The Greens Just Revived a Libel the World Spent 16 Years Repealing

Is it Coming to America Next?

A week ago Sunday the UK Greens became the first major political party in Britain to formally declare that “Zionism is racism,” passing a motion at their annual conference by 1,022 votes to 813. It is more than simply a virtue-signaling slogan. It declares the party “anti-Zionist,” says Zionism will be “treated as any other form of racism,” backs boycott, divestment and sanctions and a full arms embargo against Israel, and calls for “a single democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine,” with Jerusalem as its capital.

What that means in practice is a world in which Israel, home to the largest Jewish population on earth, no longer exists.

We have covered this fight before, and we know how it ends, because the world has already been here. We will get to 1975 in a moment. First, the facts of what happened in Brighton, because some of them have been lost in the noise.

The vote came from a small slice of a large party. The Greens put their membership at about 230,000, up sharply in a year. Fewer than 1% of members voted on the motion proposed by Lubna Speitan, a British-Palestinian artist and activist on the steering group of Greens for Palestine.

The Green Party is not some fringe group. It took 6% of the national vote in 2024, holds five seats in Parliament, controls three London councils and, since May, has two directly elected mayors. The Greens are led by an ultra-left Jewish politician, Zack Polanski. Even he realized the motion was likely a bridge too far and tried and failed to soften it before the final vote. Two amendments he backed, one adding protections for Jewish members and one removing the single-state language, were rejected. He then skipped the final vote to campaign in a by-election.

Calling Zionism racist does not simply indict a government’s policies, which is fair game and happens every day in free societies. It indicts the idea that Jews, alone among peoples, have no legitimate claim to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, about two-thirds of British Jews describe themselves as Zionists. The party has, in effect, told them what it thinks of them.

What follows is what the motion says, who wrote it, what happened in the days after the vote, and why it should matter to Americans as the DSA and some far-left Democrats approach the midterms with increasing electoral clout.

We have been here before

On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It passed 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions. Twenty-five states sponsored it, led by Arab and Muslim countries and backed by the Soviet bloc. That motion was pushed through at the height of Cold War maneuvering, in part to counter Washington’s campaign against Moscow’s terrible treatment of Soviet Jews. It was one of the most disgraceful chapters in the UN’s long record of documented anti-Israel bias.

Israel’s ambassador, Chaim Herzog, answered from the podium by holding up the text and tearing it in half. He noted that the vote fell 37 years after Kristallnacht. The U.S. ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, warned that the UN was about to codify antisemitism into international law. “A great evil has been loosed upon the world,” said Moynihan.

The resolution stood for sixteen years, the official position of the United Nations that the Jewish claim to a homeland was, in effect, bigotry.

What ended it was the collapse of the Soviet Union and a determined American campaign. In September 1991, President George H.W. Bush told the General Assembly that equating Zionism with racism “is to reject Israel itself.” Secretary of State James Baker worked the diplomacy, and Moynihan, by then a senator, pushed hard. Israel made repeal a condition of its participation in the Madrid peace conference. On December 16, 1991, Resolution 46/86 revoked the 1975 determination by a vote of 111 to 25, with 13 abstentions and 17 members not voting.

That seemed to be the end of it. The world measured the “Zionism is racism” formula against a genuine definition of racism and rejected it by better than four to one among those countries that voted.

There was, however, a catch. The repeal was a single sentence, drafted short on purpose so that hostile amendments could not hijack it. It withdrew the determination without ever stating that Zionism is not racism. So the idea was set aside but not refuted explicitly. Thirty-five years later, the Green Party is the first to have picked it back up.

What did those sixteen years cost?

The UN resolution was not law. It could not close a synagogue or defund a school. The damage came from what other institutions did once the world’s largest international body had stamped the formula with legitimacy. The harm landed at institutions with registers, budgets and meeting rooms, where someone holding a rulebook could declare a Jewish student society racist on its face and act on it. That happened, for instance, at eight British student unions that adopted “Zionism is racism” resolutions. Several, including those at the University of York and the University of Salford, struck Jewish societies from their registers or restricted their activities. In Canada, the Ontario student federation voted not to admit Jewish student groups, and the student federation at the University of Ottawa moved to stop the Jewish students’ organization from meeting on campus, both on the ground that Zionism was racism. The United States stayed away from a 1978 UN anti-racism conference because of the way it targeted Israel and Zionism. The formula had to be fought off again in 1985 at the Nairobi conference that closed the UN Decade for Women.

That is the fallout to watch now. The Greens run Hackney, where they hold 42 of 57 council seats, and Lewisham, where they hold 40 of 54, and they lead Waltham Forest. Their mayors, Zoë Garbett in Hackney and Liam Shrivastava in Lewisham, took office in May. Those councils fund community groups, license and plan around community buildings, and make decisions that touch schools. The party that runs them has just voted that the ideology most British Jews hold is racist, and it declined to protect members who attend synagogues that call themselves Zionist.

Will Green MPs and council leaders still meet communal leaders whose institutions the party’s policy now calls racist? How will Green-led councils deal with Jewish faith schools under their responsibility? How will they work with cross-communal projects that have Jewish participants?

Those are not rhetorical. They are the questions a Jewish headteacher, a synagogue chair or a charity trustee in Hackney or Lewisham is entitled to put to their council now.

The Greens also voted down an amendment that would have barred the motion from being used to discipline anyone for belonging to synagogues, community centers or other Jewish groups that call themselves Zionist or are expressly in favor of the existence of the state of Israel.

Although the party says nobody will be punished for believing in Zionism, Jewish leaders point out that when members were offered the chance to write that promise down, they declined.

In a video that spread on X around the vote, Speitan is shown at a protest saying she and others will continue until they dismantle Zionism from the world, and that the “Zionist, racist, colonial settler oppressors” will be “hunted in the same way as the Nazi oppressors were.” She adds, “It won’t happen without force.”

On a separate Zoom call she suggested synagogues that support Israel should be “confronted.”

While the party tries to diminish Speitan’s influence on the steering group of Greens for Palestine, it is hard to do so when it comes to Mothin Ali, co-deputy leader since September 2025.

Ali was a major supporter of the motion. He told Middle East Eye that Zionism, as the motion defines it, is an “ethno-nationalist state” that is responsible for “ethnic cleansing.” On the day Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel, October 7, 2023, Ali posted that “white supremacist European settler colonialism must end!” He apologized after a social media uproar.

The fallout from the Green’s vote has been immediate and came from nearly every direction. Within hours, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar barred Polanski from entering Israel. The foreign ministry said it now viewed the party as giving legitimacy to terrorism. President Isaac Herzog said those who call Zionism racism endanger Jews and Israelis everywhere, and opposition leader Yair Lapid said the racism lay with the Greens, not with Zionism. In Britain, Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis called the motion “poisonous antisemitism” and a threat to British Jews and to Britain. The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust said it would make the Greens the first electorally significant party in living memory to adopt what appears to be an overtly antisemitic platform.

Even Prime Minister Andy Burnham, no friend of Israel, called the decision “completely wrong” and urged Green leaders to reverse it. Labour chair Bridget Phillipson called it fundamentally wrong, and the Conservatives called the Greens toxic to their core.

In an article for The Free Press on October 6, former Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that the Greens had “crossed a line” and the vote amounted to “overt anti-Jewish discrimination.”

The motion even caused dissension inside the Green movement. The European Green Party said it “unequivocally” distanced itself. The co-leader of Germany’s Greens called the motion intolerable and unacceptable. The Scottish Greens defended their English and Welsh sister party’s right to the motion while saying they take no position on two states. And inside the UK party, the deputy leader of the Wales Green Party quit.

Then came the ballot box. On October 8, Polanski finished second in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election for the seat Keir Starmer vacated. Was some of the blame due to the Zionism vote? Some political commentators in the UK say yes. The by-election loss leaves a question hanging over the Greens: will Mothin Ali succeed Polanski as party leader. The chair of the Jewish Greens has called on Polanski to resign over a “dereliction of duty.” Polanski only says members will decide, and a leadership vote is due next year.

Why should Americans care?

It would be easy to read this as a British story, a quarrel inside a party with which most Americans are not very familiar. It is not, because the same dynamic is already running in the American left, and one of its institutions has already gone further than the Greens on paper.

The DSA already voted for it. At its 2025 national convention in Chicago, the Democratic Socialists of America, which has roughly 78,000 members, approved a resolution titled “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA” by 675 to 524. It describes Zionism as a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project, makes affiliation with AIPAC, J Street or Democratic Majority for Israel incompatible with membership, and makes statements such as “Israel has a right to defend itself” grounds for expulsion.

Local DSA chapters have gone further than the national body. Twin Cities DSA’s 2025 resolution committed the chapter to being anti-Zionist “in principle and praxis,” required endorsed candidates to back boycott, divestment and sanctions, and said members who advance Zionist interests, including through groups like the Jewish National Fund, face expulsion. That is the mechanism from 1976 in miniature: an organization with a register and a rulebook deciding who is in.

It matters because of the rise of far-left anti-Israel voices in the DSA and the Democratic Party, including New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, and Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, and others.

Why the Greens matter as a case study. The motion passed because a small, motivated group of activists won a vote inside a fast-growing party at a conference of roughly 1,800 voters, over the objections of four of the party’s five MPs. The DSA convention worked the same way: delegates, not rank-and-file members or voters, decided, and the people who had to live with the result were the elected officials. Polanski’s week shows what that might cost when the electorate finally weighs in. Mamdani’s turbulent week after the Green’s vote demonstrates what it costs when the base thinks you have not gone far enough.

The question for American readers is not whether any of these four will say the words “Zionism is racism” tomorrow. It is whether, the next time an activist-controlled convention, a campus senate or a city’s equity office is handed that resolution, anyone will have the standing, and the nerve, to say that Britain already ran this experiment, and so did the United Nations, and it must be rejected.

Sixteen years is a long time to be told that your claim to a homeland is bigotry. It took the world that long to climb out of that hole once, and it needed the collapse of an empire to do it. Now a party in the country that gave the world the Balfour Declaration has climbed back in, and its supporters celebrated when they did.

The Greens say they are an anti-racist party. They are entitled to argue that Israeli policy is wrong. What they are not entitled to is the claim that the movement most British Jews call their own is racism, and that nothing follows from saying so. History says something follows. The only open question is who pays first and whether American far-left progressives will follow suit and embrace the same bigotry.