by Camilla Long, The Times
A party does not spend a whole year signing up thousands of Britain’s most dedicated antisemites only for them to go nowhere
[…] I watched as (Lubna) Speitan, a British-Palestinian artist, unveiled this motion in March, when various members of the old Green Party — people we would still recognise as “tree huggers” — tried to get it thrown out. She claimed that not tabling the motion was an “attack at democracy” and that the party wanted to “silence” her. She argued it was necessary to pass it because it recognised the “erasure” of her family and people.
What her motion in fact argued for was the erasure of the Jewish people.
To state that Zionism is an “ethnonationalist political project” is to officially reject it as a concept. It is to take away the Jews’ right to a homeland and, by extension, to endanger the lives of Jews themselves. To also agree that Zionists are racists, when you define almost everyone who doesn’t hate Jews as Zionist, is to invite hatred and anger not only on many ordinary Jews, but anyone who supports them.
There is no doubt this is what Speitan meant by it. To quote her: Zionists (or as I like to call them, Jews) must be “opposed”, “shunned” and “hunted in the same way that the Nazi oppressors were”. Anyone questioning her — well, they are the ones who are racists. That is what the left’s counterattack is: no, you’re the one who’s racist. Prove you aren’t — that is what they demand.
The Greens voted it in last Sunday.
[…] I do not see either of the main party leaders grasping the depth and severity of these cultural issues. Holborn itself was a portrait in apathy and casual surrender. A failed Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, tossed away his seat to a millennial Somali refugee who hasn’t ever had a proper job, only for her to be effectively challenged by a gay Jew who has spent the past year bizarrely waving in people who may not support him either as a gay or a Jew.