What does the Green Party’s historic anti-Zionist motion mean for Palestine?

The Green Party has put the conversation back on track: the problem is not the lack of creative solutions to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The problem is Zionism itself.

To appreciate the significance of Motion A105, adopted by the Green Party of England and Wales on 4th October, consider its basic tenets.

The party is now formally anti-Zionist. It endorses the Palestinian right of return, supports one democratic state throughout historic Palestine, reaffirms its commitment to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, distinguishes anti-Zionism from antisemitism, and calls for a full arms embargo against Israel.

Though the decision may seem revolutionary within British politics, it is hardly revolutionary when examined against the history of Palestinian dispossession, beginning long before the Nakba of 1948.

Indeed, the Greens were not the first to equate Zionism with racism. That history owes much to Africa’s anti-colonial movements and their struggle against apartheid.

In 1975, the Organization of African Unity, meeting in Kampala, Uganda, drew explicit parallels between the racial systems governing South Africa, Rhodesia and occupied Palestine, identifying their common imperialist origins.

This position helped lay the groundwork for UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on 10th November 1975, which determined that Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination.

Under intense American and Israeli diplomatic pressure, the UN eventually reversed that determination on 16th December 1991.

Israel, however, was not required to dismantle the discriminatory structures that had prompted the original condemnation. The revocation changed the UN’s position, not the realities confronting Palestinians.

Those who yielded to American pressure in 1991 must therefore confront a troubling question of moral responsibility: did their decision help legitimise the very political structures that have sustained Palestinian dispossession, occupation and settler colonialism?

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The Greens have now reopened that historical debate. But they have also done something more consequential.

By adopting the motion with 1,022 votes against 813, party members demonstrated that ideas once dismissed as radical are increasingly challenging the boundaries of mainstream British politics.

Yet within this achievement lie important fault lines, revealing the nature of the struggle ahead.

Four of the party’s five MPs opposed the resolution. More tellingly, Sandy Ruthven, chair of Amnesty International UK’s charitable trust, resigned his Green Party membership altogether.

In explaining his decision, Ruthven accused the party of seeking to court the hard-left vote while failing to confront prejudice within its own ranks.

His resignation exposes a contradiction worth examining, particularly given his association with an organisation that has already documented Israeli apartheid against Palestinians.

In February 2022, Amnesty International published a landmark report concluding that Israel maintained an institutionalized system of oppression and domination over Palestinians amounting to apartheid.

That recognition was belated, but critically important. Apartheid, however, does not emerge in an ideological vacuum. It is sustained by political assumptions about belonging, sovereignty, demographic control and the unequal distribution of rights.

The question, therefore, is not merely whether Israeli apartheid exists, but what political principles have made its establishment and perpetuation possible.

The Zionist movement emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe as a nationalist project seeking a Jewish homeland, eventually pursuing Jewish statehood in Palestine. Its implementation ultimately led to the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948.

The connection between that foundational project and the discriminatory structures documented by Amnesty itself is impossible to ignore.

How, then, can the likes of Ruthven condemn apartheid without confronting the ideology that underpins it? And if that ideology is not Zionism, what is it?

The larger issue, however, is not a lack of historical knowledge among Britain’s political and intellectual elites.

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Rather, these elites have long positioned themselves as guardians of the permissible discourse on Israel and Palestine – a narrative that accommodates occasional criticism, sometimes even harsh condemnation, but rarely permits a fundamental challenge to the political structures themselves.

The Green Party’s grassroots have now challenged that conventional wisdom. They have crossed the boundary separating what may be criticised from what must remain politically untouchable.

Due to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, the Greens have effectively declared that the time for carefully managed criticism has passed.

In doing so, they have opened a political space that others may eventually occupy, including within the Labour Party, historically divided between its progressive grassroots and an increasingly centrist leadership whose policies, particularly on Palestine, have become virtually indistinguishable from those of the political right.

The vote could also encourage similar debates across Europe, challenging political parties to confront the relationship between Zionism, antisemitism, Palestinian rights and the future of historic Palestine.

But perhaps the Greens’ most consequential contribution is that they have challenged the very premise of the debate. For decades, international diplomacy has focused overwhelmingly on finding solutions while leaving the ideological foundations of the existing political order largely unexamined.

The Greens have reversed that approach, essentially declaring that no political solution in Palestine, however idealistic or supposedly pragmatic, can coexist with Zionism.

The backlash against the Greens was, of course, expected. But so, too, is the growing determination of British voters to challenge the boundaries of permissible debate across the political spectrum. 

This could finally open the way for a serious conversation about how the world can hold Israel accountable.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.