Green Party Votes Zionism Is Racism

This is what democratic societies do to themselves when the voluntary association, which ought to be the school of free opinion, becomes a court for pronouncing on the opinions of others. I have long held that associations are the great counterweight in democratic life. They are where citizens learn to deliberate, to lose a vote and remain, and to hold a view without needing the whole society to confirm it. When an association turns its majority into a verdict on what its fellow citizens may honestly believe, that school becomes something nearer a church.

On Sunday, Britain’s Green Party voted to class Zionism as a form of racism. The strongest defence of the vote deserves a fair statement. A party exists to take positions. Its members debated, counted hands, and decided, which is democracy working as intended. Many of them are moved by real horror at the conduct of the Israeli government, and they believe that a moral conviction left unspoken is only cowardice in good clothing. I do not dismiss this. A party that will say nothing hard is not worth joining.

The vote, however, did not judge a policy, a government, or a war. It judged a disposition. Zionism, whatever one thinks of its consequences, is for a great many British Jews a word for their attachment to a people’s survival rather than a programme. A party may condemn a government’s actions and remain a place where its opponents can sit. Once it declares that a fellow citizen’s attachment is itself a kind of racism, it has changed what disagreement means. The Jewish member who arrives at her branch meeting is no longer simply in the minority on a question of foreign policy. She has been told, by the procedure that was supposed to protect her voice, what her conscience amounts to.

Here the majority shows its peculiar power. It has passed no law and expelled no one. The member remains entirely free. She is free to stay in a room that has defined her, to argue against a word now fixed in the rulebook, and to explain herself again at every meeting. Most people in her place will not stay to argue. They will fold the agenda, put on their coats, and not come back. No one will have driven them out, and in that sense no one will be responsible.

The charge that such a vote lends legitimacy to terrorism I leave to others. What concerns me is that a party which began as a coalition of the uneasy, gardeners and pacifists and dissenters from every orthodoxy, has learned to take a heresy hunt for an act of conscience. Its members will think they have only clarified their principles. Over time they will find they have clarified their membership, and that the meetings have become very calm, and that everyone in the hall now agrees.