Britain’s Green Party voted on Sunday to define Zionism as a form of racism, and within hours Israel barred the party’s leader, Zack Polanski, from entering the country and said the Greens had become ‘a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism.’
The motion, passed 1,022 to 813 at the party’s annual conference in Brighton, describes Zionism as ‘an ethnonationalist political project’ that will be ‘treated as any other form of racism.’ It commits the Greens to backing a ‘single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine,’ with Jerusalem as its capital, according to The Independent, and restates support for the right of return, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and a full arms embargo against Israel. It is now formal party policy.
Israel’s foreign ministry, writing on X, said the party had ‘ceased to act as a political party’ and had ‘adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle.’ The resolution ‘will stand as a stain on the history of the United Kingdom,’ the ministry said, demanding that every British party, ‘first and foremost the governing Labour Party,’ unequivocally reject it. The entry ban imposed by Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar was described as ‘a first step.’ President Isaac Herzog called the decision ‘a disgrace’ and an ‘antisemitic lie’ that deliberately endangers Jews and Israelis, Al Jazeera reported.
British Jewish groups condemned the vote in similar terms. The Board of Deputies of British Jews said the motion stoked ‘anti-Jewish hatred after a year in which British Jews have been murdered attending their synagogue, stabbed in the streets, and seen their community buildings firebombed.’ Two worshipers were killed in an attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur last year. In March, ambulances run by a Jewish volunteer service were set alight in Golders Green, in north London, and two Jewish men were stabbed there in April. Last week, two Iranian nationals were charged over an alleged plot to attack Manchester around this year’s Yom Kippur.
The Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism, recorded 1,926 incidents in the first half of 2026, its second-highest half-year total, including a record 135 assaults. The Movement for Progressive Judaism said the Greens had ‘made antisemitism party policy and become a racist party.’ Before the vote, the heads of the Board of Deputies, the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council wrote to the party that the motion would make it ‘the first electorally significant UK political party in living memory to adopt what appears to be an overtly antisemitic political platform.’
The reaction crossed party lines. Bridget Phillipson, the Labour Party chair, called it ‘shameful to vote against a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine and to condemn the vast majority of British Jews and Jews around the world as racist for supporting Israel’s right to exist.’ Chris Philp, the Conservative shadow home secretary, said the Greens were ‘toxic to its core,’ adding that ‘British Jews should not have to disclaim a belief in Jewish self-determination and the existence of Israel in order to be accepted by a British political party.’
The motion split the Greens themselves, a party that holds five of Parliament’s 650 seats and took 6 percent of the vote in the 2024 general election. Four of the five MPs opposed it publicly, and one of them, Adrian Ramsay, a former co-leader, said he was ‘deeply saddened.’ Mr. Polanski, who is contesting Thursday’s by-election in Holborn & St Pancras, former Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s seat, did not vote. He had told the BBC earlier in the week that the ‘displacement and genocide of the Palestinian people’ is ‘clearly racism,’ and that he wanted the one-state language in the motion ‘because what I want to see is equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.’ In a joint statement with the party’s MPs after the vote, he said there was ‘no conflict between supporting the rights of Palestinians and the rights of Jewish people.’
An amendment stating the motion should not be used to ‘pressure, proscribe or discipline members based on affiliation with Jewish community institutions’ was voted down, The Guardian reported from the members-only debate. The motion had been pushed by a group called Greens for Palestine, which encouraged supporters to join the party to get it adopted; after it passed, backers came to the front of the hall to hug and cheer. ‘There are now two Green parties,’ one member who opposed the motion told The Guardian. ‘The everyday members, and those who have joined for just one reason, Palestine, and who have no interest in anything else.’
A legal fight may come next. Adam Wagner KC, the barrister who led the case that found Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour broke equalities laws over antisemitism, said there was ‘a strong risk’ the motion contravenes the Equality Act 2010, which applies to political parties, by discriminating against people who hold Zionist beliefs. About two-thirds of British Jews consider themselves Zionists, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Some members are already consulting lawyers.
Mothin Ali, the Green deputy leader and a supporter of the motion, told Sky News that the Palestinian death toll in Gaza was the key context. ‘The motion defines Zionism quite clearly. It defines it as an ethnonationalist movement. It defines it as ethnic cleansing. It defines it as genocide,’ he said. UN investigators have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel rejects, as it does claims of ethnic cleansing; Britain’s government has applied that term to Israeli settlers’ actions in the West Bank but says courts must decide whether other Israeli actions amount to genocide.
The Greens have climbed in the polls under Mr. Polanski, drawing voters dissatisfied with Labour’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war, though surveys show his own popularity slipping after several missteps. On Thursday he faces the voters of Holborn & St Pancras.