A couple of days ago, I saw this post on FB, relating to a the UK Green party’s adoption of a policy declaring that “Zionism is racism” during its autumn conference in Brighton.

A very hard day. I feel sick.

I was a member of the Green Party for almost 10 years, until in the spring of 2024, I recognised what was happening. Up until then our efforts had been focused primarily on encouraging care for this good earth and environment.

But the emphasis was changing fast. A hateful obsession was emerging, and today that process has culminated in the Greens in the UK denying Jews the right to self determination, and legitimising violence against Israel.

I was long used to the threat to the Jewish people coming from the ‘far right’. Now the threat is coming mostly from the ‘far (and not-so-far) left,’ in alliance with Israel’s other enemies.

This, by the way, affects all who value peace, freedom and beauty. “The appearance of antisemitism” the late Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs reminded us “is always an early warning sign of a dangerous dysfunction within a culture, because the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.”

But if I feel sick, I also feel proud.

I am honoured to be Jewish by birth, blessed with Jewish friends, ever more grateful for the Jewish roots which shape and nurture my Christian faith, and resolute in my love for the Jewish people and for Israel.

Friends, please stand with us! And friends who pray, this is for you… One of my heroes, the remarkable young Dutch Jewish woman Etty Hillesum [1914-1943] murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, wrote this in her diary:

“A very hard day. But I keep finding myself in prayer. And that is something I shall always be able to do, even in the smallest space: pray.”

Am Israel Chai (the people of Israel lives!)

I have walked with this comment for a couple of days. At first I wanted to resist it, to argue with it. I am not a Green party member (although perhaps the might represent the best political option for me) but it seemed to me that this post was talking about people like me- perhaps even exactly me. A person of left wing views whose views on Israel/Palestine have led me to regard the State of Israel as being responsible for genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

I wanted to write a response on facebook that went something like this;

• I am NOT antisemitic – therefore your attempts to categorise my concerns about the actions of Israel as such are simply wrong. (Of course, I would say that, right?)
• Why are your reference points for all understaning of what is happening in Gaza and the West bank either October the 7th or the Third Reich? Are no other events or actions relevant here?
• Specifically, how is it possible to ignore so much evidence? Which pile of sand are you burying your head in? Which media sources? How have you managed to dismiss Amnesty international, the UN, Biet Salem etc. etc. (Perhaps because they are ‘antisemitic’?)
• How many deaths of Palestinian children will it take to remove the State of Israel from the high altar you have placed it upon? How many 2000lb bombs on crowded streets? How many ‘daddy’s home’ massacres?
• Who has the power, the weapons, The army, the airplanes, the drones, the AI powered targeting systems, the total surveilance … and the international support of the superpowers of the West? (At least for now.) How are these people still being portrayed as those most deserving of our sympathy?
• Then there is the constant equation of Jewishness with the state of Israel. As if any criticism of Israeli military action was the same thing as ‘hatred of the Jews’.
• How do Christians still buy into the Zionist mythology? What about the life and teachings of Jesus could be regarded as consistent with what the State of Israel is allowing/perpetrating to those most vulnerable and excluded within the boundaries of Israel and the occupied territories?

But none of this would have made any difference in the sectarian divisive space that is Facebook. When did a comment ever change anyone’s mind about anything? All it does is dig us deeper into our respective trenches.

Neither does it engage in any real way with the substance of the post above, either as a critique of the Greens policy, or as an understanding of racism. I should say right now that I am not really interested in (or qualified to fully analyse) Green party policy, other than to say that is seems politically naive, as it has given a major win to those considerable media sources and political interests who have jumped up and down on it all with gleefull outrage.

I am also convinced that it is right to consider antisemitism as a particular kind of evil in the light of the holocaust.

What is racism?

What is left is a consideration of where we are up to in understanding racism – where it comes from, how it is fostered and how it effects us all. This is a big conversation, which has been part of my whole life, from studying sociology and social science as an undergraduate and then post graduate in my career as a social worker and therapist.

Different kinds of racism

The first distinction we need to make is between direct and indirect racism.

The first kind is easy to spot – the person who expresses direct hatred based on race/skin colour/religion etc.. As well as the racist thugs of Cable street, we have to mention the pseudo-science of eugenics – which never goes away – evidenced by the recent Jason Arday tragedy, which began when Nathan Cofcass, a philosophy researcher and self-described “race realist”, published the initial Substack exposé in order to pursue his own racist agenda and ‘prove’ that black people are intellectually inferior.

Are Jewish people facing an increase in direct antisemitism?

Of course they are. The latest figures (2024-2025) suggest a 4% increase over a single year.

It is this dreadful trend that defenders of Israel and critics of Palestinian justice protest movements will point to as evidence that protests have created a climate of hatred towards Jewish people in the UK.

It should be noted here that Incidents of hatred targeting Muslim people in the UK have experienced a similar increase – in fact, for every antisemitic attack, there are roughly two anti-islamic ones. If you are intrested, the government stats are here. In many ways, the Cable street thugs are no longer coming for the Jews, they are coming for the immigrants – particularly the Islamic immigrants.

Is there a left wing strand of direct antisemitism? Of course there is – 21% of the perpetrators of antisemitic harassment were described as “left-wing” by recipients of such abuse, according to a 2018 survey by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency among Jews in 12 European countries. Given everything that has happened since, it is likely to have increased.

The problem here is that there has been a persistent propoganda effort to smear ALL opposition to Israeli oppression, violence and injustice towards the Palestinians as antisemitism. This risks both obscuring the serious meaning of actual antisemitism and giving cover to people whose racism is hiding behind activism.

Indirect racism is a term often used interchangably with Institutional racism, but for the purposes of this discussion, it might be useful to think about how racism is not necessarily intentional or conscious.

We can behave in a racist manner with no intent, or even knowledge of what we are doing. For example, I had a conversation recently with somone about about a visit to a town not far from where we both live, and how he had felt unsafe walking in the streets because of the presence of groups of young men from a different racial background. The person telling me this story is someone I know to be good, kind and generous and in the years I have knoen them has never once said anything in my presence that might be regarded as racist or prejudiced. When I questioned them about this experience and the fear it evoked they talked about media stories, and events in their friendship group in which violence had been committed by people like those he had felt threatened by. Despite his lack of intention, was this racist? Where assumptions about the risk present overvalued because of skin colour?

Another example of how these stereotypes work in insiduous and even subliminal ways can be demonstrated by a study into pre-school teaching conducted by Yale university;

Here we see good people, – pres school teachers no less – affected by unconscious bias gifted to them by cultural norms and expectations.

Institutional racism is even more nuanced and difficult to pin down. We can define it this way;

The collective failure of an organization or system to provide a professional, equal service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin.

It is important to note however that this failure is not normally deliberate – at least not within societies with high values of justice and equality (which sadly might exclude Israel.) People are excluded for highly complex reasons, ranging from the sorts of unconscious bias exhibited by those teachers, through to unequal access to education or information. Subtle cues of entitlement or belonging – passed down through patterns of privilege – gift some with confidence and others with reticence and fear. Coding is also often revealed through accent, through clothing, through friendship networks.

Many of you will have seen this video;

It is these patterns of inequality that positive discrimination practices were developed to try to overcome- and we all know the huge backlash there has been against these, led by those freedom loving Republicans, who seem to genuinely regard Diversity, Equity and Inclusion attempts as evil left wing attempts to create division.

All of which takes us back to antsemitism. Are Jewish people subject to unconscious bias and institutional racism?

Of course they are. Ideas about what being Jewish means are still laced with old tropes and long nurtured conspiracy theories. We need to listen to Jewish people’s experiences and seek out those ways in which we all might carry unconscious bias…

…as we should do with all minority groups, particularly those most likely to be subject to exclusion on the basis of race, skin clour or religion. Data from government and research bodies in the UK shows that Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities experience the highest rates of formal social exclusion—such as school suspensions and permanent exclusions—while Black and Muslim individuals report the highest personal experiences of everyday racism and discrimination.

Is Zionism inherently racist?

If I answer ‘yes’ to this question, does that make me antisemitic? I think for the writer of the FB post above, it would indeed, but for accedemics or historians I suspect this would be a much more difficult question.

Lets consider the first kind of racism as outlined above – direct racism. The formation of Israel, emerging from such awful horror at the end of the last world war was always about the creation of a Jewish homeland. Prior to this period, Jews and Palestinians lived together in relative peace in what was then Palestine, where Jewish settlers had been arriving since the late 19th C. Historian Ilan Pape has been one of the few Israeli voices who has shown through deep research how Zionism always contained deeply problematic ideas about Palestinians, partly as a result of ideas of Jewish exceptionalism in Israel.

Even if you accept (as I always have) that the emergence of a safe Jewish homeland after the Holocaust was a beautiful joyous thing, it is impossible to escape the reality that many leading figures within the Zionist movement always saw the need to exclude, to evict, to persecute indigenous Palestinians. Those refugee camps did not fill themselves.The cycles of violence that have unfolded ever since have led to further entreching of racist positions on boths sides, but the central Zionist idea of an Jewish state in which non-Jews do not have the same rights or access to opportunity was baked in from the start.

There is another more brutal kind of direct racism that is on display here too. In order to deal with so much death and destruction, many have argued that it is necessary to dehumanise the enemy. Their suffering is not seen in the same way as our suffering – somehow they deserved it or brought it on themselves. Perhaps at best, their suffering is seen as a regrettable natural phenomenon, like a major weather event or an earthquake. This kind of dehumanisation has been well documented within both Israeli and western media coverage of the Gaza conflict.

Then there is the word ‘apartheid’ that has do often been applied to what is happening in Israel/Palestine. This kind of racism is both direct AND indirect. Here is the evidence;

Is Zionism racist? Is it possible to imagine a form of Zionism that is not, that fully embraces the other – either in the same country or in two different states? I certainly hope so, but I do not think this kind of Zionism has any power or traction at the present.

History will decide. I suspect it will look back in horror at what is unfolding here, and we can only hope it will do so from a different world in which peace and justice has been available to all in this beautiful place.