Opposition from several Green Party MPs to the membership’s anti-Zionist motion undermines both internal party democracy and Palestinian voices.
According to Atlas Diplomacy, a commentary titled “Rift in the UK Green Party Following the Adoption of the Zionism Is Racism Motion” by Amro Tabari has been published in The New Arab. This commentary argues that Palestinian liberation is an inherent right rather than a plea for sympathy, and that efforts by certain Green Party MPs to distance themselves from their membership’s democratic motion against Zionism expose a pattern of selective solidarity. Below is a summary of the piece.
For decades, Palestinians have been expected to validate their demands for justice by first recounting stories of suffering, displacement, imprisonment, and generational trauma under Israeli occupation in order to move audiences to tears. However, Palestinian rights are not conditional upon evoking sympathy. Consequently, the vote by UK Green Party members to adopt a historic motion declaring Zionism to be racism and calling for a free Palestine from the river to the sea marks a milestone in British solidarity efforts, demonstrating that Palestinian voices can shape the policies of a major political party without diluting their demands.
The motion was the product of months of grassroots democratic organizing, workshops, and seminars led by ordinary party members—including Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews—who persisted even after procedural delays blocked the motion during the party’s spring conference. Nevertheless, once the motion passed, several Green MPs and party leadership figures responded not by respecting the democratic outcome, but by attacking its proponents. In a sharp reversal from the leadership’s earlier celebration of surging party membership, MP Ellie Chowns called for protecting the party from “extremists and entryists.”
Fellow MP Sian Berry publicly distanced herself from the motion once media attacks began, describing it as seriously flawed and calling on the party to revisit a decision reached through its highest democratic forum. Meanwhile, former co-leader MP Adrian Ramsay issued a public statement encouraging local Green council groups to reject the policy, characterizing the conference decision as a distraction that did not reflect the views of most members—a move that actively fosters division between elected representatives and the party’s grassroots membership.
This backlash is particularly striking given that after Israeli authorities imposed entry bans on those very MPs, Palestinians within the Green Party had extended a gesture of solidarity by inviting them to visit a free Palestine and hear directly from Palestinians about their aspirations for self-determination. Furthermore, the accusation by opponents that confronting Zionism as a settler-colonial ideology threatens the safety of Jewish party members not only conflates Jewish identity with Zionism—which is itself antisemitic—but also completely erases the anti-Zionist Jewish members who helped draft and champion the motion./ Source
