As a group of left-wing Jews, we feel that dissent is crucial. Our own reactions to the Green Party motion and its fallout are varied. No statement could hope to encapsulate all of our opinions, but we are proud to be able to respectfully disagree! What follows is an incomplete attempt to summarise the conversations we have had with each other:
At the most conservative estimate, over 74,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the last three years. More than 21,000 of them were children. This is vital context to the Green Party’s “Zionism is racism” motion, and any discussion should begin there.
The motion’s Palestinian authors argue that, for the last 75 years, Palestinians have experienced the reality of Zionism as mass expulsions, land theft, legal discrimination, routine physical and sexual violence, kidnapping, and murder.
We are united in our feeling that the practical resolutions of the motion — including support for BDS, sanctions for Israel, and explicit support for a Palestinian right of return — are a just response to the brutal reality of Zionism. Some of us feel that this victory is the most important thing.
Yet some of us observed how this motion and its fallout has not been beneficial to the Palestinian cause. Media discussion around the motion has turned away from the political reality of genocide, settler colonialism, and ethnonationalism, towards a liberal idea of racism as an individual moral failing.
Many of us foresaw that this approach would only amplify polarisation and grievance politics, rather than broadening opposition to our government’s ongoing support of Israel’s genocide. It has emboldened arguments that Jewish safety and Palestinian self-determination are at odds, which our own activism has shown is untrue.
The determination of conservative Jewish institutions to conflate Jews and Israel, even as Israel commits open genocide, is dangerous — both for UK Jews and for Palestinian activists. Worse is the eagerness of non-Jewish politicians, journalists, and organisations to use Jews as political pawns. But we cannot fight this coalition without the support and discipline of non-Jewish allies.
We are concerned that events like these do more to inflame the conflict than to work towards peace in Palestine/Israel. We were especially disappointed at the lack of vocal resistance from both journalists and individual Green Party members to this zero-sum framing.
Many of us feel that our neighbours owe more consideration to our complicated history and our current status as a tiny minority in the UK, and were disappointed that a mostly symbolic amendment to offer reassurance to Jews in the party was voted down.
Although in the majority of cases ‘Zionist’ is not a dogwhistle replacement for ‘Jews’, it can be used as such, and we expect our politicians to choose their words responsibly around this. Just as we don’t think that being anti-Zionist makes one an antisemite, we also don’t think it makes one immune to antisemitism. We do not think it is too much to ask that left-wing Jews are given the same explicit clarity and welcome as any other minority, and are not treated as guilty until proven innocent.
The majority who voted on the motion were neither Palestinian nor Jewish. We would like to see (from all parties) less tokenisation of individual Jews and more proactive engagement with non-Zionist Jewish groups. We want to see a firm response to individuals who cross the line into antisemitism, but we are frustrated that the stigmatisation of anti-Zionism has deprived us of the chance to address these incidents with education and reconciliation, rather than punitive censorship – which only pushes everyone further into their respective camps.
We hope that the focus can remain on the material forces enacting daily violence against Palestinians, and not on ideological and sloganising rhetoric on all sides. Our goal continues to be reconciliation and justice for all.
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