54% of the British public admit they don't know what Zionism means.
80% of British Jews identify as Zionists.
This weekend, the Green Party of England and Wales voted to declare Zionism racism.
I've been trying to work out what I want to say about that.
I'm a Zionist. My family's connection to Zionism runs deeply through multiple generations. It is part of my Jewish identity, although certainly not the whole of it.
Apparently, I now subscribe to a racist ideology.
So I read the motion. All 22 pages of it.
What bothers me isn't that people disagree with Zionism. They're perfectly entitled to do that. Nor is it criticism of Israel. I criticise Israel.
There are things in A105 with which I don't particularly disagree. Palestinians have legitimate grievances. They have a right to dignity, security and self-determination. Israeli governments should be criticised when they deserve criticism. Opposing settlements doesn't make somebody an antisemite. Neither does supporting Palestinian statehood, an arms embargo or sanctions.
Someone can be an anti-Zionist without necessarily being an antisemite.
The problem with A105 is different.
It begins by defining Zionism as an ideology seeking an “ethnonationalist Jewish State” through the “exclusion and/or domination” of non-Jews. It describes Zionism as responsible for the “dehumanisation, displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement and destruction of Palestinians”. The conclusion follows easily enough from the definition: “Zionism is racist.”
But I don't recognise my Zionism in that definition.
For me, Zionism begins with a fairly simple proposition: Jews are a people and Jews have a right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland.
It doesn't tell me that Benjamin Netanyahu is always right. It doesn't tell me where Israel's borders should be or require me to support settlements. It doesn't tell me that a Jewish life is worth more than a Palestinian one.
I believe Palestinians have a right to self-determination too.
Apparently the authors of A105 don't see those positions as compatible. The motion specifically rejects the proposition that Zionism represents Jewish self-determination.
I keep coming back to that.
Because there is something odd about a political movement being so certain of one people's right to define its national identity while reserving for itself the right to define another's.
And the numbers make that harder to dismiss as an obscure argument about political theory.
Campaign Against Antisemitism's polling says 80% of British Jews identify as Zionists. Only 6% say they do not. It also found that 89% of British Jews consider anti-Zionism to be a form of antisemitism. Those are CAA's findings and should be understood as such, but the gulf with its YouGov polling of the wider population is striking: 54% of British adults said they did not know what Zionism meant. Only 32% selected the answer that it means believing there should be a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel.
In other words, most of the country admits it doesn't know what Zionism means while an overwhelming majority of British Jews identify with it.
That ought at least to introduce a little humility into the conversation.
It doesn't give Jews a veto over the definition of Zionism and it doesn't make Zionism immune from criticism. Beliefs don't become true or morally right because lots of people hold them.
But if you are going to tell British Jews that a belief held by 80% of us is racist, perhaps what those Jews understand themselves to believe deserves rather more consideration than this motion gives it.
Instead, the Green Party has adopted a policy which says Zionism should be treated like other forms of racism and commits the party to “explicitly opposing Zionism” in its internal and external communications. The party says the policy establishes it formally as anti-Zionist and supports a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine. The motion passed by 1,022 votes to 813. Green Party
So I have some practical questions.
What does this mean for a Jewish Green who is a Zionist?
What if their synagogue is Zionist? What if they belong to mainstream Jewish organisations which support Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state? Can someone openly describe themselves as a Zionist and stand for a party which has formally decided their Zionism is racism?
Jewish Greens have wrestled with exactly these questions. Their membership was deeply divided over the motion and their final survey did not produce a collective position. Interestingly, though, 53% of respondents agreed that passing it could make discrimination against Jews within the party more likely. Jewish Greens
I think that division is worth acknowledging. There are anti-Zionist Jews. There are Jews for whom Zionism has little or no place in their Jewish identity. They have as much right to define their Jewishness as I have to define mine.
I just wish that courtesy extended in both directions.
There are other parts of A105 which make that difficult.
Its supporting paper doesn't merely criticise the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. There is a perfectly legitimate debate about IHRA, its examples and the way institutions have applied it.
The paper goes further. It argues that the term “antisemitism” is itself discriminatory because Arabs and Palestinians are also Semitic peoples and proposes “anti-Jewish discrimination” as preferable terminology.
This is a strange argument historically. The document itself acknowledges that Antisemitismus emerged in nineteenth-century Germany as a racialised term for Judenhass, hatred of Jews. “Semitic” may describe a family of languages, but that has never made antisemitism a generic term for hostility towards everyone who speaks one of them.
It is also difficult to ignore the wider pattern.
The motion tells Jews what Zionism really means. It tells us Zionism cannot represent our self-determination. Its supporting paper rejects one widely adopted definition of antisemitism and then questions the word antisemitism itself.
At what point are Jews allowed some say in any of this?
The history deployed in support of the motion deserves scrutiny too.
A105 reaches back to UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which in 1975 declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. It acknowledges that the resolution was revoked in 1991 but presents that reversal principally as the product of American and Israeli political pressure.
Of course the repeal was political. So was the original resolution. The relevant point is that the United Nations formally revoked the proposition which the Green Party has now chosen to revive.
Then there is the International Court of Justice.
The motion says that in its 2024 advisory opinion the ICJ “conclude[d] Apartheid”.
That's not quite what the Court said. It found that Israel's separation policies in the occupied Palestinian territory breached Article 3 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which concerns racial segregation and apartheid. It did not expressly determine that the breach was apartheid rather than racial segregation.
There are arguments that Israel practises apartheid and people are entitled to make them. But if you're going to invoke the world's highest court in support of an allegation this serious, what the Court actually concluded matters.
Still, none of this is really why A105 has stayed with me.
My family's Zionism wasn't born in a university seminar.
It runs through generations of my family and through a Jewish history in which safety was often conditional on the tolerance of everybody else.
That history taught Jews many things. One of them was that the tolerance of everybody else could disappear remarkably quickly.
For my family, Zionism was one answer to that problem.
Not Jewish supremacy. Not a desire to dominate Palestinians. The rather more basic conviction that Jews should possess some agency over what happens to Jews.
That history doesn't excuse everything Israel does. It doesn't erase Palestinian history. It doesn't make Palestinian suffering less real. Jewish suffering isn't a voucher we can exchange for somebody else's.
But neither am I willing to pretend that Jewish history has nothing to tell us about why Jews might want a state of their own.
This is why “Zionism is racism” doesn't land with me as an abstract proposition about a nineteenth-century nationalist movement.
It lands as a judgement on something my family has believed for generations.
Perhaps I am supposed to detach the two. Judaism here, Zionism over there, Israel somewhere else again. Real Jewish life isn't that tidy. For many British Jews those things overlap in complicated, sometimes uncomfortable ways. Israel can make us proud and angry, occasionally at the same time. Zionism can be important to our identity without dictating our politics. We can feel a profound connection to Israel while arguing furiously about what Israel does.
That messiness matters.
A105 doesn't leave much room for it.
There is another statistic from the CAA polling which I haven't been able to shake: 89% of British Jews surveyed said they regard anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism. Campaign Against Antisemitism
That doesn't settle the argument. There are Jews who vehemently disagree, including many within Jewish Greens. Jewish Greens
But imagine discovering that 89% of another British minority believed a particular political movement was prejudicial towards them. Would the instinct of a progressive political party really be to tell them that they had misunderstood their own prejudice?
Maybe it would.
I hope not.
I don't need Green Party members to agree with me about Israel. I don't expect them to become Zionists. I don't even object to them arguing that Zionism has caused profound harm to Palestinians. That argument is part of the history and deserves to be heard.
What I object to is the certainty.
The certainty that Zionism has one meaning. That its meaning can be settled without much regard for what Zionist Jews actually believe. That Palestinian self-determination is an inalienable right while the Jewish claim to self-determination can simply be categorised as racism. That a political party can make all of those judgements and then insist that Zionist Jews should see no implications for ourselves.
I can live with contradiction. Most Jews do.
I can believe that Palestinians have suffered and that Israel should exist. I can believe that Palestinians deserve national self-determination and that Jews do too. I can love Israel without loving its government.
Apparently that position is now too complicated for the Green Party.
I'm still a Zionist.
Not because I haven't understood the accusation.
I have.
I just don't recognise the person it describes.