{"id":43165,"date":"2026-10-06T22:32:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T21:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=43165"},"modified":"2026-10-06T22:32:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T21:32:20","slug":"zionism-and-the-link-with-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2026\/10\/06\/zionism-and-the-link-with-racism","title":{"rendered":"Zionism and the link with racism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Brighton Centre, the venue for this year’s Green Party conference<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In last Saturday’s Guardian there was an article by Jonathan Freedland<\/a> about the motion since passed at the ongoing Green Party conference in the UK defining Zionism as racism which should be “treated as any other form of racism”. Because the Greens do not admit members of racist organisations, this would exclude anyone associated with almost any synagogue or mainstream Jewish organisation in the UK and would rule him out for as much as attending a mourning service (kaddish) for his late father (Michael Freedland, also a journalist). The motion was opposed by four of the party’s five MPs and its leader, Zack Polanski, who tabled an amendment to exclude attendance at synagogues from its terms, but this was rejected and Polanski did not vote (he was campaigning in the Holborn seat he is contesting; the election is this Thursday, the 8th of October). The chair of Amnesty International in the UK, Sandy Ruthven, who previously stood as a Green mayoral candidate in Bristol, has resigned from the party and the chair of the party’s Jewish division, Vivien Lichtenstein, said she was reconsidering her membership of the party. Freedland also contends that Zionism means all kinds of different things to different people, and that the peace-seeking Left is as much Zionist as the overtly racist or religious Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much as Zionism means different things to different people, it means different things now to what it meant in the 1930s or earlier. Then, Zionism meant someone who believed there should be a Jewish state in Palestine, or at least somewhere; nowadays, the mere belief that Israel should exist is, to many minds, uncontroversial. The modern state of Israel is 78 years old, and those who remember there being no such state will be in their late 80s at least, or a bit younger if they were there. No young or middle-aged person remembers a world without the state of Israel, and there is a tendency to assume that the world you know is the world as it’s always been, even if you know it is not. There will be people who believed there should never have been a state of Israel but who believe it cannot just be erased now, and will ask what will become of the Jewish population, especially the Sephardic and Mizrahi population that migrated from the Arab world and Iran; many of both groups will cling to hope of a “two-state solution” despite mounting evidence that Israel is not interested in one. I tend to use it to refer to active Zionists, those advocating for Israel in the western media and politics, Jewish or otherwise, and some of those advocates often engage in dishonest behaviour: sowing false doubts about documented atrocities, obstructing discussion of the Gaza genocide including calling it that, blaming victims, reciting pro-settler narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is nothing racist about believing that there should be a “national home for the Jews”, a Jewish state or whatever. The racism enters into it when you have to justify your demand that another people should have to give up their homes to make way for yours; that others should suffer instead of you, especially when those people were not your principal persecutors. The language used by Zionists that I have personally witnessed has borne this out: they refer to Palestinians as “Arab squatters” among other things on their blogs and forums, calling them subhumans and even vermin. Freedland claims that “the language of ‘settler colonialism’, repeated in the Green motion, fits Zionism so badly”; the Zionists, in their early years, approached the British and were offered a chunk of east Africa, which some of them were willing to accept (though not all). It was always a matter of which colonial subjects could be moved out of the way to make way for people who mattered. The inter-war migration of Jews to Palestine took advantage of the British Mandate and British politicians who were sympathetic to them, notably Winston Churchill who compared the Palestinians to dogs in the manger; the establishment of the state was made possible by a United Nations dominated by white colonial and imperial powers and their successor states (and their Nationalist ally in China); the majority of the Muslim world was under European colonial rule or Soviet domination. On top of this, other settler states such as the US, Canada and Australia allow natives to vote, even if they did not in the beginning; Israel is intent on either maintaining a permanent occupation or expelling (or killing) those in the occupied territories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freedland is wrong when he claims that no other minority would be “told what to think” in the way he claims this motion does to Jews, or told to choose between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ versions of their own religion. Muslims are treated this way all the time, expected to disavow not only terrorism (which is reasonable) but pretty much any other facet of our religion which our white interrogators find uncomfortable. As I have written before<\/a>, when Muslims police the boundaries of our community by saying that certain groups professing to be Muslims in fact are not, we are accused of complicity in terrorism or murder; meanwhile, the Zionist religious mainstream in the Jewish community — the Chief Rabbi, the Board of Deputies, the self-appointed Jewish Leadership Council, the Jewish Chronicle and allied media — are accepted as the community’s true spokesmen, and they are assumed to have the right to tell us who is a Jew and who is not, and whose opinion about Israel and Zionism is acceptable and whose is not, and whose opinion counts about what is antisemitic and what is not, and Jewish dissenters (religious or otherwise) — the ones called kapos or “self-hating Jews”, mainly among themselves but sometimes on TV — are dismissed as unrepresentative. All too often, fringe figures that have no following but who are willing to denounce the Muslim community and confirm people’s prejudices, or sectarian figures eager to denounce other Muslims for their own reasons, are presented as “true leaders” in the mainstream media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, Zionists (again, Jewish and otherwise) have been among the foremost agitators for repression against the Muslim community in the last two decades. The same media that aggressively support Israel have peddled stories designed to foment hostility to us: the Times, which hosts Melanie Phillips, published the story about a Muslim foster carer who would not let a child eat pork under her roof, as if there was anything unusual about that, as well as a series of stories ‘exposing’ Muslims who said things that didn’t come close to advocating terrorism; they were just not in keeping with western thinking, though often quite compatible with orthodox Judaism. Phillips herself proclaims that there is no such thing as Islamophobia and that it is just a way to silence criticism of the Muslim community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lastly, we cannot remain stuck in the mid to late 20th century. People’s view of Israel then does not tally with what we see today. Then it was seen as a refuge for persecuted Jews from Europe; the majority of those refugees are now dead. Then, the memory of Jews as an oppressed or persecuted minority was very recent; in any western country in 2026, Jews are a privileged subset of the white majority with ample access to political power and the media and in most of the countries where they live now, they have never been subject to officially-sanctioned antisemitic violence. People may in the past have had an idealised view of what Israel could or should be but by being a Zionist in 2026, you are supporting the Israel that is, not one that could be, and the Israel we know, the Israel supported by a seemingly endless supply of American military aid, is a racist country which maintains an oppressive occupation on its Arabic-speaking native population, which subjects that population to all manner of harassment and humiliation for the sake of its aggressive, racist, thuggish settler population, which increasingly denies rights to its Arabic-speaking citizens, a country whose regime has been likened to Apartheid by those who lived through the latter, a country that has carried out a mass slaughter of one of its occupied native populations for the past three years, a country whose population keeps voting for politicians that maintain that regime, a country that openly has designs on all of its Arab neighbours including those with which it still has diplomatic relations. There is no justifying any of this without falling into racism. A liberal Zionist in the 1960s may have been unaware of where their ideals would lead, but there is no disguising it today. Is Zionism racist by itself? Maybe not. But there is no following through on it without racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image source: Voice of Hassocks<\/a>, via Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In last Saturday’s Guardian there was an article by Jonathan Freedland about the motion since passed at the ongoing Green Party conference in the UK defining Zionism as racism which should be “treated as...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":43166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New post at Indigo Jo Blogs -- Zionism and the link with racism (my reaction to the Green Party resolution on the subject, and why you can't have one without the other).","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[53,3792],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-palestine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-bed","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/brighton-centre.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43167,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43165\/revisions\/43167"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}