Green Party Votes Zionism Is Racism
The Fence Across the Word
There is a fence across a word, and on Sunday Britain’s Green Party voted to tear it down. The fence was a distinction between a government and a people’s attachment to a place. The reformers said they saw no reason for it. I would answer that if they see no reason for it, they are precisely the people who should not be holding the crowbar.
This fence was not built by sentimental men. It was built by the United Nations, which in 1975 declared Zionism a form of racism. In 1991 that same assembly, a body not famous for changing its mind, solemnly took the declaration back. When an institution that never repents of anything repents of something, the historian should ask what it saw. What it saw was that the resolution had not wounded a government. Governments are not easily wounded. It had wounded a word, and through the word, every ordinary person who used it to mean something modest, such as “my grandmother’s people should have somewhere they cannot be expelled from.”
The strongest case for the Greens deserves to be stated plainly, because it is not stupid. They look at the conduct of the Israeli government and see discrimination. They see a state that grounds itself in an ideology. They conclude that the ideology must be the source, and that honesty requires naming it. This is the reasoning of a man who finds the river polluted and decides to abolish water.
The difficulty is that “Zionism” has never been one thing. It has been the creed of a cabinet minister in Jerusalem and the vague, unexamined loyalty of a pharmacist in Manchester who has never voted for that minister and probably never would. The Greens could have condemned the minister’s policies by name, and nobody could have accused them of anything except plain speech. Instead they condemned the pharmacist’s loyalty, and they let the minister walk free inside a general category. A precise charge would have pinned the government to the wall. A sweeping definition lets it hide among the crowd it claims to speak for.
That is the paradox, and it resolves quickly. The motion meant to be harder on the Israeli government is softer on it, because it moves the guilt from a set of decisions onto a set of people. Decisions can be reversed. People can only be suspected.
Critics now accuse the party of lending legitimacy to terrorism. That charge is contested, and an angry man should not grab it simply because it is lying near his hand. The nearer consequence is smaller and worse. Picture a Jewish sixth-former in Brighton who joined the Greens because she cares about rivers and bees. On Monday morning she opens the party newsletter and learns that her family’s oldest hope has been reclassified as a bigotry. Nobody has taken anything from her yet. They have only given everyone else permission to.
The fence was there to stop that permission. The Greens have taken the fence down. Something will come through the gap, and it will not stop to ask which policies she voted for.