By Conor Payne
Some things the British media and political class have reacted hysterically to during Israel’s genocide:
– The Maccabi Tel Aviv fan ban
– Bob Vylan
– Gary Lineker
– The Green Party motion
Something they have not reacted hysterically to:
– The genocide
Journalist Barry Malone on X.
Last weekend, the Green Party in England and Wales passed a motion stating that Zionism is a form of racism. This provoked a massive round of backlash from the media and political establishment with the now predictable claims that the motion and by extension the Greens themselves are anti-semitic and a threat to the Jewish community in Britain. Twelve Labour MPs made a criminal complaint to the police over the chant “Say it loud, say it clear; Zionists not welcome here’’.
These attacks will undoubtedly intensify in the wake of the defeat of Zack Polanski in the by-election in Holborn and St Pancras. Figures from the right wing of the Green Party, such as former MP Caroline Lucas and current MP Adrian Ramsay, have been out of the trap with attacks on Polanski’s leadership. While Polanski was defeated, under his leadership, the Greens had won unprecedented levels of support with a pro-Palestine and left-leaning message. Fundamentally, the political and media establishment in Britain can’t tolerate even one political party which reflects such views and now sees an opportunity to restore the Greens to their designated role as a politically harmless minor party.
Attacks at home and abroad
The European Green Party is now threatening to expel the Green Party of England and Wales from its organisation. Both the Greens in Germany and Austria have been supporters of the genocide. While the former was in power, it happily sold weaponry to Israel while Gaza was being decimated. The European Greens have taken no action against these organisations.
Former Irish Green Party MEP and TD, Ciarán Cuffe, is co-chair of this organisation. The Green Party in Ireland must be pressurised to oppose this move.
The attacks on the Greens and Polanski may have contributed to the by-election result, but a bigger factor is the boost given to Labour by the ousting of Starmer and the coming to power of Andy Burnham, who is presenting a face of change, promising a break with Thatcherite economics but also signalling that he understands the anger at Labour over the Gaza genocide. In reality, Labour under Burnham remains wedded to the same fundamental policies as Starmer and this ‘honeymoon’ is likely to be short-lived. And whatever happens, the British and European ruling classes will not succeed in their attempts to delegitimise anti-Zionism because people have seen the Gaza genocide and tens of millions have drawn fundamental conclusions about the nature of the Israeli Zionist state. The genie is not going back in the bottle. Despite the massive propaganda offensive against the party, 81% of Green voters have said that they support the motion, when undecided voters are excluded.
The inconvenient truth in all this is that Zionism is objectively a racist ideology. Some try to suggest that Zionism is simply the right of Jews to self-determination or a nation-state. They leave out that Zionism, in practice, has built this state at the expense of Palestinians through their displacement and subordination, beginning with the arrival of Zionist colonial settlers at the beginning of the 20th Century, a process which continues to this day. Land theft, the Nakba that saw the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their historic homeland in 1947 to 1949, occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide are all crimes endured by Palestine and its people.
A colonial movement
While most shy away from the term now, the early Zionist leaders openly identified their movement as colonial. Indeed, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, said as much in a letter written to the infamous Cecil Rhodes, who founded the White settler colonial regime of “Rhodesia”, i.e., Zimbabwe, to call by its correct, non-colonial name. All forms of settler colonialism and colonialism in general require a racist ideology to justify the domination of the colonised people. A supremacist and dehumanising racist outlook and ideology was and remains crucial in order to justify the crimes against the Palestinian people.
The Zionist state is engaging in genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing, land theft and state-sponsored settler terror in the West Bank and systematic discrimination against the minority of Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship. Millions of Palestinians are in the diaspora and denied the right to return to the homeland they or their families were expelled from. Meanwhile, under Israel’s Law of Return, Jewish people across the world can claim Israeli citizenship. All of this is racist. It also flows from the logic of the Zionist project. At the outset of the colonisation of Palestine, 90% of its population were Palestinians Muslims and Christians.
A ‘Jewish state’ could only be established by displacing many of these people and subordinating those that remain, and it cannot be maintained without continuing these policies today. Some have made the argument that Zionism means different things to different people – but regardless of the subjective intent of some who identify with the word – in the real world there is no version of Zionism which allows for equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.All variants of this ideology have been in power since the foundation of the Israeli State in 1948 and have stood over the existence of a racist and apartheid state.
The imperialist “two-state solution”
Nor is the ” two-state solution ” hypocritically promoted by the ruling classes in much of the West any answer. In the first instance, both Netanyahu’s government and their opponents in the upcoming Israeli elections are implacably opposed to it. Second, in the unlikely event this were to change, it would at best mean a tiny Palestinian statelet dominated militarily and economically by Israel. It would have a similar status to the puppet “bantustans” in apartheid South Africa, tiny statelets dominated by the white racist regime that were run by corrupt, quizling regimes.
Solidarity opposes the existence of a Zionist State in historic Palestine; an apartheid state does not have a right to exist. The Zionist State must be smashed and got rid of, and freedom for the Palestinian people from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. We want freedom for Palestine–an end to occupation, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and for Palestinians to be given the right to return from exile to their historic homeland. We want to see full equal rights for both peoples, including their national rights.
Zionism is racism, but it is an integral part of a violent and racist capitalist system, and is supported by Western imperialist powers who have sought to brutally exploit the wealth and people of West Asia and North Africa. This violence and brutality cries out for a humane, democratic and socialist society where all people can live in freedom from exploitation and oppression.
