Israel was forged out of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. The Greens have very belatedly recognised what should have been obvious all along

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

Cross-posted from Jonathan’s Substack

[ First published by Middle East Eye ]

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

It is not shameful that the Green Party adopted a motion equating Zionism with racism at its annual party conference at the weekend.

What’s shameful is that no mainstream British political party did so earlier.

We are now three years into Britain’s active complicity in Israel’s genocidal rampage through Gaza, one that has left the enclave in ruins and killed and maimed many tens of thousands of Palestinian children.

Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed two years ago that, long before the Gaza genocide, Israel was committing the crime of apartheid by systematically oppressing Palestinians under its rule.

Until the weekend, no British political party had dared recognise those harsh realities. None had offered British voters a chance to disavow the state of Israel as it actually is, rather than as it was imagined in its founders’ sale pitch: as a peace-seeking sanctuary for Jews.

What a majority of Green Party members have now accepted is that the ideology of Zionism, which gave birth to Israel and underpins its Jewish supremacist worldview, must be identified as the root of the trouble.

The problem is not with a particular prime minister, or a particular political party, or a specific government. It is the actual state – Israel itself – that practices apartheid, and whose citizen army carried out the Gaza slaughter with overwhelming approval from the Israeli public.

The dehumanisation of Palestinians – treating them simply as obstacles to “Jewish self-determination” – is inherent in the Zionism embodied by Israel.

It is this Israel – not some potential, alternate Israel that was never realised – that its supporters, Jews and non-Jews alike, defend.

Better PR

Modern Israel is the realisation of the ideology of Zionism just as, back in the 1980s, South Africa was the realisation of the ideology of apartheid.

Both are what scholars term settler-colonial states. Such states have identifiable patterns of profoundly racist behaviour that escalate depending on circumstance.

That often starts with ethnic cleansing, with the native population either expelled or herded into reservations. The segregated population is then assigned a different set of rights from the colonisers under a system of apartheid. And if the natives become too threatening to the racist project, ethnic cleansing and apartheid risk slipping into genocide.

The Zionist project has ticked all those boxes, one after another.

It was formally sponsored in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration as an explicitly colonial undertaking by Britain. The state of Israel was then established in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland.

In 1967 Israel expanded its territorial control by driving out yet more Palestinians. A network of separate ghettoes, governed by apartheid laws, was imposed on the remaining native population.

Finally, after a violent one-day breakout by Hamas in October 2023 from the largest of the concentration camps, in Gaza, Israel set about levelling the enclave in what a consensus of human rights groups, legal authorities and scholars deem to have been a genocide.

At the height of apartheid, most white South Africans willed the continuation of their state as the ultimate expression of “white self-determination”. They were adherents of a racist ideology, whatever they offered as their rationalisation for doing so.

Zionists will the continuation of the state of Israel as the ultimate expression of a misnamed “Jewish self-determination” – or, more accurately, Zionist self-determination.

They are adherents of an equally racist ideology – however they justify it to themselves – but one whose optics have been dramatically improved by attaching the label “Jewish” to it.

Indeed, the racism of Israel’s Zionism has been granted fuller expression – currently in the form of the Gaza genocid e – than the racism of South Africa’s apartheid precisely because western leaders have indulged Israel’s every crime, decade after decade.

Drawing a red line

Green party members have finally said: “Enough!”

They have called for Israel to be dismantled as a state committing the crime of apartheid, just as the earlier apartheid South Africa was dismantled. They have also called for Israel to be replaced “a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants” – again echoing earlier efforts to reinvent South Africa as a “ Rainbow Nation “.

In return for the Greens’ moral clarity, the British political and media establishments have come out in force to roast the party, accusing it of antisemitism .

As with apartheid’s demand for “white self-determination”, the question that needs to be asked of so-called “Jewish self-determination” is this: What is the cost? Who pays the price for Zionism’s assertion of such a right?

In the case of apartheid South Africa, the victims – the black population – were front and centre of the debate. In the case of apartheid Israel, the victims – the Palestinians – are barely visible.

In British media, the debate about the Greens’ “Zionism is racism” policy studiously excludes Palestinians, despite their intimate experience of what Zionism is and what it does. The very people who have been the victims of apartheid and genocide are ignored.

As the Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd observes , he, like other Palestinians, is the true authority on Zionism, not Jews. Why? Because “it is practised on my body”.

Panel discussions keep wheeling on Jewish community leaders and prominent Jewish pundits, such as columnists Lord Finkelstein and Jonathan Freedland, as though it is they who are the victims. The Palestinian voice is almost completely absent from these discussions.

What the British establishment is offering once again is an echo chamber.

The media have sought out the small number of Jewish Greens who feel upset by the motion. Meanwhile, they have ignored those Jewish Greens who fervently support it, such as Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos .

The feelings of British-Palestinian members of the Green Party – those whose families have suffered for decades at the hands of Israel and the Zionist movement – are seemingly unworthy of consideration.

Time to pick a side

The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu , who spent decades fighting South African apartheid, famously observed: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

The Greens’ motion has made Tutu’s point explicit in the context of modern Britain. It is time to make a choice.

Those who wish to be “neutral” in the face of genocide – or prefer to deflect by placing all the blame for Israel’s decades-long crimes exclusively on the shoulders of Benjamin Netanyahu – have many political parties that will welcome them.

Those whose conscience no longer allows them to remain neutral on possibly the biggest moral issue of our age now have, for the very first time, a party – one party – that represents their views.

A political party that declares itself to be progressive and anti-racist should seek to live up to those ideals. Its job is most assuredly not to equivocate on apartheid and genocide to make Zionists feel comfortable within the party.

And herein lies the threat for Israel’s apologists, Jews and non-Jews alike.

If one party is allowed to offer voters a meaningful voice on Israel – and against genocide – where might that lead? If the Greens’ anti-Zionism proves a vote winner, might other political parties suddenly find a moral backbone too?

It is critically important for the Zionists to snuff out any meaningful opposition to Israeli crimes. And so, entirely predictably, the usual suspects are rolling out the playbook of smears they used against Jeremy Corbyn when he became Labour leader in 2015.

Remember Corbyn was universally branded an antisemite by the British establishment for recognising Israel for what it is: an apartheid state.

Unremarked by the establishment media, of course, is the fact that he was utterly vindicated by the 2024 judgment of the world’s highest court in finding Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid .

No matter. The smears helped destroy Corbyn. So why not try the same trick on the Green Party and its Jewish leader, Zack Polanski?

After Polanski tripled the Greens’ share of the vote in a by-election held on Thursday, but lost to a Labour candidate benefiting from the inevitable honeymoon enjoyed by the party’s new prime minister, the media chorus was the same : wasn’t this proof Polanski needed to resign?

According to the Guardian , senior Labour officials have stated that, after the Zionism vote, the party will refuse to work with the Greens if the next election produces a hung parliament.

In other words, in the interests of yet another entirely confected antisemitism furore, Labour will choose to let in a far-right Conservative-Reform coalition rather than do a deal with a Jewish-led Green Party.

Antisemitism smears

Replicating the smears against Corbyn, a handful of Labour and Liberal Democratic MPs this week reported the Green Party to the police and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for supposed discrimination against Jews in passing the motion against Zionism.

Their hope is that the equalities watchdog can be mobilised to investigate the Greens in the same way it did Corbyn’s Labour Party.

In 2019, the EHRC was able to find only marginal examples of antisemitism under Corbyn.

Nonetheless, the new narrative is that the same so-called left-wing “extremists”, purged from Labour by his successor Keir Starmer, have now migrated to the Greens.

Paradoxically, Labour’s current leader, Andy Burnham, is at the same time furiously trying to win the anti-Zionist left back to his party. He understands that he cannot win the next general election without them.

The MPs that have reported the Greens to the EHRC are led by Mike Tapp, a former Labour home office minister, and Mark Sewards, chair of Labour Friends of Israel. Neither is Jewish.

Polanski, the leader of the Green party, is Jewish. In fact, he is the only Jewish leader of a major British party.

This strange – indeed, disturbing – state of affairs is also unremarked by the media. But it is very much of a pattern with the past decade of an establishment-confected furore about “leftwing antisemitism”.

Labour’s disciplinary hearings for antisemitism during both the Corbyn and Starmer eras were led by mostly right-leaning, non-Jewish officials and disproportionately targeted left-leaning, anti-Zionist Jewish party members.

Notably, under Starmer, Jews were 13 times more likely to be expelled from Labour than non-Jewish party members.

The Labour right, led by Starmer, and joined by the establishment media, not only expressed zero discomfort over this fact but openly celebrated the wave of expulsions.

When it was acknowledged at all, which was rare, the hounding of anti-Zionist, anti-racist Jews was implicitly justified on the grounds that they were “ the wrong sort of Jews “ – the most glaring of antisemitic tropes.

Polanski, leader of the Greens, cannot be easily smeared as an antisemite. So the same narrative – posing as concern for Jewish safety – is being crafted of him as “the wrong sort of Jew”.

In line with this framing, Israel immediately responded to the new Green Party policy by barring Polanski from entering the country, despite Zionism declaring the “Jewish state” of Israel to be a vital sanctuary for all Jews.

This is the same Israeli state that, as the legal group Adalah notes , has passed dozens of apartheid laws conferring special privileges in all areas of life on Jews that are denied to the country’s much-oppressed minority of two million Palestinian “citizens”.

That apartheid system was further codified into law in 2018 as the Basic Law : Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. It explicitly excludes Palestinians from basic rights in their own homeland.

Bad faith

In 1975, as Israel entrenched its illegal and violent military occupation over Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, a majority of United Nations member states approved a resolution identical to the Greens’ motion.

The General Assembly declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.

That resolution lasted 16 years, until 1991, when the world changed dramatically. The Soviet Union collapsed, leaving smaller states exposed and vulnerable to the sole military super-power of the US.

President George HW Bush exploited the moment to bully UN member states into reversing their support for the resolution, while Israel began a gaslighting campaign in which it refused to engage in peace talks with the Palestinians unless the resolution was revoked.

That was the context in which the UN General Assembly rescinded its determination that Zionism was racism.

The subsequent peace process – the Oslo Accords – led to the signing in 1993 of a deal on the White House lawn that many Palestinians assumed would lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. They were to be bitterly disappointed.

Israel expanded its settlements at an unprecedented rate through the Oslo years, devouring the territories meant to form a Palestinian state.

Memorably, Michael Tarazi, a Palestinian negotiator, observed of the bogus Oslo process that it was like negotiating over a piece of pizza while one party was eating it.

Israel repeatedly failed to withdraw from the territories it occupied, as promised under the Olso formula. Gradually Palestinian trust in Israel’s good faith evaporated.

The Palestinian “moderates” who engaged in the negotiations looked discredited. Hamas’ popularity rocketed, especially in the concentration camp Israel had made of Gaza.

Israel not only sealed off Gaza but put it on a starvation diet and then intermittently “mowed the lawn”, blowing up neighbourhoods and slaughtering civilians indiscriminately.

All of that culminated in Hamas’ break-out from Gaza in October 2023 and Israel’s genocidal rampage afterwards.

That genocide is once again forcing a moral reevaluation of Israel – and a recognition that it was never serious about peace. Israel was born as a settler-colonial project. It never had any intention of conceding territory or allowing a Palestinian state. The dehumanisation of Palestinians was integral to its mission.

In other words, Israel was always a racist project. The Greens have finally – very belatedly – recognised what should have been obvious all along. They should not be shamed for doing so.

Instead we need to shame those whose goal is to buy more time for Israel to carry on committing its daily racist crimes against the Palestinian people.

We have already been far too indulgent and waited far too long. Israel is not about to change. Its racism runs too deep.

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