The Greens’ foolish anti-Zionism vote is a disaster for Zack Polanski

Attendees at the conference weren’t delegates or representatives: no one elected them or mandated them, but they still got to make policy and bend the party to whatever the hell they liked, and if they didn’t want to take account of what their greybeards told them, they didn’t have to. So they didn’t.

I could have told them where this one goes, having been there before, and it isn’t where they imagine. But more of that later.

First, a quick primer on Zionism. In 1942 the exiled Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig completed his book The World Of Yesterday and then, eight months before its publication, took his own life. In the book, one of his early recollections was his meetings in fin-de-siecle Vienna with Theodor Herzl, an editor at the Neue Freie Presse, where Zweig’s first published article appeared. It was 1902, and Herzl by then had founded the modern Zionist movement – the concrete project to set up a homeland for Jews in Palestine

Zweig explained that Herzl had originally been animated by being present in Paris in 1895 for the humiliation of the Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus. Casting forward, Zweig commented that…

“…thanks to his [Herzl’s] prophetic insight, he had anticipated all its tragic significance at a time when it hardly seemed a serious matter… So he published his pamphlet on the Jewish state in which he pronounced all adaptations through assimilation and all hope of total tolerance impossible for the Jewish people. They would have to found a new home for themselves in their old homeland of Palestine.”

This was not what the educated and assimilated Jews of Austria-Hungary (or Britain for that matter) wanted to hear. As Zweig recalled…

“The general astonishment and annoyance it aroused in bourgeois Jewish circles in Vienna. What on earth, they said angrily, has that usually clever, witty and cultivated writer Herzl taken into his head? 

“What stupid stuff is he saying and writing? Why would we want to go to Palestine? We speak German, not Hebrew, our home is in beautiful Austria. Aren’t we very well off under good emperor Franz Josef? Don’t we make a respectable living and enjoy a secure position? 

“Don’t we have equal rights, aren’t we loyal, established citizens of our beloved Vienna? And don’t we live in a progressive time which will do away with all religious prejudice within a few decades?”

It was out there in the shtetls and small eastern towns of the empire, with their active discriminations and occasional pogroms, that Zionism really began to take off.

It was also out there in 1941 that the Einsatzgruppen came to call. By then Vienna was on the way to becoming judenfrei. In 1900, when Jews were rolling their eyes at silly Herzl, the Jewish population of Vienna had been around 120,000. By 1946 it was 5,000.

Zionism and the Left

My dad, Sam Aaronovitch, was an East End Jew, born in Stepney in the last days of 1919; as a teenager he was living on Cable Street in 1936, when the legendary battle against the British Union of Fascists was fought. His parents were illiterate shtetl Jews and my grandfather barely eked out a living as a second-hand clothes repairer. My grandmother never learned to speak English properly.

Sam became a young communist, because socialism seemed to offer him the best route to a society where the poverty he experienced every day had been abolished. And he was not a Zionist. As a secular Jew, he didn’t yearn for a return to a spiritual homeland, and as a communist he believed that to lose their chains the workers of the world needed to unite, not bugger off to the Middle East.

This gave him common cause with what was known as “Bundism” – the left wing movement of Jews that had been founded in the same year that Herzl launched the World Zionist Congress. Bundists believed in Jews fighting for socialism in the countries in which they lived. To them, Zionism shared an objective with antisemites: the deportation of Jews to somewhere else. 

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In Poland, where the Bund was very strong, they slugged it out with the Zionists. Alas, over the border in the young Soviet Union, even the Bund was seen as a deviation, and there the Bund was forced to dissolve itself into the CPSU (B).

The Bund disappeared after 1945 for obvious reasons and for equally obvious reasons Zionism didn’t. Communists struggled to fit what had happened to the Jews into their understanding of the world.

Led by the Soviet Union (and therefore by Stalin), they at first welcomed the UN’s establishment of the Jewish state in part of Palestine but then adopted (often reluctantly though always quietly) the Stalinist view that Jewish loyalty to Israel and Zionism itself was alien to socialism and could even amount to treachery.

The apogee of this paranoia was the infamous “Doctor’s Plot”, which saw the purging and murder of Jewish doctors in the last months of Stalin’s life. With the bemused and frankly criminal support of Western communists.

All that was history by the time I was sentient enough to notice what was going on. In 1967 I was vaguely aware that “our” side (that of the Soviet Union) was pro-Arab and “their side” (Yankee imperialists and the bourgeois press) was pro-Israeli. 

But that didn’t seem to translate itself into my parents and the comrades wanting the Jewish state to disappear. In fact, they had friends who emigrated to Israel and joined the Israeli Communist Party.

I became what I can only describe as a non-Zionist. The idea of living in Israel never had much to do with me. But if Zionism wasn’t my bag as I grew up, I always regarded anti-Zionism as even more peculiar – as odd as, say, anti-Frenchism. 

Why waste your time being opposed to the existence of a country that already existed (and now is nearly 80 years old) and that wasn’t going anywhere? Homelands for dispossessed peoples was something I could understand, whether they were Kurds, Palestinians or (retrospectively) Jews.

By the early 1970s, Eurocommunists were supporters of the two-state solution. The Soviet bloc weren’t so keen.

And here’s where we get into the “Zionism is racism” mega-diversion. In November 1975 – two years after a concerted military attempt by the Arab states to extinguish the Jewish one – the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 stating that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” by 72 votes to 35 with 32 abstentions. 

In favour: the Soviet bloc, the Arab countries, the Shah’s Iran, India and many non-aligned countries. Against: the US, European countries and US allies. There was more than a whiff of the cold war about Resolution 3379.

It made little difference in the world of guns, diplomacy and practical politics. Less than three years after that resolution was passed, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords, which regularised relations between Israel and the country that had been its primary Arab enemy, Egypt. If Sadat believed that Zionism was racism, he didn’t let it affect his actions.

But back here in Britain the resolution became a bloody nuisance. In 1976 I had been elected to the executive of the National Union of Students on a kind of sensible slate called the Broad Left. Off to the Left were a variety of Trotskyist and Maoist organisations, one of whose preoccupations even then was Palestine.

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In their student unions they had begun to use the UN resolution in their own inevitable declensive fashion, which went like this:

Zionism was racism, Israel was Zionist, Jewish societies declared themselves to be Zionist or else promoted Israel – ergo Jewish societies were racist and therefore ought to be denied student union facilities, stalls at freshers’ week and woe betide them if they invited an Israeli speaker, let alone the ambassador to address them. 

The SWP (then IS) strongholds of London polytechnics were some of the keenest prosecutors of this argument. At York University the Jewish Society was asked by the student union to deny that it was Zionist. It all got very nasty and McCarthyite and took up a lot of time and effort.

We fought it off. As I recall, we even suggested that student unions that sought in effect to shut down Jewish societies might be disaffiliated from the national union. In 1977 we established that NUS policy was for a two-state solution and not the anti-Zionist “from the river to the sea”. We were supported by the Union of Jewish Students and not opposed by the General Union of Palestinian Students.

Did it matter? Maybe a little to propagandists of either side, but it meant a whole lot to British Jews, who felt that their children going to college might be threatened with being accorded pariah status.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the UN rescinded Resolution 3379 by 111 votes to 25 with 13 abstentions. By the mid-’90s, we had the Oslo Accords, a Palestinian Authority and we had hope – a hope that was killed by the murderer of Itzhak Rabin, Hamas suicide bombers, and the failure of courageous leadership both among the Palestinians and in Israel. 

The extremists prospered and the cycle was established that eventually led us to October 7.

Enter the Greens

The motion passed by the Greens argues that the partial obliteration of Gaza and the slow, brutal annexation of the West Bank are the inevitable conclusions of Zionism – of the project to found a Jewish state in Palestine. This argument disposes without acknowledgement of the question of whether an Arab acceptance of the UN resolution establishing Israel, instead of the unremitting and armed hostility to such a state – might have led to a different outcome.

So the fact of Israeli war crimes in Gaza (genocide is a term with a specific legal meaning requiring a threshold which two or three of Netanyahu’s cabinet would like to meet) is taken to invalidate the idea of a Jewish state in a way in which, somehow, the horrific Hamas attack on October 7 does not disrupt the idea of Palestinian statehood. Except, of course, in the eyes of apologists for the Israeli nationalist Right.

The Green motion ties the party to arguing, in effect, that most Jews are racists. An amendment seeking to protect Jewish members and others from any consequential action based on that premise was roundly defeated. 

Those arguing against the amendment contended that such protection was unnecessary because, in practice, no one was threatened with sanctions on account of now being labelled racist. This defeat has already lost the party several staunch supporters who don’t accept such reassurances.

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But it also ties the party to a deeply silly policy: or as Green deputy leader Mothin Ali expressed it, the view that instead of Israel there should be magicked up “a state that’s democratic, that guarantees the rights of every single person living on that land” which would include, in the words of the motion, “the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants”. 

The original displacement of Palestinians in 1947/8 amounted to around 700,000 people: the number of people registered by the UN as Palestinian refugees now numbers just under six million. Israel’s current population is just over 10 million.

To watch people celebrating the passage of a motion whose very extremism strengthens the forces to whom they are most opposed, is sad. Especially since candidates in beauty pageants have expressed more realistic ideas for improving the world than the Greens did at the weekend. The state that fought the Yom Kippur war isn’t going to abolish itself because some trendy prat from Stoke Newington really, really wants it to.

So all the Greens have accomplished is to lay the ground for a series of domestic rows and incidents which will end in them reversing the policy or the party splitting, or both.

The last time I wrote about the Greens, I talked about how the failure of the new Corbyn project would mean an influx of resolution-hardened Corbynites and ancient Trotskyite entryists into the Green Party. As with the early days of Corbyn, there are sufficient idealistic, inexperienced youngsters to be seduced into making it seem as though there is a lively movement there. 

Look at those membership numbers! Look at all those youthful canvassers! But soon enough the Trots will kill it with their endless meetings, their need for purity, their fetishising of slogans and their psychic emptiness.

Last weekend, as we departed the hottest summer in recorded history, the Greens turned themselves into a gigantic 1970s student union general meeting (quite probably with some of the same people involved) and voted, in effect, not to care about stuff like the climate. Genuinely sad.

This article originally appeared on David Aaronovitch’s Substack