“Zionism Is Racism” Is Back — This Time in Britain

As antisemitism surges in the UK, the Green Party considers resurrecting a doctrine the world once repudiated.

I have written before about the antisemitic bullying I endured growing up in London — the taunts, the isolation, the feeling of being marked out simply for being Jewish.

I never imagined I would see anything like this again.

Since the October 7 terror attack, however, the pace and scale of antisemitism in the UK has been unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime.

That is the backdrop to what we are now learning.

According to leaked documents obtained by The Telegraph, grassroots members of the UK Green Party are advancing a motion to classify Zionism as a form of racism.

The proposal states that “Zionism, just like apartheid, denies the indigenous people their self-determination through state violence, ethnic cleansing and the denial of basic rights.” It also argues that the term antisemitism should be replaced with anti-Jewish discrimination, claiming the word itself “perpetuates biological racism.”

This is not a fringe social media post.

The Green Party is polling competitively in Britain. Since choosing a new leader last September, it has surged. Recent polling places it at 14.2 percent, fewer than five points behind the Conservatives and Labour. Its spring conference will determine whether this motion is even debated. Party leaders say it is only a proposal. That matters. But so does the fact that 300 supporters have signed onto it.

Zionism, at its core, means that the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in their historic homeland.

You can criticize Israeli governments. You can argue about policies, leaders, peace plans. Those are political arguments.

But saying the Jewish right to self-determination is racist is something different.

And it is not new.

We have been here before.

We have crossed that line before.

When the United Nations declared Zionism was racism in a 1975 resolution crafted by Soviet-aligned and Arab states, the result was not peace. It was permission. Permission for Zionist to become a slur. Permission for Jewish identity to be recast as something sinister. Permission for old hatreds to dress themselves up as virtue.

The world corrected itself 16 years later when the UN revoked that resolution.

Now, decades later, I am watching a British political party consider walking back toward that same noxious idea.

Calling Zionism racist does not simply criticize a government. It tells Jews that the belief in our collective existence as a people is illegitimate. It singles out Jewish self-determination as uniquely immoral.

And the Green Party proposal to abandon the word antisemitism in favor of something narrower is a shift that may sound technical. It is not. At a moment when anti-Jewish hostility is rising sharply, narrowing the language used to describe it does not reassure anyone.

At Antisemitism Watch, the organization I co-founded in 2022, we have seen what happens when Zionist becomes a casual insult. The word stretches. It starts with policy. It ends with people. Synagogues are targeted. Jewish businesses are boycotted. Students are told to denounce Zionism in order to belong.

Of course, Israel can be criticized. It is a democracy. Democracies argue. Democracies debate.

But there is a line between criticizing a government and declaring that the Jewish right to self-determination is racist.

In 2023, Britain recorded 4,103 antisemitic attacks and acts of abuse— the highest number ever documented.

When Zionism becomes shorthand for evil, Jews do not feel safer. We feel exposed.

I know what it feels like to be the Jewish girl in the room who is suddenly told she represents something ugly. I remember the taunts. I remember the silence. I remember knowing that speaking up might make things worse — and speaking up anyway.

That is why this matters.

If the Green Party chooses to advance this motion, it should understand what it signals to British Jews. Not an abstract foreign policy debate. Not a distant ideological argument. But something close and personal.

We have seen where this rhetoric leads.

We do not need to relearn that lesson.