Zionism is racism. The UK Green Party is simply stating historical fact

On 4 October 2026, the Green Party of England and Wales officially adopted a motion titled "Zionism is Racism". Swift condemnations followed from pro-Israel groups, which declared the policy antisemitic. The equation of Zionism with racism, however, is not a new proposition. In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution determining that Zionism is a form of racism, which the US insisted on revoking in 1991, during the last days of the USSR. Many countries that had voted for it reversed their positions in line with US instructions. Perhaps more curious is that objections to describing Zionism as racist have also come from Israel's critics. That too is not new. Noam Chomsky, long a critic of Israel, was appalled at what he labelled the "notorious" 1975 UN resolution, which he condemned "for profound hypocrisy, given the nature of the states that backed it (including the Arab states), and (arguably) for referring to Zionism as such rather than the policies of the State of Israel, but restricted to these policies, the resolution cannot be criticized as inaccurate". It is unclear whether, for Chomsky, the pro-Israel states that opposed the resolution also deserved condemnation for their endorsement of Zionist racism. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Today, Norman Finkelstein is among Israel's critics who have objected to the Green Party motion. Invoking his investment in "the precision of language", he has surprisingly claimed that "Zionism is a nebulous term". The Zionist movement's literature, its policies and the pronouncements of its leaders provide ample evidence of that racism Some critics argue that condemning Zionism, an ideology and political movement, as racist is abstract and meaningless, whereas condemning the State of Israel identifies racism in the concrete form of its institutions, laws and practices. While this may be partly true, there are many ideologies that are castigated as racist without reservations, including white nationalism and white supremacy, not to mention a whole panoply of nationalisms, especially of the European variety. If this is the principal objection, it is not clear why some of these critics have such a visceral reaction to describing Zionism and the political movement bearing its name as racist. The movement's literature, its policies and the pronouncements of its leaders provide ample evidence of that racism. Surely, none of this is in question for someone like Chomsky or his minor disciples. Colonial origins The word "Zionism" was coined in 1890 by the Austrian Jewish journalist Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937), whose family came from Galicia - the part of Poland annexed by Austria in 1772. He founded the group Zion: Union of Austrian Societies for the Colonization of Palestine and Syria. Birnbaum later supported Theodor Herzl, who founded the Zionist Organization in 1897, only to break with him in 1898 and advocate national-cultural autonomy for Jews in the diaspora. He abandoned Zionism altogether in 1900 and became an advocate of Yiddish. He later became a leader of the non-Zionist religious group Agudas Yisrael. Revisiting the genesis of the term makes clear that, contrary to some of its stubborn but ignorant defenders, Zionism has always been a colonialist ideology and movement. Its central project has always been the colonisation of Palestine by European Jews. UK Green motion on Zionism: Why we need to change the conversation Read More » From the beginning, Herzl and his followers conceived of it as necessitating the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians, whom they regarded as inferior to Jews and an obstacle to its realisation. A few examples from the movement's history suffice. Herzl insisted that the Jewish colonists must "try to spirit the penniless [Indigenous] population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country". There were minor variants at the beginning of the 20th century, such as the racist Englishman Israel Zangwill's Territorialist movement, which sought a Jewish homeland outside Palestine. That, too, was racist. Zangwill himself called for the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1905. In 1930, Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist Organization, rejected Palestinian demands for self-determination while endorsing it for world Jewry. The movement had not yet been able to expel the Palestinians. He wrote to a British official that the "rights that the Jewish people has been adjudged in Palestine [by the British Mandate] do not depend on the consent, and cannot be subject to the will, of the majority of its present inhabitants". Citing the alleged "unique[ness]" of the Jewish "connection" to Palestine, he stressed that when Britain promised a Jewish national home, "the agreement of the Palestinian Arabs was not asked". He insisted that Arab self-determination elsewhere, such as in Iraq, precluded Palestinian claims in Palestine that conflicted with Jewish colonial aspirations. Racial hierarchy For Weizmann, the inferior Palestinians could not "be considered as owning the country in the sense in which the inhabitants of Iraq or of Egypt possess their respective countries". To grant them self-determination, self-government or a legislative assembly, he argued, "would be to assign the country to its present inhabitants" and cancel the Balfour Declaration "in an underhand manner". He insisted on a different occasion, however, that "we wish to spare the Arabs as much as we can of the sufferings which every backward race has gone through on the coming of another, more advanced nation". When the Palestinians revolted against their colonisers, Weizmann called it a struggle between the "forces of civilization and building" and "the forces of destruction", declaring it "the old war of the desert against civilization" and vowing, "we will not be stopped". In 1938, David Ben-Gurion declared: "I support compulsory transfer [of the Indigenous Palestinians]. I do not see anything immoral in it." His statement reflected the policy of the Jewish Agency, which had established its first "Population Transfer Committee" in November 1937 to expel the inferior Palestinians. By the 1970s, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban did not mince words when he said that "Israeli self-determination should take moral and historical precedence over Palestinian self-determination, though it does not rule it out entirely". Even as it asserted Jewish supremacy, the movement was changing how it described itself. As early as the 1930s, amid growing global anti-colonialism and the major Palestinian anti-colonial revolt, Jewish colonists in Palestine and the Zionist Organization began to recognise the liability of describing themselves as colonialists. They sought to alter the project's vocabulary - what might today be called rebranding - although they continued to use explicitly colonial terms for years to come. After the Second World War, the Zionists sought to capitalise on burgeoning decolonisation and the growing prominence of "self-determination" by claiming that their racist settler-colonial movement was, in fact, a movement for the "self-determination" of the Jewish people. This was an odd reconfiguration. Neither Herzl's writings nor the Zionist Organization's congresses nor the speeches of its delegation to the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War had invoked "self-determination" as the principle underpinning the project. The term was also absent from the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which guaranteed Jewish colonisation, and the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Claiming rights Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the League of Nations Mandate recognised a Jewish right to establish a state in Palestine. The British and the League recognised only the dubious idea of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" as the basis for sponsoring their alleged "return". The Partition Plan proposed Arab and Jewish states as a "solution" to the "problem of Palestine"; it did not proclaim an inherent Jewish right to statehood. Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann listens to the Arab Higher Committee’s case against partition at the UN in New York on 18 October 1947 (Acme Newspictures/AFP) In May 1948, 58 years after the term "Zionism" was coined, the movement invoked such a right for the first time in its "Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel", propagating the outright fabrication that "this right was recognized" in the Balfour Declaration, reaffirmed in the Mandate and acknowledged by the Partition Plan. None of them had done so. Continuing attempts to reframe Zionism alchemically as the Jewish people's "national liberation movement", rather than the colonial project it had always proudly proclaimed, were popularised in the mid-1960s by the anti-Palestinian Tunisian Zionist Albert Memmi, who remarkably appropriated the language of the colonised. In recent years, Michael Walzer anachronistically claimed that establishing the Jewish settler-colony means that "today, Jewish self-determination, impossible for almost two-thousand years, is an everyday fact". These claims present Zionism's and Israel's settler-colonialism as "anti-colonialism". Unsurprisingly, Christian Crusaders in Palestine used the same arguments. The Zionist Israeli historian of the Crusades Joshua Prawer explains that the Crusade was similarly presented not as "a movement of imperialism or colonization, since from its Christian perspective it was an act of decolonization". Israel and the Zionist Organization have never wavered in their commitment to racialised Jewish supremacy Racism was always the basis of the Zionist movement. How else would it justify its project of stealing the land of the Palestinians? Israel and the Zionist Organization have never wavered in their commitment to racialised Jewish supremacy. Why, then, are some critics of Israel complaining about equating Zionism with racism? As shown, there is nothing "nebulous" about Zionism's commitment to racism, whether as an ideology or as a political movement. Its proponents continue to propagate their views of the unique right of Israel to be racist by remaining an exclusively Jewish state with racist laws and institutions. They attack anyone who questions that right as an antisemite. While remaining avowedly and openly racist in word and deed, Israel and the Zionist movement object only - and understandably so from their perspective - to being described as such. Why any critic of Israel should try to exonerate Israel and this movement by objecting to the accurate and precise description - historic and current - of Zionism as racism remains a mystery. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.