Yes, Zionism is racism

On Sunday, at its annual conference in Brighton, the British Green Party voted to recognise Zionism as racism. The motion, which describes Zionism as “an ethnonationalist political project”, passed with 1,022 votes to 813, despite opposition from several of the party’s MPs as well as former party leader Caroline Lucas.

The vote caused uproar in the British mainstream, with many commentators taking to the airwaves and social media to condemn it, accuse the party of anti-Semitism and even claim it is endangering Jewish people.

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Yet, the Green Party’s resolution does not declare anything radical or extraordinary. Zionism was and continues to be a settler-colonial ideology, and settler colonialism is fundamentally racist. Zionism is centred on the belief that Jewish people from anywhere in the world have a right to a homeland in historic Palestine – a right that outweighs any other people’s.

It is a conviction that is based on biblical claims to a land and an ahistorical understanding of history. Crucially, its fulfilment requires the usurping and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population.

It should not be particularly controversial to define Zionism as a settler colonial ideology, particularly as the Zionist founding fathers themselves proudly described it as such. Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leading Revisionist Zionist thinker of the early 20th century, wrote that “Zionist colonization … must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population”.

Theodor Herzl, often cited as the founding father of political Zionism, hoped to establish contact with Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist who led British colonisation in Zimbabwe.

In an infamous draft letter, which Herzl never sent, he invited Rhodes to “help make history”. “It doesn’t involve Africa but a piece of Asia Minor … How then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out the way matter for you? … Because it is something colonial,” he wrote.

Zionism’s early institutions also reflected the same colonial self-identification through their names: the Jewish Colonial Trust, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department.

Zionism is also not particularly exceptional as an ideology. It follows the path of other ideologies often rooted in the idea of manifest destiny that have shaped settler-colonial entities and their genocidal crimes committed against indigenous populations to secure the continuation of their colonial projects.

Indeed, what is unfolding in Palestine is not an isolated event but part of a global history of violent, dispossessive tactics aimed at eliminating indigenous peoples and solidifying settler-colonial control over land.

The Green Party was not the first to define Zionism as racism in an official position. In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. The resolution passed by 72 votes to 35 with 32 abstentions and drew on statements by the Organisation of African Unity and the Non-Aligned Movement made earlier that year.

It is not surprising that the resolution was championed by Global South countries who knew all too well the workings of colonial ideologies. Many rightly drew comparisons between the Zionist regime and South Africa’s apartheid regime.

The resolution was eventually repealed in 1991 under pressure from the United States and with the approval of the Soviet Union. The Israeli regime had made its revocation a condition for attending the Madrid peace talks, cosponsored by Washington and Moscow. The resolution’s repeal reflected a shift in the balance of geopolitical power, against the backdrop of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the collapse of the Eastern bloc, rather than a reconsideration of the global understanding of Zionism.

The fact that a British mainstream party has returned to something put forward by Global South countries on the world stage five decades earlier is significant. In the British political and historical context, it is a small but important step towards confronting the country’s dark legacy of facilitating the creation of a Zionist state on Palestinian land and contributing to the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Whether the Green Party will be able to hold its position under the immense pressure it is sure to face and avoid making concessions to appease those who attack it is yet to be seen.

Meanwhile, as this all plays out in the Western media, the genocide in Palestine continues, and what has been lost in the noise is the material reality of Zionism for Palestinians on the ground. For more than a century, this ideology has created untold devastation and destruction for the Palestinian people. The Green Party motion did not invent this history – it merely named it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.