The company that slogan keeps

A meme went round today, and for once the meme was doing history’s work. Look at the British parties that have made active opposition to Zionism a point of doctrine, rather than a quarrel about a particular government in Jerusalem. The list is short, and it is not a list of liberals.

Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists treated Jewish nationhood as a conspiracy and Jewish neighbours as the enemy within. The postwar fascist fringe — the National Front, then the BNP — kept the same pairing: hatred of Jews at home, hatred of a Jewish state abroad. On the other wing, the Communist Party of Great Britain took the Moscow line. After 1967 that line was not a critique of a policy. It was that Zionism itself was racism. The Soviet bloc wrote the sentence into international politics in 1975, when the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379. The General Assembly revoked it in December 1991, by 111 votes to 25. The countries that clung to it were, by then, mostly the remaining hard-line communist states and a bloc of rejectionist governments.

That is the company. Fascists, who wanted no Jews in Britain. Communists, who wanted no Jewish state anywhere, and who were happy to call the wanting of one a form of racism. The slogan did not arrive in Brighton from the Methodist chapel or from the liberal tradition that let Jews back into England under Cromwell and, imperfectly, kept them when the Continent did not.

This afternoon the Green Party conference adopted the sentence anyway. Members voted 1,022 to 813 to define Zionism as racism and to back a single Palestinian state “in all of historic Palestine”. They also rejected an amendment that would have stopped the motion being used to pressure or discipline members for belonging to a synagogue that calls itself Zionist. Four of the party’s five MPs had already said they opposed the motion. Deputy leader Rachel Millward called the wording problematic. It passed all the same. Outside the hall, supporters chanted that Zionists were not welcome.

Most synagogues in Britain are Zionist in the ordinary sense: they believe the Jewish people are entitled to a state, and that the one which exists should not be abolished. A party of the British mainstream has just declared that belief racist, and declined a safeguard for the Jews in its own ranks who hold it. The motion says anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. The chant outside the hall did not bother with the distinction.

You can oppose a government without declaring a people’s national movement a form of racism. Britain managed that for a long time. The parties that refused to manage it were the ones that already had a theory of the Jew. The Greens have now picked up a form of words those parties would have recognised, and asked the rest of us to treat it as progress.

If you have a badge, wear it today and tomorrow. Not as a foreign-policy statement. As a neighbour’s answer.

Sources: Green Party statement, 4 October 2026; BBC News; Jewish News; the 1991 repeal of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379.