On Sunday, at its annual conference in Brighton, the British Green Party voted to recognise Zionism as racism. The motion, which describes Zionism as “an ethnonationalist political project”, passed with 1,022 votes to 813, despite opposition from several of the party’s MPs as well as former party leader Caroline Lucas. The vote caused uproar in the British mainstream, with many commentators taking to the airwaves and social media to condemn it, accuse the party of anti-Semitism and even claim it is endangering Jewish people.
Yet, the Green Party’s resolution does not declare anything radical or extraordinary. Zionism was and continues to be a settler-colonial ideology, and settler colonialism is fundamentally racist. Zionism is centred on the belief that Jewish people from anywhere in the world have a right to a homeland in historic Palestine – a right that outweighs any other people’s.
It is a conviction that is based on biblical claims to a land and an ahistorical understanding of history. Crucially, its fulfilment requires the usurping and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population. It should not be particularly controversial to define Zionism as a settler colonial ideology, particularly as the Zionist founding fathers themselves proudly described it as such.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leading Revisionist Zionist thinker of the early 20th century, wrote that “Zionist colonization … must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population”. Theodor Herzl, often cited as the founding father of political Zionism, hoped to establish contact with Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist who led British colonisation in Zimbabwe. In an infamous draft letter, which Herzl never sent, he invited Rhodes to “help make history”.
Zionism’s early institutions also reflected the same colonial self-identification through their names: the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department. Zionism is also not particularly exceptional as an ideology. It follows the path of other ideologies often rooted in the idea of manifest destiny that have shaped settler-colonial entities and their genocidal crimes committed against indigenous populations to secure the continuation of their colonial projects.
Indeed, what is unfolding in Palestine is not an isolated event but part of a global history of violent, dispossessive tactics aimed at eliminating indigenous peoples and solidifying settler-colonial control over land. The Green Party was not the first to define Zionism as racism in an official position. In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination.
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