๐ฌ๐ง "If there are any tears being shed today, it should be for the children, the women and the civilians in Gaza. Thatโs who should be at the center of this motion. It's a brilliant day," a Green Party member told The Times after the party voted 1,022 to 813 at its Brighton conference to declare Zionism a form of racism.
The motion makes the Greens formally anti-Zionist and backs a single democratic state, freedom for Palestinian prisoners and Palestinians' right to resist.
Critics, including the Board of Deputies of British Jews, argued it brands Jewish self-determination as racist. But Zionism was never a movement for Jewish self-determination anywhere. Its founding 1897 Basel Program specifically called for "a home in Palestine," a land already inhabited by Palestinians.
When Britain offered territory in East Africa in 1903, the Zionist Congress rejected it in 1905, and those willing to settle elsewhere split off as "territorialists." Zionism has been tied to Palestine, and to the displacement of the people living there, ever since.