The colour of anti-Semitic madness

 In the run-up to the third anniversary of the Hamas pogrom, whilst the London Metropolitan Police urged the organisers of a large pro-Palestinian demonstration not to hold it on 7 October, a motion defining Zionism as ‘racism’ was passed at the Green Party’s annual conference. There were 1,026 votes in favour and 648 against.

The Greens have become the first European party to define Zionism as a form of racism, as in the ill-fated 1975 UN resolution. Israel has reacted by banning the Greens’ leader, Zack Polanski. The motion also defends the Palestinians’ right to ‘resist’ and calls for ‘the establishment of a single Palestinian state across the whole of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. Via Israel. It is now difficult to deny that anti-Zionism has replaced anti-Semitism as an ideological tool for the persecution of Jews.

Elise Benjamin, founder of the Jewish Greens, turned her ballot paper into a yellow star and pinned it to her jacket: “My family was murdered in the Holocaust; now people here have celebrated a vote that will make Jews feel unsafe.” A proposal aimed at protecting Jews belonging to synagogues that identify as “Zionist” has been rejected. This comes in a country that, a year ago, witnessed a massacre at the Manchester synagogue and where new plots to target British Jews are uncovered every week. 

“This is the logical next step for Corbynism,” Dominic Green, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a member of London’s Jewish community, tells Il Foglio. “The same people, once pushed to the margins of influence within Labour, have moved to the Greens and stepped up their campaign in the wake of 7 October. The group driving this trend, Greens for Palestine, is a pro-Iranian group that has exploited the post-7 October situation to accelerate what is, in effect, a sort of hijacking of a party that previously focused on the environment and has now become obsessively fixated on Jews as the source of all evil. In the 1930s, there was a very popular British fascist movement, but it failed to win a single seat. That cordon sanitaire has been breached for several years now. And no one knows where things will go from here.”

There is also an electoral contest. “If a vote were held tomorrow, key figures in the Labour leadership would lose their seats, including the Deputy Prime Minister. This is the result of an electoral strategy that relies on areas within major cities where immigrant populations have been politically integrated into the system. And because they have integrated as a bloc, they are able to act as a bloc. Thus they are making further headway. The Islamist agenda is now advancing through the Greens. But it will not last long. There is a huge contradiction between the identity politics of the left-wing socialists and that of the Islamists. What I expect to see is the emergence of an Islamist party, and this already has an informal parliamentary group.”

We call them ‘Independents for Gaza’. They are, in fact, already functioning as a party. All that is needed is for them to formally come together as such. At that point, there will be widespread panic, because it will become clear what has happened.” According to Green, this is a great opportunity for Labour. “To reposition itself as the party of decency and common sense.” Meanwhile, British Jews feel abandoned. “For the small number of idealists – let’s call them that – who remain in the Greens, the result is a terrible shock. The general feeling in Britain is that we are pushing the country to the brink of a precipice and that most of those who can afford to leave are thinking about how to do so. There is a general sense that we are approaching a collapse. Jews are more exposed and react more quickly.”