Tomorrow I will be in synagogue to say Kaddish, the traditional mourner’s prayer, in memory of my father who died eight years ago this week. If I were a member of the Green party, I would have reason to believe that that simple act could soon see me expelled as a racist. It sounds hyperbolic, but the warning comes from Green party activists opposed to a resolution declaring that Zionism is racism, which will be debated at the party conference this weekend.
The motion, which if passed would instantly become party policy, holds that Zionism should be “treated as any other form of racism”. On that logic, given that the Greens do not admit members of self-described racist organisations, they could not tolerate members of self-described Zionist organisations – a category that includes almost every synagogue, or synagogue movement, in Britain and indeed the world. Which is why saying Kaddish could lead to expulsion.
All this sounds arcane, but the Greens are no longer a fringe party. They beat Labour in a byelection in February, one of the events that catalysed the eventual removal of Keir Starmer. The Greens’ leader, Zack Polanski, hopes to win Starmer’s former seat of Holborn and St Pancras in next Thursday’s byelection.
But the row over Zionism has cast a cloud over his campaign. If he loses the seat, many will conclude that the Green surge is over – which would relieve a significant electoral headache for Labour and Andy Burnham. The charitable reading is that this move originates in genuine, and widespread, horror at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, followed by a series of unfortunate misunderstandings of what Zionism is, who Jews are and how antisemitism works.
That, I repeat, is the charitable reading, but let’s go with it. It’s worth saying that if the proposers of this motion had simply wanted to express their revulsion at the catastrophic devastation of Gaza and those who executed it, they could have denounced Israel and the Israeli government. But their admitted purpose is to go much further – to attack Israel’s very existence and the movement that led to it: Zionism.
As Polanski, who has been twisting in all directions on this subject, has tried to argue, Zionism means different things to different people. The great Israeli writer and peacenik Amos Oz used to describe it as a family name, an umbrella for a wide range of radically different worldviews. Before Israel’s founding in 1948, you’d have cultural Zionists slugging it out with religious Zionists, Marxist Zionists raging against rightwing militaristic Zionists, all of them wholly at odds with the dominant group: socialist Zionists.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
