‘The Green Party has done something profoundly wicked’ (Kristian Buus/In Pictures/Getty)
The suffix “-ism” is a relatively modern one, but the ideas it bolts on to are often ancient. No one imagines there were no pacifists before the word “pacifism” was coined, nor that humanism began when someone first gave it a name. And the same is true of Zionism. Centuries before Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”) in Paris in 1895, the idea of Zion as the homeland of Jews had been a religious reality.
The word Zion occurs more than a hundred times in the Hebrew scriptures. In 587 BC, the Babylonians conquered the land of Judah and expelled its people; the psalmist describes their despondency and their yearning for a return home. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” This lament is a recurrent feature of the Hebrew scriptures. And later, after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, the same desire for a return home, to Zion, was the defining feature of what came to be called Judaism. Zionism was not invented in 1895. It is as old as the psalmist, even older.
But the arrival of Christianity did something very particular to our understanding of all religions and has distorted the way we understand words such as Judaism and Zionism. For Christianity, and especially protestant Christianity, religion is essentially a system of belief. So successful has this idea become that it is often impossible for people to understand that a religion can be anything other than a system of belief. Yet to be Jewish is not just about what you believe, it is also about where you come from, where many yearn to return to, who your mother is, what practices you have. For the vast majority of Jews, then, Zionism is not simply a political philosophy that was invented in the years before the First World War. It is a way of life that is fundamentally constitutive of what it is to be Jewish.
Which is why, in passing a motion that “Zionism is Racism”, the Green Party has done something profoundly wicked. Those who scream “from the river to the sea” — though they probably couldn’t tell you the name of either the river or the sea — have decided to describe the safety that many Jews seek in Israel as a hatred. To condemn Zionism is to seek the destruction of Israel and open Jews up to a danger that has followed them around since forever.
This idea that Zionism is a racist and colonialist enterprise is absurd. The yearning for Zion long predates the Holocaust, but the murder of six million Jews by a European civilisation gave that yearning a new urgency. And yes, there were Jews who, before the Second World War, believed that they could make a safe home for themselves in Europe, fearing that Herzl’s new political version of Zionism would destabilise the assimilation into that society they had done so much to build.
My great-grandfather’s brother, Samuel Friedeberg, ran the Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool. In 1917, his community debated Herzl’s proposal, many worrying that the foundation of a Jewish state would “prejudicially affect the position of such Jews as are members of the British nation”. The motion was defeated 39 votes to 30. The result was a reflection of how safe many well-to-do Jews had come to feel in England, especially during the reign of Queen Victoria. As the then Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Hermann Adler, put it in 1898: “Our faith teaches us to seek the welfare of the nations under whose protection we dwell, to take part in their national efforts and to work for their success, and to wait silently for the day when the prophets will be fulfilled.”
Adler’s message to Herzl was that he shouldn’t rock the boat. Yet after the Second World War, Jews could no longer count on being protected by European nations. The “nations under whose protection we dwell” no longer protected them, indeed turned against them with diabolical and murderous consequences. Zionism wasn’t revived as a political reality by Herzl; it was revived by the screams of six million souls murdered in Europe. That was real genocide. A Jewish homeland could no longer remain a yearning.
The state of Israel was founded on 14 May 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations. But Israelis were left fighting for their lives the very next day, for that was when the armies of neighbouring Arab nations invaded. And the Israelis have been fighting for their lives ever since, against the Palestine Liberation Organization, against Hamas, and now against a ridiculous cohort of student politicians who like to cosplay as radicals by draping themselves in Palestinian colours and shouting empty words about colonialism — none of which will help the Palestinians.
What might help the Palestinians is a two-state solution, the land divided fairly between Palestinians and Israelis, giving both the right to self-determination. And, to be clear, to believe in a two-state solution is also to be a Zionist, because it is also to allow the Jews a safe space in their ancestral homeland. Zionism isn’t a movement owned by Jewish settlers who want to push Arabs off their land and pull up their olive trees. It also represents the desire of Jews not to be murdered — by Cossacks, by Nazis, by Hamas. A one-state solution would expose them to precisely the kind of murderous reality from which they have long been seeking to escape. If you think I’m being dramatic, recall what happened on 7 October 2023.
I am flying back to Israel later this month with my family so that my wife can add her vote to those seeking to get rid of the wretched Benjamin Netanyahu.She still cares deeply for her home, because human beings are creatures of place, called to care for our places, be it Judah or Jarrow. When Chaim Weizmann was asked by a British politician why the Jewish people insisted on safety in Palestine, rather than someone more convenient, he replied: “That is like asking you why you drove 20 miles to visit your mother last Sunday when there are so many old ladies living in your street.” Place matters. In the Hebrew scriptures, we are creatures of place, called to love and care for our little plot of land, just as Wendell Berry loved and cared for his little bit of Kentucky. This is the real philosophy the Greens should be defending, the fact that we are creatures of the earth. But this means nothing to our current generation of Greens, who are now a dark perversion of what that party was born to defend: our rootedness; our love of place.
On 10 November 1975, under pressure from heavy KGB propaganda, the United Nations adopted resolution 3379 that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Later that day, the Belfast born Israeli Ambassador, Chaim Herzog, stood up and contemptuously ripped the resolution in half. “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.” Sixteen years later, the resolution was revoked.
Today, the accusation Herzog tore apart has returned, dressed in the language of a new generation of radicals. So stuff the Greens, their vacant student posturing, and their cosplaying as Hamas terrorists from the safety of Brighton. Because Zionism is not racism: at its heart is something far older even than the state of Israel. And because today that desire to be safe from the dangerous racism of others has become urgent once again — including, now, from the Greens themselves.
