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I am a committed anti-Zionist. This means that I believe that Zionism is a form of settler nationalism. I believe that racism, genocide and apartheid that characterises Israel today have their core in Zionism as an ideology. I’ve worked for almost a decade within the Green Party to protect my community from antisemitism, and to protect righteous support for the Palestinian people. 

This might make me a natural supporter of motion A105 – a motion to Green Party conference that proclaims Zionism is racism. However, I believe it is a motion built on a mistake which would be disastrous for the party if it were adopted. 

Is Zionism racism? The statement sounds plausible, especially for those who have being paying attention to the evils of a live streamed genocide, perpetrated and cheered on by self-described Zionists. However, I think it is a small error with big and troubling implications for the party.

I see Zionism as a settler colonial nationalism rather than racism. Racism is an integral and indivisible part of Zionism, but they are not quite the same thing. While I would agree that Zionism is intrinsically racist, it is not a type of racism. 

Zionism is the belief in Jewish settlement in Palestine. Racist violence, ethnic cleansing of Palestinian inhabitants of the Palestine has been the result of this belief and its realisation in Israel. However, ‘Zionism’ is a term that describes the belief in settlement, rather than the violence and dispossession that has resulted from this settlement. The terms for that are anti-Palestinian racism, or white supremacy.

It is a lack of precision that will give us a fundamentally misleading model of the Israeli state. To use apartheid South Africa as an analogy, I believe that Zionism is to Israel what Afrikaner nationalism was to South Africa. The formulation that ‘Zionism is racism’ would frame Zionism as being to Israel what racism was to apartheid South Africa. It confuses a nationalist ideology with an ideology of racial difference, when the two are linked but not the same. 

It is like proclaiming that US nationalism is a type of racism. It is undeniably racist and terrible acts of discrimination, dispossession and violence have been done in the name of America. But believing in US nationalism is not the same as supporting the acts of discrimination done in the name of that nationalism.  

This might sound obscure and pedantic. Many people will be wondering why the distinction between a nationalist ideology which is deeply and intrinsically racist, and the racism itself matters. After all, there are good reasons to be critical of both. 

The issue comes when you try to use that mistake to draw the boundaries of a political community, as A105 does. In action point two of the motion, it states that not only is Zionism, defined as the belief in the creation or continuity of Israel, racism, but that all party bodies should act accordingly, presumably through expulsions and discipline against those that consider themselves Zionists, or hold what the party consider to be Zionist beliefs. In short, it is a ban on Zionists being a member of the party. 

The problem with this approach, is that while every nationalism has within it supremacist ideas, and a supremacist core, not everyone with even vague nationalist affiliations is a supremacist. We know this from other forms of nationalism. Not everyone who believes in Britishness believes that Britain should violently exclude ethnic minorities. Martin Luther King’s ‘dream’ was of a form of American nationalism that did not dispossess Black people. 

I am actively engaged with the Jewish community. I go to Synagogue.  This means that I know many people who consider themselves Zionists. Some of these people have racist and supremacist views. There are a handful who would support the genocide or support apartheid. Most do not have supremacist views. The modal view I encounter is ‘I support Israel/Zionism, but I don’t like what it does to the Palestinians’. Some of them, will even take action on this, attending protests and rallies in support of Palestine freedom or against the actions of the state. These people have a critique of the individual acts of racism within Israel, but don’t have a structural critique of Zionism as an ideology inseparable from those racist acts.

There are reasons why people think this way. After the Holocaust, which represented the extinction of Jewish life in the world’s largest Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, it is understandable that Jewish communities would look for different models to ensure their safety. For many, Zionism provided the most compelling model. This was influenced by the British Mandate allowing comparatively high numbers of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine, when many other doors were closed to them. Others associate the comparative safety Jews have experienced in Western Europe and settler colonies since 1945 with the state of Israel. Zionist affiliation within diaspora Jewish communities does not primarily exist because of Israel’s violence towards Palestinians, but instead because they see a Jewish state as a way to keep Jews safe.

To be clear, I think this position is wrong or incoherent, and that there is no way to separate the ideology of Zionism from its racist outcomes towards Palestinian people. I think the promise that Zionism offers for Jewish safety is one which is false and limited. That is why I am an anti-Zionist.

However, I don’t think people who have theoretical affiliation to Zionism as a model for Jewish safety should face disciplinary action, as suggested by A105. This should be reserved from those who have genuinely supremacist beliefs, supporters of genocide or apartheid.

Instead, we should take an organising approach to Zionists who disapprove of Israel’s violence towards Palestinians. For the left and for anti-Zionists, the modal British Jewish position on Israel offers an opportunity. There is a contradiction between a position of support for Zionism and opposition to Israel’s violence towards Palestinians. This violence is fundamental to what Israel is, as is becoming increasingly obvious to younger Jews who are increasingly rejecting Zionism.  We should embrace this, and help people along this journey, rather than excluding people who haven’t yet reached the end point. This requires taking seriously the project of developing and articulating alternative models of Jewish safety, that are not dependent on the existence of a violent settler colonial state. 

A105 is an example of what policymaking shouldn’t be. It takes a small conceptual error, miscategorising a nationalism that is racist as a type of racism, and turns it into a principle for deciding who should be welcome in our political community. If this is passed and implemented, it would have troubling capability for excluding Jews for being Jews, as Jewish Greens have set out. 

But beyond this excluding Zionists as Zionists is not the right approach. According to the most recent research 64% of the British Jewish community describes themselves as Zionist. While some of these people will be racist, many of these will reject the supremacism and violence that has characterised actually existing Israel. As a Jewish person, they are my friends and family and people that I love. As an anti-Zionist I don’t want to give up on these people, I want them to come round to my point of view. The Green Party shouldn’t either.  

This motion is written in a personal capacity and is not the official view of any body Joshua Alston sits on. 

Image credit: Scotgunn – Creative Commons