Demonstrators attend the “Lift the Ban” rally organized by Defend Our Juries, challenging the British government’s proscription of “Palestine Action” under anti-terrorism laws, in Parliament Square, in London, Britain, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

On Oct. 4, the UK Green Party passed a reckless resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism, calling for an end to all arms sales to Israel, and endorsing the idea of the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Wrapping its new platform in high-minded language, the party claimed: “The Green Party is an anti-racist party and has consistently opposed the illegal occupation of both Palestinian and Syrian land, [and] called for an end to arms sales to the Israeli government …. “

This statement is not an expression of integrity. It is a morally bankrupt perversion of history and security that whitewashes Islamic religious extremism and targets the world’s only Jewish state by rejecting its right to exist.

Ignorance of History: Gaza, the PA, and the Myths of “Occupation”

The UK Green Party’s obsession with blaming Israel for every hardship in the region relies on a total erasure of historical reality. The claim that Israel holds total military rule over Arab Palestinian life is demonstrably false.

Fully 98% of Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank live under the direct governance of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Since the mid-1990s, the Israeli military administration vacated these population centers. The PA runs the courts, the civil service, the police, the schools, the media, and daily administration. It is Mahmoud Abbas — now in the 21st year of his four-year presidential term — and his security apparatus that solely govern these residents, not Israel. Various experts estimate that Abbas controls a security force of approximately 70,000 men.

Even more appalling is the UK Greens’ rhetoric surrounding Gaza. Israel completely withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, dismantling every settlement and removing every civilian and military presence. For over 21 years, no Israeli civilians lived in Gaza.

When Hamas launched its horrific, unprovoked invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it was not a reaction to any “occupation.” Hamas overtly and specifically named its onslaught “Operation al-Aqsa Flood.” This was an explicitly religious, genocidal attack designed to murder, rape, and kidnap as many Jewish civilians as possible. “Al-Aqsa” refers to the Islamic name for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City — the holiest site in Judaism, where both the First and Second Jewish Temples stood millennia before Islam existed. Hamas’s war was motivated by radical religious violence, not any so-called occupation.

The Reckless Disarming of a Sovereign Nation

The timing of the Green Party’s statement — issued virtually on the eve of the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities— i s profoundly merciless. But its policy prescriptions are even worse.

By demanding a complete, global end to arms sales to Israel, the Greens seek to strip the Jewish state of the defensive technology — such as the Iron Dome — required to protect millions of civilians, both Jews and Arabs, from those nations and terrorists in the region that wish to eliminate Israel. If implemented worldwide, as the Greens urge, this policy would leave Israel completely defenseless. It would invite a future Oct. 7 that would be, G-d forbid, vastly more catastrophic. Depriving the democracy in the region of the tools to defend its people against violent jihadist organizations is not anti-racism; it is a blatant endorsement of mass slaughter.

Furthermore, calling Zionism “racist” fails on the basic truths of language and of law. Neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Arabs constitute a distinct “race.” Israel is a multi-ethnic democracy. Israeli Muslim Arabs serve as Supreme Court justices, parliamentarians, doctors, and military officers, possessing full civil and political rights under the law.

Who Defines Jewish Identity?

Perhaps the most patronizing aspect of the Green Party’s resolution is its smug assertion that “anti-Zionism should not be equated with antisemitism.”

Non-Jews do not have any historic, moral, or political right to dictate to an indigenous, targeted minority what does or does not constitute bigotry against them. For the overwhelming majority of Jews worldwide, Zionism is not some political idea — it is an intrinsic element of their religious, cultural, and national identity, rooted in 3,000 years of connection to their ancestral homeland as depicted in the Bible.

When a political party composed mostly of non-Jews votes to redefine the core national liberation movement of the Jewish people as “racism,” it commits an act of supreme arrogance. It attempts to strip Jews of the right to self-definition — a right that progressive movements like the UK Greens grant to every other group worldwide.

By trading genuine human rights advocacy for dangerous extremism and hate, the UK Green Party has demonstrated that it has abandoned moral clarity. This is far from true anti-racism. Calling for the disarming and dismantling of the world’s only Jewish state just 81 years after the liberation of Auschwitz is just plain evil.

Moshe Phillips is national chairman of Americans for a Safe Israel, AFSI, (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.