Given the media coverage recently, the most obvious place to start with this topic is the Green Party motion that was voted in to policy, that Zionism is Racism. This policy states that both the ideology of Zionism and its manifestation through the Israeli State is a fundamentally racist, apartheid ideology and that the genocide being committed against the Palestinian people by the State of Israel is as a direct consequence of the ideology. The policy calls for the immediate cessation of the genocide, the dismantling of the Israeli State and the re-establishment of the Palestinian State as a one State solution that allows all people to live and partake in a single democratic society; Jews, Christians and Muslims, just as it was before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. It also calls for the full right of return, under international law, for all Palestinians who have been forced out of their homes and their country.
Given this, we need to identify what Zionism is, and this is not easy at first glance because the practitioners of Zionism deliberately try to obfuscate the truth. They keep insisting that Zionism is simply the belief that Jews should have the right to a Jewish State in their ancestral homeland and that all Jews should have the right to return their and live their lives free of persecution. This sounds entirely reasonable at face value and is why so many people are vocally supportive of it. But this is not the truth. First of all, it obfuscates the reality that there was already a state and a people living there. It obfuscates the truth that Semitic Jews ARE Palestinian. It obfuscates the truth that the creation of the state of Israel in historic Palestine requires the dismantling of the Palestinian state and the expulsion of its people.
What Zionism is in reality is a fundamentally racist political ideology that was specifically designed around apartheid. In the 1890s, when the atheist father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl was developing Zionism, he was writing about creating a Jewish ethno-state which would be created by ethnically cleansing the Arab population from Palestine. Herzl wasn’t specifically talking about doing this through violence; he was talking about removing the poor part of the population by securing them work in surrounding countries whilst systematically denying them work in Palestine. For the richer part of the population, the idea was to buy their land and then refuse to sell them alternative land in Palestine, thereby ethnically cleansing the region through peaceful methods. Some of the co-creators however, realised that Palestinians would not simply just give up their homes and therefore would resist and the use of force and violence should not only not be shied away from, but should actively be used. Between the founding of Zionism and the Balfour declaration in 1917, the calls for violent displacement of the Palestinians grew and became the dominant idea, founded entirely in colonial racism and oppression.
The Balfour declaration effectively granted Zionists everything that they wanted, but not out of support for Jews, but as a methods to remove them from Europe. The Balfour declaration is what lead to the creation of Israel and specifically used racism against Jews to do this.
David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli PM and the person responsible for putting Zionism in to motion in the region, said that the Arabs must be expelled and replaced by Jews, and by Jews, he was referring to European settler colonists. It is important to remember that the Jewish people who set up Israel and touted the claim of a historic homeland, that is, the political class carrying out the building of the State, were all born in Europe, not the Middle-east and specifically, not in Palestine. Many of them are Jewish through ancestral religious choice and not through being descended from Semitic people. When he called for the expulsion of the Arabs, he was referring to people who’s direct ancestors WERE Jewish, along with Christian and Muslim. He was stating that the Semitic people of the region were to be driven out and replaced by Europeans who were Jewish by right of religion. Palestinians who were Jewish at the creation of Israel were naturalised into the Israeli State but all other people were to be driven out. This resulted in the Nakba in 1948 where 750,000 people were ethnically cleansed from the Region of Palestine that is now Israel. Most of them were forced into the area of Gaza.
In 1967, the Northern District Commissioner of the Interior, Yisrael Koenig, wrote the Koenig Memorandum which was adopted and enacted by the State and this explicitly demanded that the State ‘must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population’. Koenig was a Zionist and a part of the ruling party of Israel. The memorandum was written as official policy.
Now, Netanyahu is committing a full blown genocide against the Palestinians in the name of Zionism as well as the crime of apartheid as ruled by the world court; the ICJ. From its very conception, Zionism has been a highly racist, apartheid, European colonial settler political ideology. It is not a religion. It is not an ethnicity. It is not a race of people. It is not supported by a single type of person; indeed, many Jews support it, but so do many Christians and Atheists. Both Kier Starmer and Donald Trump are Zionists. Given all of this, saying that Zionism is not a racist ideology and that it is only about a homeland for Jews is both an obfuscation of the truth and specifically a lie. People who say ‘That isn’t my definition of Zionism’ are fooling themselves and trying to fool you. How would you react to a member of the Nazi party saying that Naziism is not his definition of being a Nazi? It is entirely meaningless when the founding principles and the actual manifestation of both Zionism and Israel are these things. Personal definitions do not matter.
All of this is why the Greens passed the motion that Zionism is racism, and to say that it is racism is neither racist nor anti-Semitic. It is just plain fact with mountains of evidence, most of which has been created and documented by Zionists.
The truth behind the current actions of the State of Israel are this; They are committing apartheid. This has been ruled by the ICJ, the highest court in the world and the ultimate authority on this. They are committing genocide; the United Nations have determined that the actions of Israel fully meet the requirements of genocide under the Geneva convention and the evidence has been presented to the ICJ by South Africa with a trial date for genocide expected to start in 2028.
The International Criminal Court, the highest criminal court in the world, is separately investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity that Israel is committing and has issued international arrest warrants for Israeli officials including Netenyahu.
Israel uses the rape and sexual assault of both men and women as a weapon of war against Palestinians. The IDF frequently rapes prisoners; there are multiple documented cases and given that no IDF soldier has been sentenced for these crimes, they are implicitly sanctioned by the State.
The killing of Jews by Jews, namely the IDF is specifically sanctioned by the State through the Hanibal directive in order to stop IDF soldiers being captured by Hamas.
Moving closer to home, the vast majority of politicians from almost all political parties are members of official Friends of Israel groups that allow for and facilitate political and personal donations to these politicians from the State of Israel. The UK under the current Labour and previous Conservative governments have been supplying parts for the F35 jets that the Israeli air force uses, along with providing intelligence to Israel from RAF overflights of Gaza from RAF Akrotiri. The UK Government have also refused to enact the international arrest warrants issued by the ICC. This means that the UK government has broken international law in order to actively support a State committing genocide, to commit that genocide. In addition, the UK government is arresting its own citizens for historically accepted direct action as a form of protest and arresting those people and their supporters under terrorism legislation, often for holding cardboard signs, whilst completely ignoring that gangs of masked men roaming the streets threatening migrants and using the fear of violence as a means to affect political change; The government are ignoring actual terrorists and arresting peaceful critics of Israel as terrorists.
So, to anybody that is still voting for and supporting Labour, particularly people who are paying membership fees, know this; not only are you supporting the continuation of neoliberalism which actively harms the working class, but by your support for the party, you are also actively supporting the breach of international law, the use of State sanctioned rape as a weapon of oppression, the murder of tens of thousands of children, apartheid, genocide and the State sanctioned murder of Jews by Jews. You are also supporting the ability of an apartheid, genocidal regime to influence our national policy. Think about what that means.
If you do not support this, there is a singular political party that explicitly rejects this through official policy; the Green Party of England and Wales. This, however, is also not without issue. The motion was voted on by the membership who attended the conference and passed. Regardless of the requirements for changes to internal party processes, the motion passed and became official party policy. What happened next however, is that elected Green MPs, used their position of power to go on National television and undermine the democratic systems of the party by capitulating to public pressure applied by the Zionist lobby. Rachel Millward specifically stated that Israel has a right to exist; I’ll come on to this shortly, but this comment is in direct conflict with official party policy, and whilst she has a right to her own personal opinion, she is using her position to air that personal opinion over the party policy. Ellie Chown has used her position to publicly say that not only does she disagree with the motion but that the party needs to ensure that it is not captured by racists and extremists. Well, Ellie, that is precisely what the Zionism is racism motion aims to do because Zionist ARE racists and extremists. The party MPs, having ignored the calls for change previously are now demanding change on the basis that less than 1% of the party voted on this issue. It’s strange that they don’t care that less than 1% of the party voted on all of the other motions at the conference, such as environmental policies; it was okay for those motions to pass, but not the Zionism is racism motion. They are also using the fact that less than 1% of the party voted for this at conference to infer that the other 218,000 people in the party disagree with the motion. Here is the thing; there has been no polling of the rest of the party, so this is just made up nonsense being shouted as fact. The truth is, the Zionism is racism motion does not damage the party. The elected MPs are the ones actively damaging the party.
It is worth noting that in 1975, the UN ruled that Zionism is a form of racism and this ruling remained extant until 1991. When it was withdrawn, it was not withdrawn because the ideological position had changed; it changed because of the proposal of the two State solution. The US under George W Bush and the UK both put pressure on the UN to accept the two State solution, which would allow Israel to continue existing despite its documented crimes. Israel then agreed to this but told the UN that it would only agree to cease hostilities and accept the two State solution if the UN rescinded the Zionism is racism ruling. Effectively, the ruling was rescinded due to the UN being blackmailed by Israel, the US and the UK.
Moving on to the one State solution, I frequently hear that the State of Israel has the right to exist and that you can not just go and dismantle a State. It is one of the favourite attack lines by the media, though it is often framed in an unwinnable bad faith argument in the form of; ‘Do you believe that Israel, as a safe homeland for Jewish people, having fled and survived the Holocaust, has a right to exist?’ The issue with this phrasing are that this conflates a state with a country, it infers that States have rights, it ignores that this requires apartheid. It ignores that there are other ways for Jewish people to have a home and it phrases the question as though to deny it would be evil. It is all a smoke screen.
The truth is this; States do not have a right to exist. They are not a collection of borders. They are not a country. They are not a people. They are not a religion. They are not an ethnicity. They are a political construct that houses national policies and governs the political and financial systems of a county, region or people.
In 1650, Cromwell dismantled the monarchical State or Britain and rebuilt it as a democratic State. That old State no longer existed. After WW2, the Nazi State was dismantled and we got East and West Germany; two states in one country. At the creation of Israel, the Palestinian State was dismantled in favour of the creation of the State of Israel. We dismantle and create States fairly regularly, so any argument that we can not just go and dismantle the State of Israel is purely a lie. Not only do States not have a right to exist because States do not have rights, but any State that is built upon or enacts apartheid and/or genocide, should be actively dismantled.
Finally, the argument that the Zionism is racism policy somehow makes British Jews less safe; this is fundamentally untrue. The policy, firstly was passed as an E-motion, meaning that it does not affect disciplinary procedures at all. It does not stop members being Zionists and it does not seek to punish people who belong to Zionist organisations. The policy is specifically about how Zionism manifests in the Israeli genocide. It completely separates the Jewish people and the religion of Judaism from the political ideology of Zionism. The policy actively protects Jewish party members through these very clear distinctions. As for anti-Semitic attacks in the UK, these have absolutely risen in recent years, but not as a result of the Zionism is racism motion. The attacks predate the motion by a long way and are rising as a result of growing anti-Semitic opinion as a result of both Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people and our government’s complicity in it, as well as our government putting the lives of British Jews ahead of other religions or marginalised groups; the Jewish community in London have their own police force and receive government funding to help protect them from antisemitic attacks. There is nothing wrong with that in isolation, until you realise that the Muslim community does not receive the same. The LGBTQ community do not receive the same. The Irish community do not receive the same. I absolutely condemn antisemitism and all attacks on the Jewish community, as I also condemn all attacks and bigotry towards all communities and individuals, but the government, along with Israel, are the ones making British Jews less safe by prioritising Zionism over all else and refusing to even say the word genocide along with actually committing genocide.
We are all free to decide how we react to all of this, but if your reaction is to side with a genocidal, apartheid State, you deserve to be called out for it and you deserve to be shamed for it.