When Donald Trump calls someone a socialist he is not using the word in the same way that, say, Zohran Mamdani does. The mayor of New York espouses democratic socialism as a mission of equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity. The US president says socialism only pretends to be democratic “because it sounds so nice”; that “it’s really communism you’re talking about” and that people such as Mamdani pose “the biggest threat to our nation … since its founding”.
People who despise an idea, seeing it as the manifestation of everything wicked, cannot be expected to define it accurately. As with the radical right and socialism, so it is with the left and Zionism.
There are interwoven historical, biblical and intellectual strands to the belief that Jews have an ancestral homeland on the eastern border of the Mediterranean. It is a belief that has evolved across centuries. It was expressed as liturgical yearning before being crystallised in the modern era as a political ambition to be safe from persecution, given urgency by mass slaughter before achieving realisation in 1948 with the foundation of the state now called Israel. Since then it has been refracted through different lenses of war and contemporary Israeli politics.
That process defies capture by a single word. Zionism can be left and right; moderate and extreme. It contains multitudes. Unless you want to join the Green party of England and Wales, in which case, there is only one permitted definition. Last weekend, the party voted for a motion that declares Zionism “fundamentally incompatible with anti-racist principles, equality and justice” because it is based on “European settler-colonial systems of domination and oppression”. The Greens are now an “anti-Zionist” party to their constitutional core.
Any objection on the basis that such a policy vilifies Jews who recognise other definitions of Zionism is dealt with in a pre-emptive clause. The only target is Zionism “as defined” in the motion and not the “religious or ethnic background of those who may identify as Zionists”.
By this Orwellian formula, Jews who call themselves Zionists are still tolerable to the Greens, but only if their personal understanding of Zionism is something the party considers to be the wrong one. If they want to be loyal members, they should adopt the doctrinally correct definition. But then they would have to stop being Zionists. Jews are welcome as long as they repress undesirable features of their cultural identity and religious practice to satisfy the party line.
Naturally, the drafters of the motion do not think this is antisemitism. Here is another word whose meaning is defined not with reference to the experience of Jews but to the grievance of those who don’t like to be accused of targeting them. In the radical-left lexicon, antisemitism is addressed most commonly as the charge that cannot fairly be levelled against an “anti-Zionist” – the tool that Zionists use to deflect criticism of their nefarious ways.
In practice, the Greens have made themselves hostile to the vast majority of British Jews, given the density of kinship connections and emotional sympathies, past or present, that most have to the idea of Israel as a place of sanctuary.
Many hate the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, are repulsed by the racist pronouncements of his far-right ministers, horrified by the atrocious conduct of the war in Gaza and prepared to condemn it without equivocation. They despair at the ultra-nationalist trend in Israeli politics but hold that feeling alongside a belief that the country itself should be allowed to exist.
The Greens disagree. They reject a two-state solution in the Middle East on the basis that Israel – not just occupied Palestinian territories, but the whole country – is illegitimate in its conception. It is an aberration whose erasure from the map is a non-negotiable demand in the global struggle against racism.
That position is more extreme than the one held by the Palestinian Authority. It has brought censure from the European Green group, to which the Green party of England and Wales is affiliated. It has issued a statement observing that fewer than 1% of members voted for the anti-Zionism motion and that Green MPs and other senior figures in the party opposed it. In light of that contradiction, they seek “clarity from the leadership”.
They won’t get it from Zack Polanski. If the Green leader had wanted to make his position clear he could have stayed in Brighton for the debate, spoken his mind and cast his vote. But he slipped away to campaign ahead of this week’s byelection in Holborn and St Pancras, the north London seat vacated by Keir Starmer.
Polanski is Jewish. His stated attitude to Zionism is convoluted. He recognises that it means different things to different people. He endorsed a homeopathic “safeguarding” amendment to reassure Jewish Greens that attendance at synagogues, most of which hold to some idea of Zionism, would not lead to sanction by the party. The amendment was rejected.
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Polanski’s influence over the process was limited by the Green party’s rulebook, which gives the membership control over policy. It is unclear whether he could have swayed opinion by deploying the charisma that won him the leadership last year and, by viral contagion on social media, massively boosted party membership. He didn’t appear to try. Maybe he doesn’t know what he believes. Perhaps he feels more like a hostage of the movement that carried him to the top than its leader. Probably both.
That is the suspicion of some Green veterans. They feel their party has been captured by a well-organised, itinerant caucus of militant left activists who have been looking for a new host since Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes lost control of Labour. Obsession with Israel, crowding out the party’s environmental message, is a tell.
There is an ideological chain of association in the view that climate justice can only be realised by the defeat of oppressive capitalist systems of which Zionism is the ne plus ultra. That approach can be effective for animating the passionate ideals of a young crowd that sees the horrors of Gaza as the defining moral cause of their generation. But it also alienates a wider audience of people who want a Green party that campaigns effectively on the climate and who don’t see why the road to a low-carbon future has to be paved with rows about antisemitism of the kind that poisoned Labour under Corbyn.
Polanski is not going to resolve that tension. He is a talented communicator as long as his audience is predisposed to like the message. His authority is solar-powered, activated only when the light of an enthusiastic crowd shines directly on him. If there is a risk of no applause, he powers down. He had the opportunity at the Brighton conference to demonstrate a different kind of authority, generated from within, expressing conviction derived from a stable core of belief, made compelling by courage. It is the stuff of which leadership is made. Polanski doesn’t have it. If those are also qualities the voters of Holborn and St Pancras care for in a local MP, they will have to seek them elsewhere.
