ones who had to drink that poison. And we are the ones who have to actually dream beyond it, to believe that we have allies around the world who we can work with.

Israel itself, the occupying power, the one who has power and is committing a genocide right now and taking our own lands, is not accepting it. It is against the DNA of Zionism. Zionism is about mega Israel, greater Israel. How can you talk to Zionists about one or two solutions. You can’t reconcile with it. You can’t negotiate with it. You just dismantle it or die. Those are our options. Be erased, which is Zionism. Or fight Zionism, the thing that’s trying to erase you. For a Palestinian, this is the only realistic, pragmatic option. Anything else is idealism. The idealists are the people who think that you can take the ghetto of Ramallah, plant a Palestinian flag on it, and say we have two-state solution. That’s La La Land.

6. Britain and the West are responsible, historically and now, including media, the liberal establishment and parts of the left

The justifications for Zionism are built on a completely European trajectory of history. So you’re asking us to be responsible for a history that we did not play a part of in. Why do we have to pay the price for European history, European mass racism towards Jewish people? Especially when you consider if you look at the story as it unfolded, the places where, as antisemitism spiked in different moments across European history, the place where Jews were safest was in Arab and Muslim countries, in places like Palestine.

And the irony is that now the European places that were very, very anti-Jewish are now the most active advocates for Israel. Some say because they’re still antisemitic, they’re advocating for the Zionists, because that would solve their problem with Jews!

Some of our allies and friends say we should talk about genocide and occupation, not Zionism is Racism. But the question is, how do we go about strategically addressing the reasons why the occupation and genocide happened?

The British establishment has stood by the Zionist Project from the beginning, increasingly after 1967 and also after the co-option of the Gulf states into the sphere of interest of the US and European states as an outpost of empire.

In the UK we have what has been called a low intensity democracy. So you get to speak and talk just within the parameters drawn by the establishment. Feel free and sometimes weak forms of resistance are allowed within the system so that it’s immune to larger contestation. So you say free Palestine, we ban some settlers, we allow a little bit of space for that. But now it ends up that, oh, you’ve touched the line, you’ve touched the line. Because we are in a country where politicians persist in giving the benefit of the doubt to a state that is committing genocide.

The Green Party motion makes a start at recognising British centrality in the establishment of Israel, but it’s also a local issue. Climate devastation, hypercapitalism, AI, militarisation, pacification, environmental degradation – they are all tied.  Why are Israeli drones being manufactured here? Why are there weapons of death on British soil? What version of British sovereignty is this? And why are British civilians who say no, I’m not going to let this arms factory operate in this country, charged as terrorists? British nationals were killed by Israel in the genocide itself. And what did the UK do? Nothing.

It’s insane how the whole media establishment went after the Greens for a democratically voted resolution, even so-called left-wing media.  “The Greens have passed a very controversial motion, Zionism is the belief that Jews should have a homeland,” full stop, nothing about Palestine. They can’t deal with the substance of it, the core arguments, they immediately jump to character assassination, smearing. They think that the emotions of some people are way more important than the lives of the people of Palestine. After three years of Israel genocide over Gaza.  If it’s harmful to some people’s feelings that Zionism is racism and it kills us, then it should be. Everyone should be harmed by that. Normal reaction.

When you tell me that someone needs to protect their right to have Zionist belief, you’re saying they need to be protected against self-reflection. They don’t want to self-reflect on what it means.

7. The motion gives the Green Party the opportunity to grow into a more significant force in British politics

What the Greens need to do is double down on becoming a mass-based organisation, a true, strong, left movement here, that could possibly have a domino effect elsewhere.

It’s by continuing to develop positions that resonate with people on climate change, on social welfare, on cost of living, on Palestine, which does matter to large numbers of voters, on racism, militarisation and corporate power, on standing up to the Reform Party and the far right, because Labour and the Tories certainly are not doing it.

That’s what’s going to make the Green Party become even more relevant. They need to double down or risk returning to irrelevance, leaving the establishment to become a debate club between the old behemoths and this new far-right phenomenon of fascism.

Huge demonstrations and public activism over a live-streamed three years of genocide in Gaza have increased awareness of Palestinian rights. We as Palestinians are always told to wait for the right time. Why was it delayed until now that people in the UK have recognised that there is something called Zionism that’s actually the material manifestation of everything we as Palestinians embody and live in our lives?

The sad thing is how the British public that is not politicised is trained to think in the frameworks that the media adopts. Frameworks like presumed savagery and guilt in people of colour until proven otherwise.

The Green Party should be proud. It knows that what it’s saying is in line with legal justice that should be the strength of their messaging. Rather than going the other way and saying, oh, maybe we should tone it down because Labour is now offering a more “moderate” position on Palestine. And here we see that danger in how British politics operates. A “moderate” position allowed the genocide. The Labour Party did more than just allow it, they fueled it. It has not changed its colours. The statement from Ed Miliband was classical electoral signaling without changing anything. The genocide is still continuing. What are they doing on that? ? Did you pressure Israel to stop its grave violations? No. You still come back to me and tell me Israel has the right to defend itself. A leader of the Labour Party has to make commitments to the state of Israel. And this is what happened with the purge of Corbyn. He poked too close.

This is kind of that classic moment where you have the establishment versus the people. We saw it in the Arab Spring, for instance. The Green Party leadership is now at a point where it has to choose. Is it going to try to kind of close ranks, make bridges back with the establishment, say, actually, we didn’t mean it. We’ll find a way to shut these people up. Or will it rely on its new mass base to explain why this resolution was passed, carry on the conversation and use it as an opportunity to educate even more people about how the issues that concern large parts of the British voter base –  climate catastrophe, hypercapitalism, increased monopoly, redistribution of wealth to the very tiny number of extremely wealthy in society, cost of living crisis, Palestine –  are connected.