A debate has broken out recently in the Green Party in Britain over what constitutes ‘anti-Zionism’. In a contribution to the discussion JUDY BEISHON explains the need to take a class approach to this issue, which has a relevance well beyond the Greens.
The horrific war against the Palestinians in Gaza, along with ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and brutal onslaughts on Lebanon and elsewhere in the region, has led to widespread condemnation of the ultra-right Israeli government by ordinary people worldwide.
Trying to counter the expressions of mass opposition and anger, many states have stepped up repression against anti-war protesters. Also, allegations of antisemitism, including equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, have been widely used as a political weapon by the political right against the left, to try to undermine the left and weaken opposition to the Israeli state’s massacres, repression and wars.
Governments, including in Britain, that fundamentally support the Israeli government’s actions, take part in these slurs, as do right-wing Jewish ‘leaders’ who condemn antisemitism but are silent on the brutality of the Israeli state.
Meanwhile, attacks on Jewish people have risen worldwide, a large proportion seemingly due to unjustifiable blaming of Jews internationally for the crimes of the Israeli government and defence of that government by many sections of the Jewish ‘establishment’. In turn, the Israeli government uses attacks on Jews to try to bolster the argument that antisemitism will always exist and to boost Jewish reactionary nationalism.
Socialists have to counter these travesties and lead the way in combating abuse directed at Jews, antisemitism and all forms of racism, and in fighting for working class unity. In doing so, we oppose the view that antisemitism is an eternal prejudice standing above class society. On the contrary, in the world today it is capitalist decline, exploitation, and ‘divide and rule’ that lies at the root of it.
Regarding ‘anti-Zionism’, a debate has been taking place in the Green Party in Britain, that discussed ‘resolution A105’ titled “Zionism is Racism” during its online conference in March. Pressure from a layer of Green Party members for the scheduling of the resolution reflected the influx into the Greens of many people from the movement against the war on Gaza, no doubt approving of the party’s manifesto pledges to end arms sales to Israel and oppose the occupation of Palestinian land. Recently the Greens also rightly opposed the government’s ban on the group Palestine Action.
Among the clauses of resolution A105, as its title suggests, is the proposition that the Greens should be anti-Zionist. The ‘Jewish Greens’ platform within the party strenuously opposed that aspect of the motion, as well as other clauses. In disputed circumstances a vote on A105 wasn’t taken but it is due to be scheduled again later this year, so the sharp debate on its contents is ongoing.
Which side of their debate is correct? It is firstly necessary to take a look back at Zionism’s history to examine this.
Origins of modern Zionism
Zion was a biblical name for part of Jerusalem. Ever since a sizeable Jewish presence there over 2,000 years ago, a passively expressed desire has existed within Jewish prayers to ‘return’ to Zion. But modern, political Zionism only arose around 150 years ago as a secular movement in favour of the creation of a national home for Jewish people. Jews were minorities in many countries but nowhere a majority, and had faced a long history of persecution internationally. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, in the Tsarist Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in particular, they were facing waves of antisemitic persecution and unemployment.
Feudal relations in those empires were crumbling, with Jews being both economically undermined and scapegoated, while also being squeezed out of the developing capitalist relations. This fuelled the start of Jewish nationalism in the form of modern Zionism, initially presented as a mainly European-based bourgeois nationalist ideology designed to appeal to Jews of all classes, which argued against ‘assimilation’, based on the idea that in the capitalist era, Jews need a national territory of their own to guarantee their economic wellbeing and safety.
This bourgeois nationalism had a reactionary character, rather than being akin to the bourgeois nationalist or democratic movements historically against feudal relations or against colonial rule, which had a progressive character.
Initially, a number of possible destinations were considered, but by 1897 Palestine was agreed at the first Zionist congress as the target site for the homeland. For several decades the goal was usually described by Zionist leaders as a homeland rather than a state. This was to try to appear less inflammatory towards the Arab population of Palestine, which grew increasingly alarmed and outraged at the arrival of Jews from Europe who – backed by Western powers that didn’t want to welcome Jewish victims of antisemitism into their own countries – were encroaching on the rights of the 90% Arab population that had lived there for many centuries. Nevertheless, for the Zionist leaders a Jewish state was the aim, and was eventually openly declared as such by the Zionist Organisation in 1942. They dismissed the native Arab population as sparse and uncivilised; and Palestinian land as needing the new technology that Jewish settlers could bring.
In its early stages Zionist ideology only attracted a small minority of Jews, mainly in Europe, with Jewish youth being more attracted to the developing socialist movements that were seeking to challenge crisis-ridden capitalism and the increasing nationalism of the imperialist powers.
As well as large numbers of Jewish workers getting involved alongside other workers in the mass socialist and workers’ parties affiliated to the Second International, a socialist Jewish organisation, the General Jewish Labour Bund, was founded in the Russian empire in 1897 and grew to have tens of thousands of members. The Bund believed that Jewish workers should fight for workers’ and cultural rights where they lived, rather than emigrating to Palestine, so was staunchly anti-Zionist. Major competitive battles broke out between Jewish non-Zionists and Zionists, sometimes descending into physical violence.
The Bund was among the founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but came under criticism from Lenin and the Bolsheviks over its demand to be recognised as the sole representative of Jews in the Party, among other issues.
Zionist ideology
There was no single, uniform Zionist ideology. For instance, the movement Hovevi Zion (Lovers of Zion), focused on promoting settlement in Palestine and was regarded as ‘practical’ Zionism, as opposed to political Zionism that was seeking a Jewish state through international political and legal endorsement and protection.
Political Zionism gained ascendancy but itself contained many battling trends. On its right wing was ‘revisionist’ Zionism, pioneered by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, which had a more hardline stance compared to the more gradual approach of the founders of political Zionism like Theodor Herzl. Jabotinsky eventually argued that a Jewish state should have the whole of Palestine including both banks of the river Jordan, and as he recognised that the native Arabs would never voluntarily accept that outcome, an ‘iron wall’ of military force would be necessary to achieve it.
On the Zionist left, around the start of the twentieth century, Poale-Zion (Workers of Zion) was founded with its main theoretician being Ber Borochov. It was influenced by Marxism but took a Zionist approach by calling for the development of a Jewish working class in Palestine. Inspired by the 1917 Russian revolution, a left section split away to found a precursor of the Communist Party of Palestine, which recruited some Arab members. The right wing of Poale-Zion played a role in helping to draw Jewish socialists towards the seemingly social-democratic form of Zionism that became the ideological basis of the party Mapai, founded in 1930, that in reality embraced capitalist development. Governments during the first three decades of the State of Israel were based on that liberal form of Zionism – firstly as Mapai, and from 1968 as the Israeli Labour Party.
The forerunners of Mapai promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine and settlement there rather than building military strength. But over time, there ended up being no significant difference between the various Zionist trends regarding using force to displace Arabs in Palestine and to take the maximum possible amount of land from them, to set up a Jewish state. Historian Avi Shlaim, who believes that the creation of Israel in Palestine was justified, nevertheless wrote: “That most Zionist leaders wanted the largest possible Jewish state in Palestine with as few Arabs inside it as possible is hardly open to question” (Israel and Palestine, 2009). The differences were mainly over tactics to achieve it, and the eventual borders.
Imperialist backing
In the early twentieth century the world was dominated by competing imperialist powers who were prepared to enlist the national aspirations of the peoples they ruled over for their own ends. The Zionists sought support from among them; prior to the first world war they approached Britain, Germany, Italy and the Turkish Ottoman empire, among others. The failure of negotiations with the Ottoman empire and later its imminent collapse, led the Zionist leaders to back Britain and France in the first world war against the Ottoman empire that ruled west Asia and was allied to the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and Bulgaria.
British imperialism, for its own varied reasons, then delivered the much sought after support through the pivotal 1917 ‘Balfour declaration’, which supported the idea of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. At that time, only 10% of Palestine’s population was Jewish. Britain also gave support to the Middle East’s Arab populations in their struggle against the Ottoman empire. However, in 1922, following the defeat and carve up of the Ottoman empire that encompassed Palestine, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate to rule Palestine, including giving the Zionist Organisation some administrative roles there and ratifying the Balfour declaration.
The Zionists’ road from that point towards creating the State of Israel in 1948 was far from straightforward, not least because the British government – while allowing a certain amount of Jewish immigration to Palestine – tried to boost its interests in the Arab world and cooled towards the idea of partitioning Palestine. It struggled to maintain control during the Arab revolt in Palestine in 1936-39, during which armed Zionist gangs, especially Irgun, targeted and killed Arabs. After the second world war, British troops were targeted by Zionist militias, whose terrorist acts included the 1946 bombing of the British HQ in Jerusalem’s King David hotel, killing 91 people. That attack was organised by the Irgun under its commander Menachem Begin, who became Israeli prime minister in 1977, at the head of the right-wing Likud party founded four years earlier.
As part of British imperialism trying to manage its decline and economic crisis in the post war period, including its relations with the US at the start of the ‘cold war’ with the USSR, in 1947-48 it pulled out of Greece, the Indian sub-continent, Burma and Palestine. Also post-war, the terrible news of the Holocaust – the killing of over six million Jews by Nazi Germany – changed Zionism from being a minority current amongst Jews in Europe to having majority support. In Poland, just before the war, despite rising antisemitism, the anti-Zionist Bund had won a resounding victory over other Jewish-based organisations in the December 1938 Polish local elections, for example, gaining 16 of 19 seats won by Jewish parties on Warsaw city council.
But Jews in Poland then suffered the worst slaughter in the Holocaust: their number went from around 3.3 million to less than 400,000. After the war, following the July 1946 pogrom that killed 42 Jews in Kielce, many of the surviving Jews left Poland and tried to get to Palestine, not primarily due to support for Zionism but seeking safety.
With the background of these events, the UN voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. That decision triggered a civil war in Palestine during which the Nakba took place – the catastrophe of over 750,000 Palestinians being driven from their homes by brutal, armed Jewish assaults – and the State of Israel was announced with a larger area of land than the UN had designated to it. The UN had granted Israel 55% of Palestine, despite Jews only holding 8% of the land; but by the time of the 1949 armistice, Israel had taken 78%.
While the early Zionist-encouraged immigration to Palestine came mainly from Europe, as tensions developed in Palestine and elsewhere, Jews in north Africa and west Asia moved in significant numbers to Palestine, with the biggest waves being to the new Israeli state following its creation. After arrival in Israel they were discriminated against by the European-origin government leaders, who regarded Jews from Europe as having more of the characteristics that they wanted to base Israeli society on.
Palestinians’ plight
While both Western imperialism and the Zionist leaders tried to satisfy their own interests by courting various Arab figureheads and playing them off against each other, the fate of the Arab populations across the Middle East was never their concern. The secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France had carved up the Middle East to be under the influence of those two powers; and a promise to support the setting up of an independent Arab kingdom after the fall of the Ottoman empire was subsequently reneged on. These factors, and Jewish immigration into Palestine, led to the growth of a Palestinian national movement in the period between the first and second world wars, which has continued in various forms ever since.
The Palestinians suffered a second major episode of displacement and repressive occupation following a six-day war in 1967, in which the Israeli regime took control of the West Bank, Golan Heights and Gaza Strip, occupying those areas from then on. Some Zionists regard the 1948 war and creation of Israel as justified, but not the occupation after 1967, believing that the occupation, as Shlaim argued, “transformed Zionism from a national liberation movement for the Jews into a colonial movement that represses and oppresses the Palestinian people”. However, from the very start, modern Zionism was certainly not a ‘national liberation movement’; rather it was influenced by some of the rapacious colonial conquests previously inflicted across the globe by western powers. Most Zionist leaders have always welcomed Jewish territorial expansion in Palestine and further displacement of Palestinians; and every Zionist government in Israel has also pursued policies of discrimination against Palestinians who remained within the 1948 borders of Israel.
No amount of attempted dressing up of the early stages of Zionism as containing elements of ‘socialism’ can alter the fact that from its start, the State of Israel was based on the oppression of the Palestinian people and their national rights. For Israel’s first Zionist leaders and their forerunners, leaning on left-wing ideology was a cover for what their Zionism really was and is.
Motion A105
The arguments of the main proponents on both sides of the Green Party debate on Zionism are flawed, with neither using Marxist, class-based analysis.
The ‘Jewish Greens’ group argues that there are too many different interpretations of Zionism to label all Zionists as being racist, and Jewish people can oppose the actions of the Israeli government while at the same time identifying as Zionist. They rightly point out that Jewish people can interpret Zionism as “a sense that Jews should have a place that they call home” and that “regardless of how Zionism has played out in the real world an unbridled attack on Zionism would – for many Jews (regardless of their own relationship with Zionism) – come across as an attack at that very basic right of aspiring to lead a safe and secure life”.
Without putting it in class terms, their argument on this particular issue nevertheless reflects the importance of distinguishing between the nationalism of the ruling classes, who use it in their own interests, and that of ordinary people, which is fundamentally an expression of wanting to live well and securely in their own communities.
Jewish Greens also have a point when arguing that A105’s effective proscribing of any Green who identifies as Zionist, or has any connections with any Zionist organisation, or who expresses sympathy for Israelis, could lead to destructive witch-hunts and expulsions within the Green Party. While disciplinary action would no doubt be justified on some issues – such as support for the war on Gaza – socialists warn against trying to resolve a complex issue with administrative measures, rather than seeking to raise common agreement and class consciousness through democratic political debate.
However, Jewish Greens’ material wrongly suggests that it would only be correct in Israel to define the far-right as racist. This, combined with stressing that not all forms or interpretations of Zionism are racist, creates an overall standpoint that markedly evades the fact that modern Zionism, as it has actually ‘played out in the real world’ in its state form, has irrefutably been racist and oppressive, and must be opposed by socialists. It is true that ideas exist on forms of Jewish nationalism that wouldn’t infringe on the rights of others, which can manifest in people’s minds as forms of Zionism. But modern, political Zionism, as practised by the Israeli state, has consistently been – from an early stage in its development – a racist ideology, highly oppressive to Palestinian Arabs.
Green party members should join with socialists in exposing the arguments of the likes of multimillionaire head of the US Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, who argued that it is antisemitic to be anti-Zionist, on the basis that: “Zionism is, simply put, the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancient homeland. That’s what it is. Zionism is essential to the Jewish tradition… that notion of self-determination in the homeland doesn’t exclude Palestinians, doesn’t exclude any other group. It’s saying Jews have the right, this sort of liberation movement, to go back to where they’re from. Anti-Zionism is the belief that Jews do not have that right”. (New York Times, 9 August, 2025). Leaving aside the fact that a vast number of other people in the world could theoretically claim the right to an ancient homeland, the monstrous portrayal by Greenblatt of a morally apt Israeli state that ‘doesn’t exclude Palestinians’, is typical of right-wing Zionist propaganda.
Political Zionism has also been a major deceit, because the State of Israel doesn’t and can’t provide a ‘safe and secure life’ for Jews. Before Russian revolutionary Leon Troksky died in 1940, he presciently warned that an Israeli state in Palestine would be a ‘bloody trap’ for Jews within it, as it would be based on continually oppressing Palestinians, thereby producing fears among Israelis of losing a war.
Today, the only way Israeli Jews can gain security will be through building an anti-capitalist alternative in Israel that rejects bourgeois nationalist Zionism. This means putting forward the necessity of removing capitalism – a system that will never solve the Israel-Palestine conflict – and arguing for a transformation to socialism, a society in which public ownership of the top corporations and democratically decided economic planning will lay the basis for peaceful co-existence of Arabs and Jews.
One state?
On the other side of the Greens’ debate, promoted by the platform ‘Greens for Palestine’, as well as A105’s unqualified assertion that ‘Zionism is racism’, the motion proposes: “The establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, equal rights for all, and the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants”. But this is unachievable on a capitalist basis. The Israeli capitalists, for as long as capitalism exists, won’t concede ‘equal rights for all’ – with the danger for them of a Palestinian majority population – and they won’t grant the right of return to Palestinians, which would guarantee a Palestinian majority. These are regarded as existential issues for Israeli Jewish capitalism, which has enormous military strength to defend itself.
It is also the case that Israeli Jewish workers wouldn’t support such a programme on a capitalist basis, as they would fear a fall in their living standards. They can see that crisis-ridden capitalism isn’t meeting the needs of the present population of Israel within the 1948 borders, never mind an enlarged population. On a socialist basis, a levelling upwards would be possible for both nationalities, but any proposition to ‘level down’ on a capitalist basis can’t win over Israeli workers to the essential task they face, which is to organise independently as workers in order to build collective strength and purpose towards a goal of challenging and removing Israeli capitalism.
This points to another problem with A105’s call for ‘one state’, especially when combined with another clause in the resolution that supports the Palestinians’ right to self-determination while making no mention of national rights for Israeli Jews, up to and including the right to their own state. Socialists would welcome an eventual agreement by ordinary people on both sides of the national divide to agree to live together in one state. But doing so can only be realised on the basis of socialism, so thought has to be given to what kind of programme can win over working class people on both sides to that vital transformation.
The ‘one state’ proposition and the lack of accepting any Israeli national rights, conflicts strongly with the present strong desire for national self-determination among working people on both sides. The repeated rounds of terrible bloodshed have led to a situation where distrust between them has never been greater, so a programme that calls for two socialist states alongside each other, as part of a socialist confederation of the region, is more acceptable to most ordinary people in both Israel and Palestine as a goal to build towards, than the idea of one state. Full democratic rights would need to be guaranteed for the minorities in those states.
Such a programme takes into account the obstacle that right-wing nationalism can be to achieving united working-class struggle towards socialist change. The Trotskyist forerunners of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) rightly opposed the creation of Israel in 1948, but over the subsequent decades the Israeli state has become sizable and thoroughly embedded, with strong national consciousness in all its classes. It is unfortunately common on the left internationally to not recognise the necessary programmatic conclusions that need to be drawn from this.
Also, political errors, such as those in motion A105, are seized on by right-wing forces to try to discredit the anti-war movement, the left and Greens. The Times of Israel reported that the UK Greens’ Zionism is Racism motion calls for “the abolition of the Jewish state of Israel”. Socialists must certainly call for the end of the capitalist state of Israel and we call for the end of capitalism everywhere, but A105’s effective rejection of any Jewish national rights is used by the likes of the Times of Israel to try to shore up a reactionary nationalist hold on the Israeli Jewish working class.
The Palestinians will be best aided in their struggle for liberation by those who not only support their struggle, but who also put forward a programme that can help to expose the abhorrent class-based motives of Israel’s capitalists and that aims towards drawing a majority of Israeli workers away from them and their brutal racist repression of Palestinians. This can’t be done by simply and baldly denouncing all those who identify with some form of Zionism as racist.