This weekend, the Green Party of England and Wales crossed a line. A dangerous line. One that it is unacceptable to cross. It passed a resolution which effectively denounced the State of Israel’s right to exist.
By a vote of 1,022 to 813, the party passed a motion entitled “Zionism Is Racism,” which commits the party to a single Palestinian state covering all of historic Palestine—which is to say, to a world in which Israel, the state which contains the largest population of Jews on Earth, does not exist.
To understand the full depth of this shift, consider what the motion says. It defines Zionism not as the movement for Jewish self-determination in the historic Jewish homeland, but as an ideology demanding “an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population.” It instructs that Zionism will be “treated as any other form of racism” and rejects any attempt “to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.”
Since at least two-thirds of British Jews call themselves Zionists, the party has, in effect, branded the majority of the country’s Jews racists, while declaring that doing so cannot be antisemitic.
If you care about the future of Britain, as I do, and if you care about the future of the peoples that live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, as I do, this is a signal event.
Start with the local picture.
For most of its history, the Green Party was a party on the margins. Today it is a significant force in British politics. It won its best-ever results in this year’s local elections, and its membership has almost tripled. And it has moved itself, and many of its supporters and sympathizers, from condemnation of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war to a full-on denial of the State of Israel’s right to exist.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Before this spring’s local elections, the Green Party had to investigate more than 30 of its council candidates over allegations of antisemitic social media posts. Two more were arrested a week before the election on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred.
Party officials insisted such candidates were a tiny fraction of the 4,500 they had put forward, but Sunday’s vote suggests the rot runs far deeper.
There are those in my party, Labour, who might be tempted by the so-called progressive Red-Green coalition—an alliance between Labour and the Greens to unite the British left. But this vote should serve as a warning of the dangers such an alliance would bring.
Zionism was never a movement started in support of Jewish supremacy. It started because Jewish people found that the original preferred strategy of assimilation was impossible. Throughout the centuries Jews in Europe and elsewhere were subject to persecution. Sometimes treated less badly than at other times, but never treated equally. So in the late 19th century, the movement began for a Jewish homeland. The terrors of the Holocaust gave it unstoppable force. But it was never, and has never been, incompatible with self-determination for the Palestinians.
“Zionism is racism” is not fresh moral thinking about the Middle East. In 1975, the Soviet bloc and its Arab allies pursued United Nations Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a “form of racism and racial discrimination.” Britain voted against the resolution in 1975 and for its revocation in 1991. Now, a Soviet propaganda campaign, which should have died with the Cold War, is being given a second life in 21st-century Britain.
Then there are the implications of this vote for the region of the world where I am passionately focused: the Middle East.
This weekend’s motion overturns decades of international consensus. It rejects the two-state solution. With it goes the architecture of every attempt to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1947, when the UN General Assembly first voted for a Jewish state alongside an Arab one. In this, the party is unashamedly aligning itself with the most extreme elements of Middle East politics.
Those of us working, through the Board of Peace, to ensure that the bloodshed of October 7 is never repeated, and that Gaza has a different and better future, understand very well the legitimate global concern about Gaza. We have a plan—the only viable plan on offer—whose framework is designed to create a new Gaza in which Israel’s security is protected and the Palestinians in Gaza have the chance of a different and better future. And we know that only by freeing Gaza from the control of Hamas, so long as it remains a group committed to the destruction of Israel by violence, can the Palestinians of Gaza have a chance at freedom.
When misguided or malevolently guided activists in Western countries campaign for Zionism to be delegitimized, they do more than cause affront to Israel and to the Jewish community across the world. They harm the Palestinian cause—the very cause they say they support. Palestinians know Israel will continue to exist. They know that if there were a one-state solution how unlikely it would be that such a state would be Palestinian. What’s more, resolutions like the one just passed by the Greens simply provide fodder for those on the far right in Israel, who also believe that Palestinians and Israelis can never live in peace.
People around the world are understandably rightly appalled by the devastation of this war. And we can debate the Middle East: its politics, its challenges, and its solutions. That is healthy. But this vote—overt anti-Jewish discrimination from what is now a mainstream British party—is a warning sign. It reveals something rotten. It is the duty of all of us to put it right.
This article was originally published in the The Free Press on 6 October 2026.