Sparks: Green party votes to adopt policy that equates Zionism with racism
The matter is this: no party gets to decide which peoples may claim self-determination and which may not, and a vote cannot make it otherwise.
Delegates have passed their resolution with the comfortable majority of a conference hall, and the members it wounds are already calculating whether the party's freedom of conscience extends to them.
They voted on whether a people's longing counts as hatred, then adjourned for lunch - the ballot box and the bread roll received equal seriousness.
The count is not in your power once the tellers have finished; whether you answer it with reason or with rage is, and you have confused these two things.
Behind the resolution stands a specific Tuesday morning: a Jewish member of the party deciding whether her political home still has room for her.
Diagnoses pronounced by a vote of a thousand to eight hundred settle elections, not diseases; the fever still running through the membership tells you the diagnosis was wrong.
It is proposed, with perfect fairness, that every national movement for self-determination be tested for racism by those opposed to its existence, and I await the equal application of this test to all nations, beginning with our own.
One delegate speaks of anti-racism, one member of antisemitism, and neither notices they argue in different jurisdictions - the state's conduct and the people's right to exist are separate questions, and the dispute dissolves once they are separated.
When a word is defined by its enemies rather than its bearers, the name no longer names, and where names are crooked every speech that follows is crooked too.
Remarkably few of the people whose belonging was under debate sat in the room when it was decided, and no proclamation afterward explains the arithmetic.
They insist the motion is reasoned criticism while refusing to reason with the members it devastates - declaring themselves rational, then excluding from reason the very people they judge.
Light through green glass takes the color of the glass; a resolution passed through a party's certainty takes the color of that certainty, and the members outside the window see what the glass cannot.
Having sat in halls where a majority decided what a minority was, I know the temperature drops before anyone speaks; the eight hundred and thirteen who voted no know that cold.
A victory won by a margin of two hundred voices is a battle fought, not won; the general who splits his own army to take one hill has surrendered the terrain that matters.
Outreach to the party's Jewish members had gone splendidly, in the way a garden party goes splendidly right up until one notices what the guests are fleeing from.
We are told the policy was chosen; observe instead a population of parties under selection for moral distinctness, each drifting toward the position that most distinguishes it - survival of the most quotable.
Two hundred ballots carried the motion and cost the party a community it will not easily win back; a shopkeeper would call that a bad trade before anyone begins philosophising about it.
There is a fence between criticising a state and condemning a people, and the party that removes it without asking why it was built will learn the reason from the members walking out.