The Board of Deputies of British Jews has declared the Green Party of England and Wales a "racist party", after its deputies voted 118 to one on Sunday for a motion condemning the party's "Zionism is racism" policy.
The motion, passed at the Board's October plenary meeting, says the Greens have "by adopting an antisemitic platform, become a racist party" and resolves that "the Board will treat it as it has treated other racist parties". It also urges other parties not to enter coalitions with the Greens at local or national level, saying any party that did so would be "failing to take antisemitism with the requisite seriousness" unless the local Green leadership had rejected the policy and committed to overturning it.
The decision turns a position the Board's executive had already taken, that the Green policy is antisemitic, into a formal finding against the party itself. It adds to pressure on the Greens from Labour, which has threatened to end power-sharing with Green council groups, and exposes the split inside the party, where four of its five MPs opposed the policy.
Phil Rosenberg, the Board's president, said: "Today, representatives of Jewish communities across Britain have delivered a clear verdict. By adopting an antisemitic platform, the Green Party of England and Wales has become a racist party. We will treat it accordingly."
He added: "No political party has the right to tell Jews that a central part of our identity, rooted in thousands of years of history, faith and peoplehood, is racist."
A Green Party spokesman rejected the Board's characterisation of the motion and the party. "The Green Party does not discriminate against or exclude people for holding Zionist views," he said. He said the conference motion set out political opposition to ethnic cleansing and displacement.
The Green policy was adopted at the party's conference in Brighton on 4 October by 1,022 votes to 813, a vote of members present rather than a ballot of the whole membership. The motion, A105, declares the party to be "an anti-Zionist party", states that Zionism "as defined above, will be treated as any other form of racism" and calls for a single democratic state throughout historic Palestine. An amendment intended to stop the motion being used against Jewish members linked to Zionist institutions was defeated.
Zack Polanski, the Green leader, did not vote. He had left the conference after his Friday speech to campaign in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election. Interviewed on the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg this month, he said the policy would stand until 2028 and that he would not try to overturn it, but that he wanted to amend it at the first opportunity to move away from a one-state position.
Ellie Chowns, Sian Berry, Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer, four of the party's five MPs, publicly opposed the motion before the vote. Chowns said it "risks fuelling division and risks undermining the party's ability to advocate effectively for justice and peace". The European Green Party said the resolution "goes against our agreed positions of the EGP and its Member Parties, therefore as EGP we unequivocally distance ourselves from it".
Prime Minister Andy Burnham condemned the policy as antisemitic at Prime Minister's Questions, and Labour has told Green groups with which it shares power on councils to reject it or lose those arrangements. A Green spokesperson said at the time that for Labour "to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism is disappointing and wrong".
The Board's motion cites its own past campaigns against parties it named as racist, including the National Front in the 1970s, according to the Jewish Chronicle. The Board has not set out in detail what its decision will mean in practice beyond saying it will "give effect to the resolution in its dealings with" the party.
Rosenberg said the Greens' leadership "must now take responsibility for reversing this policy and confronting the antisemitism it has legitimised", and called on "democratic parties and wider civil society to apply the same standards to anti-Jewish racism that they would to any other form of racism".
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