“Green party votes to adopt policy that equates Zionism with racism”, reports the Guardian.
Members voted at the party’s annual conference in Brighton to back a motion that calls for Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, to be “treated as any other form of racism”. It passed by 1,022 votes to 813.
It has been publicly opposed by four of the party’s five MPs, although Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens in England and Wales, has said he does believe Zionism is a racist idea.
The motion, which is now formal policy, calls for a single Palestinian state in place of Israel, “with equal rights for all”.
Adrian Ramsay, one of the MPs and a former party co-leader, said after the vote that he was “deeply saddened” by the decision, and that the idea of endorsing a single Palestinian state did not match Green commitments to self-determination.
In earlier voting, an amendment ensuring other parts of Green policy were updated to take account of the motion was backed. Three other amendments, including one that said the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline members based on affiliation with Jewish community institutions”, were voted down.
The text of the motion includes this passage:
4. The Green Party affirms the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self
determination, including the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and
liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation, and acknowledges
that the struggle to achieve that liberation by all available means under
international law is legitimate.
The Guardian article also says that
While the proposers of the motion argue it will not be used to discipline Jewish members who support Zionism, it is understood that some members are consulting lawyers over whether the policy could be challenged.
Adam Wagner KC, the barrister who led a case which concluded that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour broke equalities laws over antisemitism, said that such a case would have a good chance of success.
“I think there is a strong risk that the motion as passed contravenes the Equality Act 2010, which applies to political parties, as it will discriminate against and harass people who hold Zionist beliefs and Jewish people more generally,” he said.
“Zionism, defined in the broad sense of supporting the establishment, development and protection of a Jewish nation state in its ancestral homeland, the land of Israel, is likely to be a protected belief under the Equality Act 2010.”
There should be no “protected beliefs”. Though I would strongly advise Jewish Greens, and decent people of any religion or no religion to get out, I support the right of any political party to be whatever it chooses to be. What the Green Party of England and Wales has now chosen to be is a Muslim sectarian party.
🚨The Greens have PASSED Zionism is Racism
1022 votes for
813 against
Result met with cheers and waving of Palestinain flags.— Sabrina Miller (@SabriSun_Miller) October 4, 2026
The triumph of the various “Gaza Independents” in the 2024 election demonstrates that in the modern UK, a Muslim sectarian party whose main interests lie outside the UK can win seats in Parliament. Nonetheless the victory of this motion at the Green Party conference has made a previously quite successful strategy of entryism into a previously existing British party too obvious.