Zionism Is A Racist Ideology

The vote by the Green Party  on Sunday that was carried by 1,022 votes to 813 (55%–45%)  to .define Zionism as “a political ideology which called for the creation - and, now it exists, the continuation - of an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population,” and states that this will be treated as any other form of racism. It commits the party to supporting “the establishment of 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.” 

This historicaly makes it the first major party in the UK to recognise Zionism as a form of racism. Green Party leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, was immediately banned by the Israeli government from entering the nation after the motion was passed. As Israel lashes out against this I  personally beleive that the Green Party was right to vote the way  it did. Zionism is a political ideology, not a synonym for Judaism or Jewish identity and criticising it is not antisemitism. 

This is another important policy position the Green Party has adopted. For decades, the support for a non-existent two-state solution has been used as a bogus cover for Palestinian self-determination by politicians who, in reality, support Jewish supremacy and have granted Zionist Israel the time to achieve its goals. 

 Even now, politicians and Zionists parrot this bogus commitment to equality, whilst a genocide of Palestinians has taken place and an annexation of Gaza and the West Bank is in process.  

A one-state solution does not deny the right to Jewish self-determination. Even this is a racist argument to make. 

It is a denial of the right of Jewish supremacists alone to determine what the state in the Holy Land should be. It says that all people Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and non-Zionist Jews, religious or non-religious- should determine the future of that state as equal citizens.

Outrage at the UK Green party's new policy on Zionism equating with racism ignores the fact that that position had international support 51 years ago. In 1975, Resolution 3379 the UN General Assembly linked Zionism and the State of Israel, to racism and racial discrimination. The UN overturned its resolution 16 years later, in 1991, under intense US pressure and after Israel refused to engage in peace talks unless it was revoked. Since then, Zionism has shown not only that it is a racist political ideology but that it's a genocidal one too,

Historically before the establishment of Israel, Palestine was a society of multiple communities, religions and ethnic backgrounds. Muslims, Christians and Jews lived there. It was not an empty land waiting for an ethnically defined state. 

The fundamental question is simple: how do you create and maintain a state built around the political and demographic primacy of one people in a land shared by others, without dispossession, displacement and unequal rights? Palestinian history tells us exactly what that has meant. No people has the right to secure its self-determination by denying it to another. 

The birth of “Political Zionism” is often dated to the 1896 publication of playwright and journalist Theodore Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). In his pamphlet, he argued that the establishment of a modern, European homeland for Jews would provide a refuge for a persecuted people and prevent competition with non-Jews. 

Antisemitism would disappear and Jews would be able to ‘live at last as free men on our own soil’. In the years following the publication of The Jewish State, Argentina and east Africa would both be mooted as possible locations for the new homeland, but these territories lacked the draw of the Holy Land. Palestine – ‘our ever-memorable historic home’ – was the dream.  

Herzl’s vision was not accepted by all. The eastern European intellectual Ahad Ha’am, whose Zionism focused on renewing Judaism rather than fighting antisemitism, castigated Herzl for what he described as his ‘mechanical mimicry’ of Europe. Ha’am viewed Herzlian Zionism as just another form of assimilation, typical of western European Jews who knew little about their ancestors’ faith. He was more interested in establishing a country that was uniquely Jewish rather than a European-style state for Jews.  

Palestinian Arabs were, unsurprisingly, not supportive. In 1899 the mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi, told Herzl that it was ‘pure folly’ to attempt to establish a Jewish country in Palestine because it was ‘inhabited by others’. 

Herzl, who viewed non-Europeans as backward (in The Jewish State he envisions the Jewish homeland as ‘a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism’), reassured the mayor that Zionism would benefit all Palestinians: ‘No one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.’ Despite the opposition, Herzl ploughed on, conscious of the ever-growing threat to European Jewry.

One year after the publication of The Jewish State, Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel and established the World Zionist Organization (WZO). ‘Zionism seeks to establish a home for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel secured under public law’, declared the WZO. Zionism was now an organised movement subsequently, several waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine succeeded in creating a societal infrastructure of settlements there.

The Zionist movement emphasized its ideology as a response to antisemitic persecution against Jews across Europe. However Zionism expanded into a settler colonialist ideology that put the interests of a predominantly European religious group over the those of a multitude of people who had been living in Palestine for 1000s of years. It has resulted in 80 years of horror.

 Zionism is the political ideology that the state of Israel was founded on. It claims Jewish safety requires a “Jewish nation-state,” where the rights of Jews are privileged over others; a place of Jewish supremacy. In order to create a Jewish state on land that Palestinians had lived in for millenia., 

Zionism’s founders publicly embraced an explicitly colonial ideology: using ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide to ensure their goal of “maximum land, minimum Palestinians.” 

Since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the Israeli government has used Zionism to justify massacring Palestinians, destroying villages, enforcing apartheid, running a military occupation that separates families with checkpoints and walls, enabling progroms by Jewish settlers, and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

Zionism is the ideology that led to, and justified, the Nakba, the occupation, the apartheid, and the Gaza genocide which  is  ongoing.  A political system that gives one ethnic group supremacy over another is, by definition, racist.

Zionism means nonstop apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war, genocide, and abuse. And worse, Zionists think that they have the right to impose all that because they are "special". 

Even worse, the US, UK, Canada, Australia and many other countries do not step in to stop any of this behaviour. In fact, many send arms to Israel. It seems that the lives of some do not matter when there is a profit to be made.

Since its inception, Zionism has always been inherently racist and genocidal. The Israeli government, and the  institutions that defend it, want us to think Zionism protects against antisemitism, and that to be Jewish is to be Zionist. None of that is true. 

As long as Zionism has existed, there were Jews standing in opposition to it. They rejected the idea that Jewish freedom from antisemitism is secured through a militarized apartheid state, or the power to oppress others. Instead, they built thriving communities across the world, deeply connected to their neighbors and Jewish traditions.

There's no humane version of an ideology built on death, destruction and supremacy. There is no non-racist Zionism. Zionism is racism. Period. End of story.