We are Seeing the Same 'Antisemitism' Smears in the Green Party as Occurred in Labour – the ONLY Racism that Matters is Zionism

Abby Martin On Why Israel is a Racist Genocidal State That Has to Go

My membership of the Green Party triggered a storm of publicity. First off was the Jewish Chronicle whose Jane Prinsley wanted to know why I had decided to join the GP.

I wondered why the JC was interested in which party I’m a member of. ‘anti-Semitism’. Prinsley replied:

‘The JC is interested because it appears lots of people who were suspended from Labour over allegations of antisemitism have now joined Zack Polanski’s party.’

My response was that

The reason why lots of victims of the false allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party have joined the Green Party is because the allegations were false. The fact that so many of the victims were Jewish might give you a clue as to their bona fides

Prinsley’s only response was to ask if I

continue to refute the claim that you are a notorious antisemite?

My response was that I had spent my life fighting fascism and racism, anti-Semitism and Zionism included. The article finished with:‘He did not respond directly to the allegation that he is a “notorious anti-Semite.’

I sent in a letter rebutting this. The JC subsequently amended the article to make it clear that I didn’t accept this smear.

The JC was not the only paper interested in my political affiliation. On 30 March The Telegraph Political Correspondent, Amy Gibbons, contacted me. I responded that:

After Corbyn decided to destroy Your Party I resigned from it and joined the Green Party. I think it is important for Jewish people to make it clear that opposition to Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism. Zionism is the ideology of the Israeli state and it is an ideology of ethnic cleansing that has now turned genocidal. Israel has never been interested in becoming a normal, stable country. It is the only state in the world that refuses to define its borders because the myth of the Biblical Land of Israel stretches into Lebanon and Syria and all the way to the Euphrates in Iraq and down to the Nile. So it's got a long way to go.

Former Times presstitute, Oliver Kamm claimed on X that he had played a part in my expulsion by sending misinformation to the Labour Party witchhunters that I had supported the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher by the IRA.

In fact his intervention played no part whatsoever in my expulsion. He has a habit of flattering himself in the absence of anyone else willing to do so.

He subsequently emailed me because I had referred to an inane question he asked at a meeting I addressed at Oxford University Labour Club where he stated that Zionism could not be racist because Jews were not a race. My response being that in that case the Nazis weren’t racist either!

He denied that he was at the meeting. All I can say is that I was told it was him. I can’t prove it and after 40 years I don’t really care. Clearly it disturbs Kamm.

Kamm calls himself a ‘left-winger’ but as Peter Wilby, remarked this was strange since he held ‘"no discernible left-wing views". He supported Blair’s invasion of Iraq and Trump’s attack on Iran.

Kamm calls himself a journalist but a more appropriate description would be a Press Prostitute – his pimp being Rupert Murdoch.

A founder of the Islamophobic Henry Jackson Society he wrote that

‘if any reader wishes to nominate me [for Islamaphobe of the year] and I am successful, you can be sure I'll turn up to collect the award and express my reasons for pride in it.’

Poor Kamm. Despite being a ‘journalist’ he has never won a single award in an industry noted for the eagerness in which one hack recommends another for a ‘hack of the year’ award.

Such is the quality of his writing, he couldn’t even win a Racist of the Year Award.

However he was happy to call me a ‘notorious anti-Semite’. When I asked him to detail any remark by me that was anti-Semitic he fell silent.

you flatter yourself, not for the first time, @oliverkamm you played no part in my expulsion - the comment about Thatcher being a legitimate target played no part at all and wasn't in the final bundle of papers.

You were and are a nobody and when you are deceased you will… https://t.co/8S055Eyahl
— Tony Greenstein tonygreenstein.com (@TonyGreenstein) April 10, 2026

On April 8 an article appeared using as its main strapline the fact that in 2019 at the Palestine Expo Conference I had called Israel ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’.

It was spontaneous remark yet it sums up Israel. It was also prescient. To be fair, the article appeared with my comment. The article was the usual shock horror click bait.

It quoted a coupled of ex-Labour deadbeats, Lords Austin and the Sex Pest Walney aka John Woodcock. Gibbons said that Walney had ‘quit Labour in 2018’ without saying why.

Walney is a corrupt lobbyist who pushed for the banning of Palestine Action. I told her that it would have been more honest to have mentioned why he had been suspended.

I know that The Telegraph is not a bastion of feminism but nonetheless, as a female journalist you have a responsibility not to cover for politicians who are guilty of sexual harassment. We can I think take it as read that if Mr Woodcock or Lord Walnut had been innocent of the accusations that he would have stayed and fought his corner

Comments on the Telegraph's Facebook page

The comments from paid subscribers underneath The Telegraph article were vitriolic. However the comments on its Facebook and X page are uniformly supportive.

As I said in the Telegraph article, I joined the Green Party after Corbyn had decided to turn Your Party into a vanity project. However the Green Party is a petit-bourgeois, anti-socialist party that has not fundamentally changed.

With the advent of a new leader Zack Polanski the GP has a chance to ditch its conservative old guard who want nothing more than to green capitalism and become an establishment party with a green tinge.

Zack Polanski on What He Thinks Zionism Is and the E12 Motion on Zionism

The GP used the Genocide in Gaza in order to win the Gorton and Denton byelection. It’s clear that they want to use Palestine to their electoral advantage whilst not wanting to break from Zionism, imperialism and NATO.

The Anti-Semitism Smear Campaign is Getting Back Into Gear

We are seeing a steady stream of allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against Green candidates. If Polanski is sincere in apologising for having swallowed the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears the first time around then he should knock it on the head now.

Polanski should also make it clear that he no longer supports the false IHRA definition of anti-Semitism whose only purpose is to shield Israel from criticism. What is called ‘anti-Semitism’ today is not the OED definition, ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews’ but criticism of Israel and Zionism.

When the Board of Deputies of British Jews go out of their way to support Israel’s genocide, its starvation of Palestinians, its mass murder, torture and rape regime, all in the name of British Jews, then it is no surprise that some people are hostile to Jews. The wonder is that there aren’t more of them.

If the Zionists were genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism then they would shut up about Israel.

When 36 of the Board's Deputies Made Mild Criticisms of Israel in a letter to the FT the Board disciplined them, suspending some. The Board doesn't do democracy of free speech

The BOD and the Campaign Against Antisemitism are concerned about Israel not anti-Semitism. When Israel bombed a Teheran synagogue last week they said nothing. Not one British newspaper covered the story apart from the Scottish National.

Israel destroys a Teheran synagogue (where is the western media?)

official Labour account now caricaturing a Jewish rival as a sinister svengali type. https://t.co/ysOf5SKGhd pic.twitter.com/5GX6ynNzYw
— bat020 (@bat020) February 22, 2026

When the Mail, Labour Party and Reform posted anti-Semitic caricatures of Polanski the Zionists said nothing. There were no press releases attacking anti-Semitism as they are Zionists.

It will be a test of Polanski whether he wants to go down the road that the weak Corbyn took of accepting that his detractors were acting in good faith. When it comes to Zionists we should remember they are natural born liars and nothing they say should be taken on face value.

The real problem, as Hamza Egal, Chair of Global Majority Greens said, is that the GP has a racism problem. It doesn’t want to mention Zionism for fear of offending White Zionists. Even though the leadership of the Jewish Greens are supporting a movement that is perpetrating genocide against an indigenous population.

Zack Polanski on What He Thinks Zionism Is and the E12 Motion on Zionism

Polanski & His Belief in a Non-Racist Zionism

Polanski has been evasive on the question of Zionism with his suggestion that there was a time when Zionism wasn’t the racist, genocidal, messianic freak show that it is today.

There was a strand in Zionism known as Cultural Zionism, represented by the figure of Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg) who died in 1927. Cultural Zionism had no influence on Zionist settler colonialism beyond the development of the Hebrew language and the cultural side of Zionist colonisation.

Zack Polanski: Zionism ‘Racist’ Based On Israel's Current Actions

The idea of a Jewish cultural centre in Palestine avoided the question of statehood. There were a number of offshoots such as Brit Shalom, all of which withered and died. They sought to convince the Arabs that Zionism would benefit them.

Defence of Children International - Palestine was declared a 'terrorist' organisation in 2021 by the 'Change' government not Netanyahu. It has now closed. There is no charity left in Palestine to defend its children against abuse. This is the Jewish identity that the Jewish Greens and Jo Bird defend.

Arthur Ruppin, the most important figure in pre-state Israel after Ben-Gurion, was a co-founder of Brit Shalom, which never had more than a 100 members. He was a racist and eugenicist, who believed Arab Jews were a dysgenic element in Jewry. He measured Jewish skulls and other physical characteristics to ‘prove’ that ‘pure’ Jews weren’t Semitic.

He ended up in August 1933 having a friendly meeting at Jena University with Nazi Professor Hans Gunther, the ideological mentor of Himmler. They found themselves in agreement on race. See Etan Bloom’s Ph. D. Thesis ‘Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture’. Ruppin was the Director of the Palestine Office which was responsible for colonisation from 2008 onwards.

Soldiers in the service of the settlers attack CNN camera crewe and Palestinians

The dilemma of Cultural Zionism was best summed up in a meeting that Ben-Gurion had with Martin Buber of Brit Shalom in 1925. Buber, a German Zionist was also a Blood and Soil Zionist. Ben-Gurion asked Buber whether he had come to Palestine with the consent of the original inhabitants. That was the dilemma of Zionism’s ‘peace-wing.’ Their very existence rested on Zionist colonisation.

Zionism’s racism began with the idea that Jews could never live in harmony with non-Jews. This led to the colonisation of Palestine and the development of anti-Arab racism. It accepted all the anti-Semitic stereotypes that racists held about Jews. It was summed up in shelilat ha’galut (the Negation of the Diaspora) i.e hatred of diaspora Jews.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, held that ‘the Jewish people is a very nasty people and its neighbours hate it and they are right.’ The ‘left-wing’ of the Zionist movement, Hashomer Hatzair, believed that:

Israel bombs an Iranian synagogue and proves yet again that Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism

the Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural, human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligation, knows no order or discipline

Joachim Doron, an Israeli historian, described how:

rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against the Diaspora Jew, some of which are so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.

What is Zionism?

Zionism is not Jewish in origin. Christian Zionism preceded it by four centuries. It was a product of the Reformation. Whereas the Catholic Church held that they were the New Israel, Protestant Restorationism believed in the ‘Jewish return to Palestine’. A Jewish Return was a precondition for Christ’s second coming and his rule for 1,000 years.

Protestant theology combined with British Empire. One of the earliest supporters of the Jewish ‘return’ was the Evangelical seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, Ashley Cooper. He also opposed Jewish Emancipation in 1858. In 1838 Palmerston opened a British consulate in Jerusalem and appointed Vice-Consul, William Young, as Protector of the Jews in Palestine.

When Palmerston approached the Board of Deputies in 1840 to inquire about co-operation in the Jewish settlement projects, he got ‘a very meagre response’. In a resolution passed on 7 November 1842 the Board resolved that it

is precluded from originating any measure for carrying out the benevolent views of Colonel Churchill respecting the Jews of Syria.

The 1845 Frankfurt Rabbinical Conference agreed that

all petitions for the return to the land of our fathers and for the restoration of the Jewish state should be eliminated from the prayers.

The Central Conference of American Rabbis in the Pittsburgh Declaration of 1885 declared likewise.

When the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the promise by British imperialism to give Palestine to the Zionists, was issued the only member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet to vote against it was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu.

Zionism was foisted by non-Jews on Jews. The idea of a ‘return of the Jews’ to Palestine assumed that Jews did not belong where they were born. It was inherently anti-Semitic. That is why anti-Semites have always supported Zionism.

The Nazis were no exception. Reinhard Heydrich, the Deputy to Himmler held that the Zionists were the good Jews. On 28.1.35. Heydrich issued a Directive stating that

The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership. (These organizations) are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)

Jewish Zionism began with the 1881 pogrom in Odessa after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In 1882 the Lovers of Zion were formed by Leon Pinsker and thus began the First Aliyah, emigration to Palestine, although arguably this was not a true Zionist colonisation.

Zionism was a movement of despair. The idea of moving to Palestine came about because Jews despaired of overcoming anti-Semitism. However of the 2.5 million Jews who fled Czarist Russia barely 1% went to Palestine.

99% of Jews emigrated to the USA, Britain and France. New York was the new Jerusalem. It was not until 1897 that Theodor Herzl formed the Zionist Organisation. Its first Congress was going to be in Munich but the Jews there protested against what they saw as an anti-Semitic movement. The Zionists had to hold the Congress in Basel, Switzerland.

Judge: Palestinian Minor Who Died in Israeli Prison Was 'Likely Starved,' but Case Closed

Zionism was a reaction to anti-Semitism which accepted the premise that Jews did not belong in non-Jewish society. The opposite reaction was the formation, also in 1897, of the Bund, a mass socialist party that was 40,000 strong. The Bund organised self-defence squads against the pogromists and helped form the RSDP that in 1917 overthrew the Czar and in November staged the world’s first workers revolution.

Whilst the Bund fought the Czar the Zionists collaborated with his regime. In August 1903, a few months after the Kishinev pogro m Herzl visited the Czar’s Minister of Interior, Count von Plehve seeking a Royal Charter.

Around 50% of the revolutionaries arrested fighting the Czarist regime were Jewish. Whereas the Bund like all socialist groups was illegal in Russia, the Zionist Federation was a legal political group in Russia.

Zionism was reactionary from the start. Herzl wrote that ‘the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends. The anti-Semitic countries our allies.’ And so it has proven. Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration introduced the Aliens Bill in 1905 to prevent Jewish refugees entering Britain.

The Zionist strategy was to ally with British imperialism and their slogan was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’. To them the Palestinians were invisible.

The Zionist aim was a Jewish State, the title of Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet. A Jewish state meant a state without the natives. The Zionists drew up plans to ethnically cleanse their state of non-Jews. Ilan Pappe documents this in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This was achieved in 1947-8 through a series of massacres perpetrated by the Labour Zionist Haganah terror group and its shock troops, Palmach. Why? UN Resolution 181which allocated 56% of Palestine to the Zionists had within it nearly equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians.

Despite closing the archives, Israeli historians have demolished the Zionist lies about a voluntary emigration. One of the best descriptions of what happened is an article in Ha'aretz by Adam Raz Terror Was Needed to Make Arabs Leave': What the Israeli Army Did in 1948, Revealed

From the start, Zionism aimed towards an apartheid state. None were more ardent than the ‘socialist’ Zionists. They demanded ‘Jewish Labour’ which meant Jewish employers should only employ Jews. Their pickets outside orange groves forcibly turned away Arab workers. The Jewish National Fund decreed that no non-Jew should be able to work on that land.

The best account of JNF practice is the 1930 Hope-Simpson Report, set up in the wake of the 1929 riots. Article 23 said:

" . . . . The lessee undertakes to execute all works connected with the cultivation of the holding only with Jewish labour.. ... Where the lessee has contravened the provisions of this Article three times the Fund may apply the right of restitution of the holding, without paying any compensation whatever."

As the Report pithily observes:

The above quoted provisions sufficiently illustrate the Zionist policy with regard to the Arabs in their colonies. Attempts are constantly being made to establish the advantage which Jewish settlement has brought to the Arab. The most lofty sentiments are ventilated at public meetings and in Zionist propaganda. At the time of the Zionist Congress in 1921 a resolution was passed which ''solemnly declared the desire of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people in relations of friendship and mutual respect,... " This resolution is frequently quoted in proof of the excellent sentiments which Zionism cherishes towards the people of Palestine. The provisions quoted above, which are included in legal documents binding on every settler in a Zionist colony, are not compatible with the sentiments publicly expressed.

The Zionist colonists aimed to create an apartheid Jewish economy first and then a Jewish state with as few Arabs as possible. This is as true today as it was 100 years ago.

Secret filming EXPOSES Israeli Settler Group

The ‘moderate’ leader of Israel’s Opposition Yesh Atid party, Yair Lapid explained what he desired in Israel.

My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians

These are nakedly racist views. This is the response to those who believe there is a nicer, kinder Zionism. Cultural Zionism was a fragment. Zionism stood for a Jewish Supremacist State. This is as true of ‘left-wing’ as ‘right-wing’ Zionism.

The only difference between Labour Zionism and its Zionist opponents was tactical. Today in Israel there is wall to wall support for the war against Iran and Lebanon. Expansion is part of the DNA of Zionism. Israel is the only country that has refused to define its borders. The Greater Israel project is common to all wings of Zionism.

Zionism is, above all, a settler colonial project. For many Jews Zionism and Israel are their identity. Just as for South Africa Whites Apartheid was their identity.

Zionism is what Zionism does to the Palestinians and the wider Middle East. Zionism is not what is inside the head of Jews struggling for an identity. If someone Jewish identifies as a Zionist then they should change their identity to an anti-racist one not expect people to accept it.

There are in the Green Party Jewish Greens who imagine that they can be both Zionist and progressive. They are wrong. Today the most reactionary and racist elements of society such Suella Braverman and Keir Starmer identify with Israel.

Sabotage throttles Green conference as members left heartbroken over “Zionism is Racism” motion

There should be no concessions to a Jewish identity based on racism. This is why I was surprised that one of the speakers opposing the prioritisation of the Zionism=Racism motion was Jo Bird who was expelled from the Labour Party.

In speaking against prioritising the anti-Zionist motion Jo Bird demonstrated that she was a Jewish Chauvinist who believes her Jewish identity is more important than the children who have been starved to death, buried and burnt alive.

Jo Bird - prioritises Jewish Zionist identity over Genocide

Green conference showed democracy, but also how easily it’s undermined

Those who believe that to be Jewish is to be a Zionist need to question what being Jewish means. If you believe in changing society you should first change yourself. As James Baldwin wrote in The Nation in 1979

But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests.

Primo Levi, the Auschwitz survivor said in an interview “Everybody is somebody’s Jew” and his interviewer, Filippo Gentiloni, from Il Manifesto, closed the quote “And today Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”

The debate on Zionism will be a debate about the heart of the Green Party. The pressures from the right-wing press and establishment will be immense.

As I warned previously The Question is Whether Polanski Will Buckle Like Corbyn or Is He Made of a Different Mettle? It is clear that Zack is buckling under pressure. He wants the luxury of condemning what Israel is doing now without condemning the ideology of the state whose Jewish Supremacy and Apartheid led to the Genocide.

It is like condemning the Nazi Holocaust without condemning Nazism or condemning human rights abuses in South Africa in the 70s without condemning Apartheid. There is a reason why Israel is doing what it does. And that is Zionism.

A Jewish State which reduces being Jewish to an ethnicity could not help but be a Jewish Supremacist state. The same was true of the Christian ethno-nationalist states of Eastern Europe in the 1940’s. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the extermination of Jews and Roma.

Romania murdered over 300,000 of its 600,000 Jews without any help from the Nazis. Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, who was hanged at Nuremberg, said that ‘we use the art of surgery, not butchery.’ Slovakia was the first state to deport its Jews. It asked the Nazis to take them off their hands. Croatia was the only Nazi-occupied country to have its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.

Any state based on an ethno-religious basis will be a racially supremacist state like Israel. That is why I said that Israel was Hitler’s Bastard Offspring.

The Labour Zionists planned the Nakba in 1947-8, the Likud Zionists perpetrated the Gaza Genocide.

60% of Israeli Jews support the extermination and 82% support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. 56% support the deportation of Israel’s Arabs. Anti-Zionist Israelis comprise less than 1% of the population. South Africa under Apartheid was benign compared to Israel. Israel is a racist cesspit.

18-month-old Jawad Abu Nassar was returned by the Israeli army top his family with burn marks and puncture wounds, in what the family says was the result of torture, according to doctors, March 24, 2026. (Photo: Ramzi Abu Amer/APA Images)

The Greater Israel project is underway. It was the Labour Zionists who set it in train with the conquering of the West Bank. It is among the settlers that the messianic fascist movement that is represented by Religious Zionism – Smotrich and Ben Gvir - has taken root.

Zionism is fundamentally racist. I accept that this is a problem for Jews who were brought up to believe that Zionism and anti-racism were compatible. Many Jews were unaware of the Nakba and what a Jewish state meant in practice. Today there is no excuse for any Jew being unaware.

Many people hold contradictory ideas in their heads but for the Green Party there is no excuse for looking two ways at the same time. It is institutional cognitive dissonance.

Over the coming months and years we will continue to learn more and more about the horrors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

A new report seen by @MiddleEastEye details the scope of sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli regime soldiers:

“One former detainee,…
— Dr. Yara Hawari د. يارا هواري (@yarahawari) April 11, 2026

Zionism is what Zionism does to the Palestinians not what Jews with an identity crisis have floating around in their heads. The British and US states support Zionism because Israel represents the projection of western power in the Middle East not out of any concern for Jewish people.

It is no accident that the racist Trump is the most pro-Zionist President of the United States. He threatened that "a whole civilisation will die tonight". This came on top of the destruction of civilisation in Gaza which Trump and Biden enabled. Zionism today is a genocidal project.

The Green Party has to make up its mind. If it is an anti-racist party it must also be an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist party.

Tony Greenstein