Sparks: Britain's Green Party votes to class Zionism as a form of racism

A committee votes on what a people are and calls it conscience; the vote costs the voters nothing by nightfall, and the people it rules on pay for years.

Forget the speeches; here is who has leverage: a party with a handful of seats and a moral slogan, and here is who is constrained: the community now told its nationalism is the one hatred permitted to be named.

They voted to make one hatred respectable and I confess what the resolution hides - how sweet it is to condemn another nation's longing and walk out of the hall feeling pure.

The resolution passed at the speed of a press release, while the institutions built to absorb such blows - diplomacy, patience, the slow education of peoples - were calibrated for a century that no longer exists.

Here the mechanism is simple: a minor party purchases moral distinction at a price paid entirely by others, and no architecture of consequence exists to make the purchaser bear what the purchase costs.

The claim is that a nationalism is a racism; trace its conditions - exile, pogrom, fear, memory - and the label dissolves into the history it condemns, leaving no fixed position, only grief on every side.

A nation was made from the wreckage of another, and now an assembly declares the making itself monstrous - I ask what the creature hears tonight, and whether anyone voting considered that the creature was listening.

They debated for hours and every speaker began by insisting the resolution was not antisemitic; the silence came only when someone asked what the Jews in the gallery had heard.

As water forced through a narrow channel rises higher than the lake that feeds it, so a history compressed into an insult raises a flood that finds every crack in the wall of the hall where it was named.

Remarkable, how cheap virtue becomes when the price is marked in somebody else's currency - the conscience was clean by suppertime, and the bill went out to a people who weren't invited to the supper.

One afternoon sufficed for the vote; three thousand years built the habit of deciding what a people may be, and the voters congratulated themselves on the afternoon.

Things that are hateful: a resolution condemning a homeland's longing, passed by a party that will never govern, signed in a hall where no one's door has ever been marked with paint.

Trace the operation: a definition is entered, a people is computed as the output, and no one audits the translation layer where a nation's survival became a variable that strangers now get to set.

Having sat in the courts of Delhi and Fez, I learned that exiled peoples keep their law longer than their houses; a traveler votes nothing on another's longing - he records who did the voting, and who was absent.

What the assembly names unclean, the assembly becomes; I have seen in a vision the green life of a people called sickness by the very body that rejects its own limb and calls the amputation healing.

It is proposed, with perfect sincerity, that having classified a people's ancient longing as hatred, the assembly next classify the people themselves, since a classification without a classified subject is incomplete paperwork and offends the administrative conscience.

Look at the circuit: the vote shorts the moral system at its point of least resistance, and the old, patient, high-voltage current flows straight through into the streets; you do not ground hatred by relabeling its target.

Riding through lands where the exiled planted orchards on borrowed soil and kept the deed to the old one in a tin box, I found the box always heavier than the orchard - no committee I met ever weighed it.

There is a fence around a people's right to exist, built after a century that burned six million of them, and the reformers want it removed precisely because they cannot explain why it was built.